H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-18 on Mundy, The Sisterhood67 min read

As many women scholars can and do attest, the path to academia can be full of discrimination, both open and institutional. I am part of that cohort, as one of the few female historians, in Canada or the United States, doing the history of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Even today, this field continues to be overwhelmingly male dominated.[1] Not surprisingly, as a graduate student I faced sexism and misogyny, from both my male and female professors, my male peers, and later some of my colleagues as I assumed a tenure stream appointment at Dalhousie University.[2] At the time I remember wondering if there were other women going through what I was as we crossed into the twenty-first century. It turns out there were.

 

H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum

Roundtable Review 16-18 

Liza Mundy, The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at the CIA. Crown, 2024 ISBN-10 0593238192 (hardcover, $ 36.98)

16 December 2024 | PDF: https://issforum.org/to/jrt16-18 | Website: rjissf.org | Twitter: @HDiplo

Editor: Diane Labrosse
Commissioning Editor: Sarah-Jane Corke
Production Editor: Christopher Ball
Pre-Production Copy Editor: Bethany Keenan

 

Introduction by Sarah-Jane Corke, University of New Brunswick. 2

Review by Kathryn Olmsted, University of California, Davis. 8

Review by Jess Shahan, University of Leicester 13

Review by Kate Vigurs, University of Warwick. 18

Response by Liza Mundy, author and journalist 23

 

As many women scholars can and do attest, the path to academia can be full of discrimination, both open and institutional. I am part of that cohort, as one of the few female historians, in Canada or the United States, doing the history of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Even today, this field continues to be overwhelmingly male dominated.[1] Not surprisingly, as a graduate student I faced sexism and misogyny, from both my male and female professors, my male peers, and later some of my colleagues as I assumed a tenure stream appointment at Dalhousie University.[2] At the time I remember wondering if there were other women going through what I was as we crossed into the twenty-first century. It turns out there were.

It was probably naive of me, but if you told me at the time that the women who were working at the CIA, in the year 2000, were experiencing sexism that was much, much worse, than that which I experienced, I may not have believed you. However, there was never a direct line between the sexism I faced, my country’s national security, and the potential for loss of life. The same cannot be said for the women who worked for the CIA in the years immediately before 9/11. As Kathryn Olmsted argues in her review below, we now have evidence of how the “sexism within the agency not only harmed the women who worked there but also the nation’s national security,” as well.

As award-winning Washington Post journalist Liza Mundy points out in her response to the H-Diplo roundtable on her book The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at the CIA, one of the driving forces behind her decision to write this book was her commitment to expose the story of what happened to the women who worked in and around Alec Station¾Michael Scheuer’s counter-terrorism virtual station in the CIA¾which worked on the bin Laden file between 1996–2005. It was composed primarily of female analysts, and it was given the derogatory nickname, “the Manson Family,” by some of the men who worked around the women.[3] Mundy found it extraordinary that these women were not listened to when they first raised the alarm about the growth of al-Qaeda. The failure to head their warnings ended on 11 September 2001.

Although it was their story that she wanted to tell in The Sisterhood, she felt that the “institutional neglect of these women’s warnings, for much of the 1990s, did not come out of nowhere.” Rather she believed “it was a direct outgrowth of a climate cultivated since the agency’s founding.” Therefore, to her mind, “it would have been wrong…to separate more recent history from what came before.” As a result, the book examines “one of the biggest transformations in CIA culture, from a male-dominated institution where women were seen as typists and sexual playthings to one where women propelled some of the agencies most important successes.” Mundy believes that these women’s experiences and “connections to one another amounts to an alternative, and corrective history of American spy craft” (8). I could not agree more.

We owe a debt to Mundy, who is well versed to tell their stories. The Sisterhood is her sixth book. She is also the author of Code Girls: The Untold Story of American Code Breakers of World War II, which tells the story of the some of the 10,000 female code breakers who helped end the war and went on to play a role in the new postwar computer age, as well as a biography of Michele Obama.[4]Given her writing credentials it is also no surprise that Mundy provides a riveting account. All three of our reviewers, historians Olmsted, Jess Shahan, and Kate Vigurs highlight her ability to drive the narrative in a way that keeps the reader engaged. “If you expect a lively tale of scrappy women fighting toxic masculinity and institutional sexism,” Olmsted argues, “you will not be disappointed.”

That said, however, Mundy is not interested in illustrating how her story fits into the still-developing historiography on women in intelligence. She does, however, owe a debt to all the scholars who have come before her. As historian Kate Vigurs points out, The Sisterhood “is the result of several developments which reflect not only a welcome expansion of women’s history and gender studies but also an increased interest in the ‘voices from below’ that has been underway for some time.” While these types of histories became the dominant genre of historical writing in the seventies and eighties, it has taken much longer for them to be included in intelligence history.[5]

There are several reasons for this. First, the field remains dominated by men. Male scholars of both the OSS and CIA have generally ignored the experiences of women in their accounts of the history of American intelligence.[6] I don’t know how many times I have heard a male scholar say, when asked about the missing women in their [hi]stories, “well there just were not a lot of women.” Turns out, as Mundy argues, that “they were there all along” (8); you just had to dig a little harder to find them.

