| This week, the CIA took another blow to its reputation. On Tuesday, a CIA trainee — who says she was sexually assaulted in a stairwell at the CIA headquarters in 2022 — filed a lawsuit against the agency. The lawsuit alleges that the CIA “repeatedly and improperly” discouraged the female trainee from lodging a criminal complaint, and engaged in “criminal witness tampering” on behalf of her assailant — who was convicted of assault and battery in August. It’s not the first time this year that the agency has come under fire for its treatment of women. At least two dozen women have come forward with complaints over the past few months. The CIA’s relationship to its female employees has always been a complex one. Liza Mundy’s forthcoming book, “The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at the CIA,” tells that story straight from the mouths of the women who experienced it — all the way back to the founding of the Office of Strategic Services in 1942 — the first centralized U.S. intelligence agency, which predates the CIA. Mundy tells the story of the decades of sexism that the agency's employees have faced. For years, she says, women in the C.I.A. refused to help other women in the agency with their careers to avoid appearing “feminist.” Eventually, American spy-women realized the only way to improve their collective situation was to help each other. But at first, they had to keep their mentoring a secret. “This network was really covertly constructed between women over decades where they knew that it would be the kiss of death to your career if you were seen as a rabble rouser or a feminist,” Mundy tells Women Rule. “The building of a sisterhood was clandestine, and it took a long time.” I talked with Mundy about the history of women in the CIA, the sexism that they faced and how some women eventually managed to come into power at the agency. Here’s the conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity. Gardner: You write that at its peak, the OSS employed 13,000 Americans, of whom more than one-third were female. Why were they so willing to hire women in such a high-stakes organization when many places still wouldn’t hire them at all? Mundy: World War II was this obviously terrible moment for the world, and it was this remarkable moment for women, in that opportunities opened up for women in the workplace, in government service, in intelligence work, and also in STEM technology, that never would have existed before the war. What happened during World War II was that we were terribly surprised at Pearl Harbor, and the fact that we had basically very little competent intelligence gathering was made painfully evident at the exact moment that we were joining World War II and sending all of our young men off for fighting. I became aware of this moment when I was writing my last book, “Code Girls.” About 10,000 women were recruited to work as code breakers as part of the same effort to scale up our intelligence gathering capabilities practically overnight. It wasn't that women were replacing that in existing jobs. It was that all these new jobs were being created. [Before World War II] there were so few opportunities for women. … The only job that was reliably open to women was teaching school. That's great if you want to be a school teacher, but if you want to be a doctor, or an architect or an engineer, you're out of luck. But then all of a sudden, we enter World War II, we need all these machines, we need all these battleships. People know about Rosie the Riveter, the women working in factories, but they don't realize that for the first time ever in American history, women who were fortunate to have some higher education were finally allowed to show what they could do. And so not only was the OSS, our first civilian spy service, willing and eager to recruit women, but they were hotly competing with other government agencies and with and with the private sector for women. Gardner: You note that, in the early days of the CIA and the OSS, most women started as typists or secretaries, and any spying they did usually was not acknowledged. But your book also shows that women eventually worked their way up in both organizations. How did they make that happen? Mundy: War is an accelerant. On the battlefield, it accelerates technologies, it accelerates medicine. So that was true in the spy service as well. Some women who were hired as clerks and secretaries very quickly were sent overseas. They in some cases began running resistance networks. They began recruiting foreign nationals, they began building networks overseas or working with foreign intelligence services to build our understanding of the coastlines in Asia. And some of the women, like Eloise Page, who were hired as secretaries — in her case for Bill Donovan, the head of the OSS, who was a terrible philanderer among other things — got the goods on these guys. I mean, they were typing their correspondence — they knew all their secrets. Women who were able to withstand the frustration, women who were sort of smart and wily enough — in the case of Eloise Page — to get the goods on their own bosses, would later use that as leverage to build careers at the CIA. Gardner: The CIA, as you write, was notoriously full of misogyny and sexual objectification for the women who worked there. How was it possible that that could be true, and that the CIA was also a place where women held important positions and developed this “sisterhood?” Mundy: The sisterhood did not exist for at least two decades after the CIA was created. It was an incredibly clubby and networked place. You not only had to be a man to be part of the network, but you had to be part of a certain group. You know, like the Ivy Leaguers or people from certain colleges, or there was a network of Greek American male officers who looked out for each other. It was a very competitive and undermining place where you often couldn't trust your colleagues and everybody was going after the same top jobs. So you really needed mentors and protectors and you had to rely on your network, even if you were a man. And so in this environment, in the 1940s and 50s and into the 1960s, women who rose — and there weren't many of them — often did it with the help of a man, and certainly without the help of other women. The women understood early on that you did not want to be seen as the feminist, you did not want to be seen as a woman who was helping other women. You wanted to be seen as one of the boys. So the institutional culture really put women at odds with each other. It really wasn't until the 1970s when a few women began quietly helping each other. So these women had to do what's called “run an operation” – they had to run an operation against the very institution they worked for, in order to advance their own careers and to advance the careers of each other. The building of a sisterhood was clandestine — and it took a long time.
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