Title: The Sisterhood
Rating: 4 Stars
The subtitle of this history pretty much sums it up. It’s the story of the role women played in our country’s intelligence service. Although it briefly discusses earlier intelligence agents like Harriet Tubman, it’s mostly focused on the CIA with a brief discussion of its predecessor, the OSS.
The OSS came into being in the starting days of World War II when it became obvious that the US was woefully unprepared, especially in comparison to other countries, to perform intelligence work.
Since the OSS and the opening days of the CIA were the 1940s and the early 1950s, you can probably imagine the roles that women were forced into. They were secretaries. They were keepers of 3×5 index cards. If they were in the field, their role was relegated to recording analysts, which basically involved writing up the field reports that the ‘real’ agents were generating. In many cases, they were just seen as sexual objects to be used by men that were higher in the hierarchy. Of course, nearly men were higher in said hierarchy.
This sexist attitude extended to even the wives of field agents. They were expected to essentially work for the CIA for free, in whatever capacity that was called for. In most cases, this was being charming and gracious hostesses as their husband tried to recruit some likely foreign candidate.
It was for the most part impossible for a woman to get into clandestine training. Even if she got in and passed training, once graduated she would be overlooked by the men that were selecting overseas field agents. Upon completion, she often ended up in a desk job with limited opportunities for promotion.
Eventually, some women pioneered through all of the difficulties and became field agents. To the shock of probably no one reading this in the year 2024, they turned out to be superb agents. Even though some people nowadays seem to treat the word diversity as some kind of woke culture disaster, having diverse points of view and approaches actually leads to more successful outcomes. Many of the women in the field exhibited empathy, companionship, and openness that disarmed foreign recruits. Regardless of the sex or religion of their targets, women proved to be extremely adept at managing them. Slowly, gradually, these women were promoted and eventually served as mentors to the next generation of women recruited to join the agency.
There was an upside to the fact that women were relegated to records and data collection. With the fall of USSR, the conventional tools of spy craft became increasingly obsolete. In the resulting power vacuum arose terrorist networks. Such networks don’t have national borders or embassies. They don’t attend cocktail receptions where drunken bro-dudes could slap each on the back and establish an intelligence gathering relationship.
Terrorist networks are high decentralized. They operate as cells. They sparingly use electronic communication. Suddenly, intelligence gathering became about assembling individual pieces of information out of an immense ocean of data and being able to draw conclusions.
Since women had been assigned to data collection for decades, it turned out that a number of them became valuable expert analysts and leaders in this new paradigm. Alec Station was the CIA station devoted to tracking down Osama bin Laden. This station was populated largely by women.
Unfortunately, in no small part because it was so dominated by women, it was not taken seriously. For years, CIA leaders did not take the briefs published by Alec Station seriously. There were several times when the station had fairly conclusively located bin Laden but no one gave the order to take him.
All of that changed after 9/11. Although the agents working on Alec Station were understandably traumatized and guilt ridden by the tragedy of that day, from that point forward they definitely had the ear of leadership. The counter terrorism center dramatically grew in size and the women that had worked in it for years were leaned on to lead.
However, there was no point in having the ear of leadership if the leadership was only interested in hearing about evidence that confirmed their biases. I’d written earlier about how obsessed the Bush Administration was about linking Iraq to 9/11 (click here to read). Here you get the viewpoint of the analysts. By the time of 9/11, some of them had been working the desk for a decade. They knew that there was no connection between Saddam and Osama. No matter how many times they beat questions down, the same questions would just arise again. Their expert opinions were shunted aside in favor of the Red Cell, a team that CIA Director Tenet formed that had no expertise in the Middle East but were given a free hand to dream up any terrifying nightmare terrorist scenario. It was these analyses that were taken up by the White House and used as part of the justification for the war in Iraq.
This was kind of a strange book to read. The book before the rise of Alec Station is a pretty grim recitation of white men behaving badly and those women, desperate to serve their country, working for years, sometimes decades, in relative obscurity just for the opportunity to prove their mettle. That section can be summed up as: Nevertheless, she persisted.
Once, Mundy starts discussing Alec Station, the book transitions to a true spy, spine tingling read of tracking down terrorists while an invisible clock is ticking. It also brings up the moral questions (as well of effectiveness) of rendering, enhanced interrogation, and torture. Some women were so horrified by these changes that they resigned or requested reassignment. Others were all for it and saw it as an opportunity to give a bad guy a bad day.
Reading the section about Alec Station in this book and comparing it to the leadership missteps that led us to the second Iraq War as told in the history To Start a War, by Robert Draper, gave me a great picture of those terrifying days in the aftermath of 9/11 and the troublesome years after when the US lost its way.
dorkenstein 