Second, it is important to note that their history is a difficult one to tell. As Shahan points out in her review, the “voices of women intelligence professionals have faced a double secrecy: there are limits on the extent to which they can discuss their careers, and the histories of intelligence have largely written them out.” As a result, many of their stories remain largely invisible within the field of Intelligence Studies (IS). This is beginning to change.

To get at their stories, Mundy conducted over 100 interviews. Thus, her work serves as a primary resource for a new generation of scholars looking to understand what happened during these years. It is to be hoped that, after securing the permission of the women she talked to, she will eventually donate her transcripts, of the interviews, to a research center, so that more scholars can make use of them.[7]

In addition to the interviews, Mundy also relies on some of the existing histories to tell the stories of these women. The discrimination faced by CIA officers Sandy Grimes and Jeanne Vertefeuille, for example, was documented in their book Circle of Treason, which told the story of the hunt for Soviet spy Aldrich Ames.[8] As Shahan argues, Mundy draws heavily on their book in her account. However, other stories like those of the women who worked on the bin Laden file, both before and after 9/11, have only been hinted at.[9] Their stories are a critical part of American history, and they deserve to be part of the scholarly record. Yet, as Shahan argues it often feels like there is only “a small club of mostly women scholars who work on various projects that bring forward the hidden histories of women in intelligence.” Although that club is getting bigger, we still have a long way to go.[10]

While the stories Mundy tells are critically important for documenting a well-rounded intelligence history, Olmsted argues that the book “reads as work of journalism, with all of the strength and weaknesses of that genre.” She notes that the strength of Mundy’s work lies in her ability to extract “instructive and horrifying stories from her sources.” On the other hand, she points out that as a journalist Mundy does not engage with historians of women’s history or other scholars on gender theory.[11]

According to Vigurs, “the last few years have seen an effort to critique problematic institutional histories together with traditional assumptions and practices including those around gender.” She goes on to note critical approaches to women’s narratives in intelligence studies

have also increasingly sought to move beyond the mere “finding” of women in intelligence history to reveal a deeper and more nuanced understanding of women’s impact on intelligence work. There has been a drive to explore the ways in which the experiences of women, as former intelligence professionals, can contribute to intelligence studies. However, we still lack much in the way of ambitious and substantive studies.

Mundy’s work does not fill that void, but she does provide evidence that will allow future historians to do so.

A more serious concern, raised by Shahan is that “it is not clear in some chapters where the author’s voice ends and where the recollections of the individuals who were interviewed begins. Given the complexity of the content” she argues, “this is a book where footnotes rather than endnotes would be beneficial.” Despite, the lack of proper sourcing, however, Shahan concludes that “this does not in any way diminish the book’s contribution, but rather highlights how much we do not know and how much this field still has room to grow.”

Clearly, it is still a complicated art to write women back into history. But despite the shortcomings raised by Olmsted and Shahan, Mundy’s work is extraordinarily important, and it serves as a useful corrective to the male dominated histories of the CIA. I will continue to use it in my third-year course on the history on the agency. Indeed, my female students in the course loved the book. It was exhilarating to see them dominate the conversations when we it came up for discussion. Unfortunately, I also found it disconcerting to see how difficult it was for some of my male students to join in. The tension between the two groups over the question of sexism in the workplace remains troubling, even today. That said, as Vigurs, points out “the field of international history is no longer remorselessly focused on men.” This means that the students who take my courses, and indeed any courses on intelligence history will, and must, get used to reading about the full experiences of the women who worked in the American national security state.[12]After all, they have been reading about the men for generations.[13]

Capturing the voices of some of my female students, Vigurs closes her review suggesting that the book left her “feeling frustrated and irritated at the injustices women faced, proud of what they overcame, whilst brushing the broken glass from their shoulders from the sheer number of shattered glass ceilings, and hopeful for what might be.” Given the recent emerging backlash both to women writing what has been labelled “Critical Intelligence Studies,” and to the diversity programs, “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI),” within the IC, I am not so sanguine.[14] It seems that acceptance of women scholars, women’s history, and the use of gender as a tool for historical analysis should not be taken for granted even in the twenty-first century.

 

Contributors

Liza Mundy is a Washington, DC-based author and journalist. A former staff writer for The Washington Post, she writes for The Atlantic and Smithsonian, among other publications, and is the author of five books, including The Sisterhood and Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II.

Sarah-Jane Corke is the Co-Founder and past President of the North American Society for Intelligence History (NASIH) now renamed the Society for Intelligence History (SIH). She is an associate professor of history at the University of New Brunswick. Her first book US Covert Operations and Cold War Strategy: Truman, the CIA and Secret Warfare was published by Routledge in 2008. Her second book, an edited collection with Mark Stout, Piercing the Veil: Intelligence History and the International Spy Museum is under contract and due to be published in 2025 by the University Press of Kansas. Her third monograph, The Nine Lives of Patricia and John Paton Davies was awarded a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grant in 2022. She is also working on a history of the Director of National Intelligence.

Kathryn Olmsted is Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. She is the co-editor (with Athan Theoharis, Richard Immerman, John Prados, and Loch Johnson) of The CIA: Security Under Scrutiny (Greenwood, 2006), and the author of Challenging the Secret Government: The Post-Watergate Investigations of the CIA and FBI (University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley (University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11 (Oxford University Press, 2009); Right Out of California: The 1930s and the Big Business Roots of Modern Conservatism (The New Press, 2015); and The Newspaper Axis: Six Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler (Yale University Press, 2022).

Jess Shahan is a Teaching Fellow in International Relations at the University of Leicester and holds a PhD in International Politics from Aberystwyth University. Dr. Shahan’s research focuses on women in intelligence work in the latter half of the twentieth century with particular interest in British and American intelligence organizations. She is the author of “‘Don’t Keep Mum’: Critical Approaches to the Narratives of Women Intelligence Professionals,” Intelligence and National Security, 36:4 (2021): 569-583.

Kate Vigurs, PhD, is a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Warwick and works as an independent historian on projects related to Special Operations Executive in World War Two. The author of Mission France (Yale University Press, 2021), she is currently working on her second book, Mission Europe (Yale University Press), which will be published in 2025.

 

In the early 1990s, Aldrich Ames, one of the most damaging Soviet moles in the history of the CIA, worried that the spy catchers in the agency were closing in on him.[15] Since 1985, in return for millions of dollars in payoffs, he had been sending the nation’s secrets to its enemies in Moscow, resulting in the deaths of at least ten agents. Ames knew that the CIA suspected it had a mole—and that it suspected him in particular. But Ames, an old-style operations agent, steeped in its culture of sexism and misogyny, was relieved and pleasantly surprised to learn that the counterintelligence (CI) team assigned to catch him was led by women. One day, Ames, with a smile and a swagger, approached one of these women, Sandy Grimes, as she started a new job in the national Counterintelligence Center, and welcomed her to the center—and then proceeded to lecture her on how to run counterintelligence operations.[16] As Liza Mundy comments in her new book The Sisterhood, “He mansplained, to the female investigators, how to conduct an investigation” (154). His confidence was misplaced, and the women soon gathered enough evidence against him to pass the case to the FBI.

The story speaks to the institutional sexism at the agency, and within the US federal government more broadly. Mundy reports that though women at the CIA did the most to identify Ames, it was men at the FBI who took credit for the success. And when Congress demanded that the CIA explain why it had taken so long to catch the traitor, the female counterintelligence officers took the blame. “What makes you think that you were capable of leading a CI investigation?” one Congressman sneered at Jeanne Vertefeuille, the head of the team (154). Grimes and Vertefeuille did ultimately receive citations from the CIA, but lesser ones than the honor given their male boss. They boycotted the awards ceremony to protest their treatment.[17]

Mundy relates many such anecdotes, gleaned from more than 100 interviews, in her breezy, engaging study of the women of the CIA. Her topic is expansive: the transformation in the CIA’s gender culture, from, as Mundy says, “a male-dominated institution where women were seen as typists and sexual playthings to one where women propelled some of the agency’s most important successes” (xiii). In its early days, the CIA believed that it possessed “carte blanche to violate the rights and well-being of vulnerable people,” including the women who worked for it (xvii). The details of those free-wheeling years, and the ways that women fought to change the toxic agency culture, are the subjects of the book. Mundy argues that in the process of making the agency more gender-inclusive, these pioneering women also helped make the United States safer.

Mundy is a journalist, and the book reads as a work of journalism, with all the strengths and weaknesses of that genre. The strengths include the author’s skills in extracting instructive (and horrifying) stories from her sources. The weaknesses include little engagement with other scholarship. In notes at the back of the book, there are many references to popular histories of the CIA written by journalists and intelligence professionals, but few to the standard books cited by most academics.[18] Nor, for that matter, does she cite or refer to much scholarly work on the history of feminism, gender discrimination in the workplace, or even academic work on women in intelligence agencies.[19] If you expect a lively tale of scrappy women fighting toxic masculinity and institutional sexism, you will not be disappointed. Readers should not expect a scholarly monograph.

Mundy starts her story during World War II, with the CIA’s wartime predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). One-third of the 13,000 OSS employees were women. Indeed, they were highly qualified women: 48 percent of OSS women were college graduates, compared to just 4.6 percent of women in the United States as a whole; 21 percent had done graduate work; and 8 percent had PhDs (16). Mundy uses a postwar government report (called, aptly, The Assessment of Men) to add detail to her narrative of how the OSS leaders picked their agents.[20] In one case, the applicants were divided by gender, and the male group was assessed on how well it responded to a challenge to build a bridge across a chasm. The women, meanwhile, were asked to create a cross-referenced filing system (17).[21]

Though Mundy includes rich details for her chapters on the OSS, her sources for the early years of the CIA seem limited, in part because many of the principals are no longer alive and thus could not be interviewed. The narrative rushes past this era, noting that the women of the early CIA started out as clerks but fought their way to more powerful and demanding positions. However, institutional sexism made it difficult for women to enter the operational field. “Men were the case officers, and women were the reports officers,” one CIA officer told her (30).

Mundy’s account gathers steam in the mid-1960s, when the oldest of her interview subjects started to join the agency. Some of her interviewees enjoyed fascinating careers, filled with initial disappointments and eventual triumphs. In 1966, Lisa Manfull, a Brown graduate and diplomat’s daughter, signed up with the agency and trained at “the Farm,” otherwise known as Camp Peary, a CIA covert training facility in Virginia. But Manfull’s training was cut short; she was not allowed to complete the course and become certified as a field agent. Instead, she was shunted into a dull job at CIA headquarters. There, she discovered that women were frequently subjected to sexual innuendo, unwanted advances, and hostile work environments. Male colleagues welcomed one woman to her new office with a sign adorned with Playboy centerfolds. “And so, women—secretaries, clerks, case officers—had to navigate a workplace in which they were assumed to be, on some level, playthings,” Mundy notes (79). Once married, Manfull (now Manfull Harper), was forced to resign when her husband got an operations job abroad, though she was able to work on a contract basis under “housewife cover.” Finally, a decade after being denied her full certification in covert operations, she returned to the Farm, and this time completed the course (96).

In the 1970s, women began to form the “sisterhood” of Mundy’s title. Manfull Harper, for example, assisted another pioneering woman CIA officer, Heidi August, in navigating the agency’s sexist culture. August had been a clerk in the Tripoli station in 1969 during the coup led by Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi. After thinking on her feet and taking the initiative to burn secret documents, she began to work her way up through various postings in the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. In 1974, she was assigned to Cambodia just as the Khmer Rouge were poised to take over. Her success in these roles prompted her boss to make an unusual suggestion: that she become a case officer, which was extremely rare for women at that time (51). August turned to Manfull Harper for advice, and aced the training course. When August began her new job, she excelled, especially in recruiting women agents. Once again, her competent performance led the agency to make a bold move: to offer her a job as chief at a new station in the Mediterranean.

By the time August began breaking down barriers as a female chief of station, CIA headquarters was changing as well. The women who joined the CIA after the feminist revolution of the 1970s had new skills, expectations, and attitudes. Mundy explains how these women of the 1980s tried to change the sexist culture at the agency. Once, as spy gadget developer Jonna Mendez walked down a long CIA corridor with a young chemist named Trish, they passed an “old-school ops guy” who liked to call out sexual vulgarities to his female colleagues. On this occasion, when he started to tell the women what sexual acts he would like to perform on them, he got a surprise. “Trish just looks at him and says ‘F*ck off,’” Mendez recounted to Mundy. The man was “just stunned. I’m sure he hadn’t heard that before, from a woman, especially from a pretty young woman” (137-138). The encounter marked, in Mendez’s view, the start of a sea change in the agency’s gender culture.[22]

In 1986, women officers at the CIA started to file formal complaints about gender inequities at the agency. Their protests became the basis of a class action lawsuit with about 200 plaintiffs that continued into the 1990s, as public discussion around the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings made women more conscious of—and less willing to tolerate—sexual discrimination and harassment.[23] They certainly had reason to complain: the CIA compiled a “Glass Ceiling Study” that showed that women held 40 percent of professional positions but only 10 percent of the top jobs at the agency (157).[24] In 1995, when the agency finally settled the class action suit, the litigants received back pay and retroactive promotions, though many believed that their male colleagues retaliated against them after the settlement.

Besides the struggles and triumphs of the covert operators, Mundy also covers the CIA women analysts’ fight to be taken seriously, and extensively documents the story of the women analysts who tracked al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. To be sure, she says, there were men involved in the hunt for bin Laden, especially at the top levels; but she argues that the agency’s sisterhood was ultimately responsible for the mission’s success. Western women, she says, were particularly motivated to catch bin Laden, whom Mundy describes as “a psychopath for whom women and children were little more than projections of his own narcissistic ego” (373). These CIA women were offended by bin Laden’s “perverted idea of family” and his views on gender: “the most dismissive idea of women and their value that could be imagined” (383). In 2010, female analysts noted extra laundry on the line at the compound in Pakistan where bin Laden’s courier was living, and where the CIA suspected bin Laden himself might be hiding. Mundy concedes that male analysts might have noticed the laundry, but she argues that women’s special insight into mundane household tasks might have been the key to finding him. “It is not an exaggeration to say,” she writes, “that the decision to be ‘inclusive’ is one reason the mission succeeded” (384).

In the end, this is one of Mundy’s most important points: that sexism within the agency not only harmed the women who worked there, but also the nation’s security. Women could be and were terrific spies, but their intelligence was meaningless if their male colleagues refused to listen to them. As Mundy says, “Being underestimated because of gender (or any other reason) is an advantage when you are a spy on the street trying to move around unobserved. Being underestimated is a problem for everybody when you are a woman (or anybody) in a national security community trying to make yourself heard about something important you have discovered” (xvii). Mundy does not offer comparisons to other similar institutions, leaving the reader to wonder if women in the US Army, say, or the FBI, were also underestimated, and if so, whether the impact on national security was the same.

Though the book is consistently readable, it misses a few opportunities for deeper analysis. Racism is mentioned in passing, as when she notes that the CIA’s glass ceiling study showed that people of color suffered discrimination, but the book does not push this thought further (157). The narrative is also rather uncritical of the agency’s mission and its actions. The CIA’s assassination plots against Cuban leader Fidel Castro whiz by the reader with little comment (and there is no mention of the agency’s collaboration with the Mafia); and popular world leaders who were overthrown or killed with the CIA’s connivance—Congo’s Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, and Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz—do not rate a mention.[25] In the section on the War on Terror, Mundy includes interviews with CIA women who deplore the agency’s use of torture, but she also quotes other women who have no regrets about waterboarding and other brutal (and illegal) interrogation techniques. Mundy does not offer her own judgment.

Perhaps it is unfair to fault the book for its uncritical attitude toward the CIA, or its lack of engagement with existing scholarship, because The Sisterhood is not that kind of book. Mundy has succeeded in interviewing more than 100 agency employees who speak directly to the ways that sexism distorted and undermined the agency’s mission. In that sense, the book is a useful primary source for historians.

The voices of women intelligence professionals have faced a double secrecy: there are limits on the extent to which they can discuss their careers, and the histories of intelligence have largely written them out. Whether by omission or deliberate decision, traditional intelligence histories have furthered the narratives of men. There are, however, notable exceptions to this trend.[26] Understandably, much of the work on women in intelligence has focused on the two world wars. In addition to general interest on the topic and a wide range of available material, there are other reasons, including the fact that the secrecy restrictions on that era are fewer. Authors are also motivated to capture the stories of these women while they are here to tell them, and the importance of such efforts should not be understated.

Liza Mundy’s The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at the CIA pushes the field of women in intelligence further. It sometimes feels like there is a small club of mostly women scholars who work on various projects that bring forward the hidden histories of women in intelligence. Mundy is not the first to write on a sisterhood, and indeed, we can look to her prior work on Code Girls as somewhat of an antecedent to The Sisterhood.[27] We could also invoke Elizabeth McIntosh’s Sisterhood of Spies, which sets out the work of the Central Intelligence Agency’s predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services.[28] However, Mundy’s book goes where most books on women in intelligence have not: the post-Cold War decades, the events surrounding the 9/11 attacks, and the War on Terror.

While the first part of The Sisterhood is situated within the Cold War years, the second and third parts bring in more contemporary experiences of women in intelligence work. The first part of The Sisterhood centers on the first three to four decades of the CIA, which was created in 1947 by President Harry S. Truman. The individual stories in the first part of the book are intensely interwoven. As compared to the second and third parts, this first section covers a longer time span. This identifies a problem that I have faced in researching women in contemporary intelligence history: the absence of a pre-existing body of scholarly research on women in intelligence during the Cold-War era. To set a stage for analysis of the post-Cold War period, one must first build up a discussion broadly from the 1950s through to the 1980s. Certainly, as Mundy’s work shows, these time periods are irrevocably interconnected. There is an argument to be made here that The Sisterhood could exist as two distinct books. There is a depth of material here in this first part of The Sisterhood that could be drawn out and explored further.

The narrative weaving smooths out in the second and third parts of the book, where the focus begins to narrow in on the identification of networked terrorism and the lead-up to the 9/11 attacks. The stories of the central figures still play out over multiple chapters, but the focus narrows here to fewer stories that are more clearly spaced out. In relating these experiences Mundy makes the argument that a systemic devaluation of women and their work largely contributed to the intelligence failure on 9/11 and the failure of the US intelligence services to prevent or successfully warn of those attacks. While this is not a new argument,[29] it is made well in this section and advanced by highlighting the struggles of extraordinarily talented and capable women to have their voices heard in an organization that was resistant to change.

The third part of the book examines women’s experiences in the decade after the 9/11 attacks and acknowledges the weight of trauma and emotional consequences for those who were tasked with tracking down the perpetrators and dismantling a global terror network in the aftermath of the attacks. There is no shortage of recollections, as Mundy acknowledges, from the men involved in this time period. However, additional voices are beginning to emerge, particularly those of the women who are overlooked by traditional intelligence histories.[30]The Sisterhood sets out to share a collective accounting of women’s roles within the CIA. The telling of this collective narrative until now has largely been driven by the publication of individual memoirs from the men and women who were there. Through its collective accounting, The Sisterhood presents a contemporary history of women in the CIA, achieving this aim in a sensitive, thoughtful, and connected manner.

In order to write this history of women in intelligence work, one must go off the well-worn track of government sources and mission-focused reporting.[31] In this sense, it challenges the precepts of traditional intelligence histories, which are largely (though not always) far more reliant on the “official” record. Mundy brings in a range of publicly available and some archival material to supplement the highlight of her book: her interviews with intelligence professionals. This is where the book truly shines and presents an incalculable value to this field.

While Mundy includes primary source material, I would like to have seen more engagement with the archival releases on women’s history from the CIA, including the “Typist to Trailblazer” collection and some of the scholarly literature that has emerged from it.[32] That said, this is not necessarily the central aim of this book, which is the formation of accounts drawn from interviews into a cohesive narrative history of women’s experiences in the CIA. This is also one of the book’s main achievements.

Even in an age where we see an increase in women’s contributions to intelligence memoirs, these are still self-selected sources and limited in number.[33] The CIA’s authorization and review process can arguably serve as both facilitator and deterrence in publishing one’s own story.[34] As Mundy acknowledges in the epilogue, writing a book can be a daunting task, particularly when the wider perception of events is set out by the men who were involved. Through her interviews, Mundy captures voices that we might never hear.

The CIA’s well-known publication review process is a requirement for the publication of agency memoirs.[35] Mundy’s book subverted this process, perhaps necessarily so. It is only in the acknowledgments at the end of the book that this is explained: a short but powerful statement of, “No intelligence agency reviewed this book” (400). It would be helpful to know to what extent individual interviewees sought permission, but that might be an ask beyond the remit of this book, or might put interviewees in a difficult situation. In interviews about The Sisterhood, Mundy has described the events leading to her interest in the CIA in a way that suggests agency encouragement for the publication of this book. After the publication of her previous book, Code Girls, Mundy had been invited to a meeting with agency historians. This sparked further interest in the topic. She recalled the beginning stages of her research for The Sisterhood, noting that when seeking interviews with CIA women, she received “a surprising number of responses.”[36]

The narratives presented are woven together throughout the book. Their connections and emerging network of women intelligence professionals builds with the progress of the book, and are particularly visible in the first part. However, the interwoven stories are at times difficult to follow. In chapter 10, “The Vault Women Revolt,” for example, the author touches on the stories of at least six women involved in the record-keeping and information management functions of the CIA. The lawsuit by Harriette Thompson is sandwiched in the middle of other women’s tales (141-142). Thompson’s formal complaint of discrimination over career progression led to an Equal Employment Opportunities Commission investigation, and later, a lawsuit that the CIA settled. While these events are certainly interconnected, perhaps there is room to draw out the discussion of individual CIA employment discrimination lawsuits further, bringing in additional context for the reader.

The use or selection of quotations might be more clearly addressed in the endnotes, as certain chapters bring in a greater number of quotations than others. Chapter 11, “Miss Marple of Russia House,” again introduces a range of stories, including that of Jeanne Vertefeuille and Sandra Grimes. Vertefeuille and Grimes were part a nearly decade-long investigation into leaks at the CIA. The investigation led to the capture in 1994 of Aldrich Ames, who is perhaps the most notorious known KGB mole in the CIA. Mundy engages with and highlights the work of Vertefeuille and Grimes as presented in their co-authored book, Circle of Treason.[37] The endnote for the chapter acknowledges that most of the material was drawn from their book. Mundy’s telling of their story is enmeshed in the wider narrative of the chapter, but as this draws heavily from Circle of Treason, I wonder if there is more that could be added here. Given the wider impact of the Aldrich Ames case and the range of literature which has emerged from the wider fascination with it, there is perhaps room here to expand the interviews and sources used in discussing the investigation and relevant fallout.[38]

This dilemma leads to one of the challenges of this form of historical writing. It is not clear in some chapters where the author’s voice ends and where the recollections of the individuals who were interviewed begin. Given the complexity of the content, this is a book where footnotes rather than endnotes would be beneficial. Here, the use of endnotes introduces an imprecision in referencing into the book. This does not in any way diminish the book’s contribution, but rather highlights how much we do not know and how much this field still has room to grow.

Indeed, Mundy’s writing brings together these narratives in a cohesive manner that does not gloss over tensions amongst the women themselves. At various points in The Sisterhood, Mundy handles the discord amongst the women of the CIA well. She notes in the organization of a class action lawsuit that divisions amongst women were exploited by management. Further, Mundy addresses the generational clashes effectively and with sensitivity (243, 249).

To some extent, reading The Sisterhood requires a broad baseline knowledge of US foreign policy. However, Mundy does a sound job of situating these narratives in their historical context, by providing relevant information to the reader without including extraneous discussion. I would argue that there is an artistry (or some necessary element of it) in this type of historical writing. Mundy, in discussing the Libyan coup in Chapter 3 waits to reveal to the reader that it was led by Muammar Qaddafi, who would come to rule Libya following a coup d’état in 1969 until his killing in 2011 (43). Though those who know this history will have already guessed the connection, there is room for surprise in the storytelling. As such, it is an engaging form of writing that may appeal to readers outside of the academic market¾and something that seems to be a core mission of both The Sisterhood and Code Girls. The intended audience is thus a broad one. In a growing genre of women in intelligence work, The Sisterhood offers a substantial contribution to contemporary intelligence history.

In this sense, The Sisterhood sits within a particular process of writing women’s histories, one that offers a narrative-centric approach in its construction. It challenges to more traditionally inclined intelligence histories. Mundy’s book fits with other narrative-driven accounts that place the stories of women within their wider historical context.[39] These works serve to highlight what is challenging about writing the histories of women within organizations where their voices have been subverted by a larger, more prevalent, male-centric narrative. As such, these works necessarily employ a narrative-centric approach, one that first sets out the stories of individual women and then provides the relevant context. One could argue that this is a genre or sub-genre unto itself, letting women’s experiences, voices, and recollections take center stage in driving the larger discussion of institutional change. In the sense, it is a bottom-up history that seeks to privilege the voices of women where possible.

The central argument in the book is the importance of the organization and collective efforts of women, the forming of the sisterhood that the book is named for. Yet, there is a second argument here, one that rebukes existing histories of intelligence when they leave out the women who were critical to the building of contemporary intelligence organizations. In this sense, the argument is that these voices, recollections, and yes, stories, need to be heard.

Happily, we can now say that the field of international history is no longer remorselessly focused on men.[40] This is especially true in terms of the experience of war, but even areas like diplomacy have seen a welcome expansion of interest in the contribution of women like former US secretaries of state Madeline Albright, Condoleezza Rice, and Hilary Clinton.[41] Arguably, this is the result of several developments which reflect not only a welcome expansion of women’s history and gender studies, but also an increased interest in the “voices from below” that has been underway for some time.[42] Inspired by the social, cultural, and, more recently, the affective turns in history, more scholars have focused on the everyday stories of both men and women.[43] For more than twenty years scholars have been examining how micro-scaled interactions might have resonated and shaped international affairs. In parallel, political scientists and international relations scholars have become fascinated by everyday practice and what some have called “vernacular security.”[44]

What has been the consequences of all this for intelligence studies? While it has always been a strongly historical field, it is already undergoing a conceptual transformation. The last few years have seen an effort to critique problematic institutional histories together with traditional assumptions and practices including those around gender. The 2021 official study of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) by historian John Ferris is an example. Although it looks like a traditional “regimental history,” it in fact devotes significant sections to social history and the role of women.[45] Critical approaches to women’s narratives in intelligence have also increasingly sought to move beyond the mere “finding” of women in intelligence history to reveal a deeper and more nuanced understanding of women’s impact on intelligence work. There has been a drive to explore the ways in which the experiences of women, as former intelligence professionals, can contribute to intelligence studies. However, we still lack much in the way of ambitious and substantive studies.[46]

In the last decade, historians have made remarkable progress in broadening our understanding of the multifaceted roles played by women in intelligence.[47] That said, there remains too little attention to the everyday, especially when it falls outside of the framework of expected female spy activity. [48] Tammy Proctor pioneered the reconceptualization of this space with her close analysis of British female intelligence work during the First World War, underlying the disconnect between women’s actual contributions to espionage and the stereotypes of female spies which continue to capture both the popular imagination and¾to a lesser extent¾scholarship on the subject. As she points out, the scholarship that does exist tends to be biographical in nature, an unintended consequence of which is the perpetuation of exceptionalism in women’s espionage history.[49] Similar observations have been made with regard to women spies at the center of McCarthyite persecutions in early Cold War America.[50] The analysis of women of intelligence is very often thrown back on an analysis of the images of female spies that infuse popular culture.[51]

For all these reasons, Liza Mundy’s recent book, The Sisterhood, makes a welcome and rather original contribution. Using numerous interviews with women who sought her out to tell their story as well as the other way round, the work gives first-hand accounts of all aspects of CIA work, from those who worked in the “vault,” a network of secure, windowless rooms where classified records about “people and operations were kept,” to those who came to have leadership positions (70). The interviews lend a frank and honest tone to the topics that are discussed; Mundy not only covers a vast amount of ground, but she also mostly escapes hagiography to give one of the first accounts of what women spies did in the workplace on a daily basis. The narrative takes a chronological approach, moving from CIA’s beginnings in World War Two with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) through to the hunt for Osama bin Laden, the founder of the terrorist organization al-Qaeda, in 2011 to the appointment of CIA’s first female director, Gina Haspel, in 2018. The early history is a captivating part of the story that unfolds here, offering insights into the obstacles that women overcame to gain an equal footing with their male counterparts. But, sometimes, perhaps due to the sheer enormity of the subject that it covers, the text feels rather rushed in places and areas of potential interest remain unexplored. This is particularly the case in the early chapters that focus on the OSS, where Mundy outlines the origins of CIA.

Despite the vast volume of records, the history of OSS has receded somewhat in current writing, and this book could have been the chance to address this lacuna.[52] A stronger analysis of OSS, its ground-breaking nature, and its remarkably large recruitment of women at a time when women were primarily confined to manual work on the home front, would have been welcome. The OSS’s relationship with Britain’s Special Operations Executive is misrepresented in parts (it is sometimes confused with the Secret Intelligence Service) and Mundy focusses on the (in)famous Virginia Hall, who completed two missions, one for SOE and another for OSS, despite being wanted by the Gestapo; and Julia Child, who worked as research assistant and assisted in the development of an anti-shark repellent (21). While the selection of these two women is logical as both went on to be part of the CIA, with 3,000 other women to choose from it seems a missed opportunity to explore the CIA from the roots up and instead deploys a familiar hagiographical lens that focuses on a few well-known figures.[53]

Mundy argues that in the post-war years, a collective amnesia about the recent revolution in the workplace appeared to settle over America. Most parts of the world returned to normal gender roles, and the war work that had been undertaken by women (who were relegated back to support roles such as secretaries and teachers) was quickly forgotten in favor of male-dominated war stories and a desire to return men to their rightful workplaces, and roles as breadwinners and heads of the households. America’s codebreaking agencies, where much of the workforce had been female, was perhaps the only place where a few key positions were retained by the women of intelligence (28).

When CIA was formally established by President Harry S. Truman 1947, the agency continued to rely on the “old boys’” network, and for the most part employed white men with degree from Ivy League universities. The account of the CIA’s early years is awash with a myriad of abbreviations, organizational changes, names, and places that the reader needs to keep track of. In some respects, it feels a little overcrowded (8-10). However, as the chronology develops, Mundy’s narrative becomes more exciting and readable. There are also plenty of engaging ground-breaking moments that allow a fast the pace. This gathering speed reflects not only the expanding range of roles that were occupied by women, but also Mundy’s research methodology. As an experienced investigative journalist, she mostly relies on interviews, and so there are simply more living subjects available for the years beyond the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

Starting with the early female CIA recruits who reported to the humble “Brownstone” (so called because it was made of drab, brown building materials), Mundy sets the tone by relaying that the men changed into army fatigues to strip them of class and /or military rank as part of the interview process, whilst the women were told to only remove their coats and hats as “no further equalization was thought to be needed” (4). Despite the overarching theme of prejudice and sexism, the men and women encountered in The Sisterhood vary hugely in background, social standing, race, and affability. They do not conform to a stereotype in which all men are demeaning, sex-starved brutes whilst all the women are terribly demure and supportive of one another’s ambitions and careers prospects. Witnessing all these “sisters” in their immensely competitive work environment, acting in ways that came naturally, adds to the humanity and relatability of the book.

The roles that these women undertook varied greatly, and Mundy’s ability to highlight these offers a valuable insight into the world in which they operated. Whilst some subjects drift in and out of the narrative, Mundy follows a few of her subjects more closely. This includes Lisa Manfull, an A student at Brown University who joined CIA’s career training program in 1968 at a lower paygrade than male recruits, which she fought against for all her career. Eventually, despite many efforts to keep her in a desk job she became a successful secret operative (85). Mundy also focuses on Eloise Page, who started as a wartime secretary to William “Wild Bill” Donovan and became the CIA’s first female station chief in 1978 (73-77).

Mundy offers fascinating and detailed accounts of some memorable and ground-breaking incidents, such as the recounting of the story of CIA station chief Heidi August, who was operating in the Mediterranean area in 1985 when EgyptAir Flight 648 was hijacked and landed in Malta with the hijackers demanding fuel and money. As an undercover CIA officer in the US consul office, August was all but powerless to help, but still took her seat at a makeshift command center next to a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Meanwhile, after she witnessed the bodies of the passengers shot by the terrorists being flung from the plane onto the tarmac, she promised one American victim that she would revenge her death.

Somewhat more relatable to the civilian reader is the so called “housewife cover,” which was most prevalent during the Cold War and upon which many a CIA officer relied. It was the type of spy work where women did not excel because of their femme fatale looks or indeed their overt sexuality, but quite the opposite: it was their ability to blend in and their perceived insignificance that made them so useful. Housewife cover converted an apparent weakness¾a woman’s ability to be ordinary and even mundane¾into a strength. Women could turn their unimportant and routine activities into spying. If a woman bent down to pick up a dropped lipstick or cigarette and picked up a message at the same time, would anyone even notice? The trappings of domesticity, such as the innocent pushing of a pram, the carrying of heavy shopping bags, or engaging in polite conversation at the dinner table, became the tools of the trade. The more patriarchal the culture, the more wives could get away with.

These women were, for the most part, the wives of CIA operatives, politicians, and diplomats, who worked as full-time adjuncts and functioned as extensions of their spymaster husbands. The wives received tradecraft training but little or no pay, and there was no real prospect of a promotion or formal employment in the CIA, at least not without fighting for this. Director William Colby’s 1978 memoir Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA is full of praise for his first wife, Barbara Colby, who, while the couple was on an early posting to Sweden, “did much to shore up my weak cover” by jumping into the “job of the junior diplomat’s wife with her typical enthusiasm and charm.”[54] In Vietnam, her “warm and outgoing personality” carried them through dinners and receptions.[55] Mundy highlights what an asset these women were to their husbands, and their country, and celebrates them for the first time.

Mundy concludes The Sisterhood with the hunt for bin Laden, and observes that, in the end, it was the sight of too many clothes drying on a line that helped confirm to bin Laden’s pursuers that he and his wives had been hiding out in a guarded compound in Pakistan. Bin Laden was adamant that a man should have four wives; perhaps it was busy women’s work that helped to give him away in the end (381).

The Sisterhood is not only an enjoyable book, it is an example of what can be achieved by the skillful deployment of in-depth interviews. It offers rare insights into the everyday life of women in the world of intelligence, an existence that included a mixture of drudgery and drama. The book leaves this reader feeling frustrated and irritated at the injustices women faced, proud of what they overcame, whilst brushing the broken glass from their shoulders from the sheer number of shattered glass ceilings, and hopeful for what might be.

Response by Liza Mundy, author and journalist

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