Hidden story of female spies and CIA agents -s

Christina Hillsberg joined the CIA as a 21-year-old eager in 2006. She spent more than a decade there: secret travel to CIA stations across the globe, meeting clandestine springs in cafes and hotel rooms and recruiting “Asssets” who would provide secrets and information to the US government.

It was exciting, dangerous, sometimes scary. And she was lucky to have a number of female mentors and bosses who could help her sail.

Had not always been like that

In “Change Agents: Women who transformed the CIA” (Citadel, outside June 24), Hillsberg chronicles rampant sexism and its predetermined female indignation endured. They were routinely rejected, weakened, underestimated and harassed.

When they succeeded, their male colleagues would ask them to show empty with whom they slept to get what they wanted.

A woman – who began as a secretary in the 1990s before surgery in West Africa and Latin America – recalled that an elderly male employee would grab her chest and say “Honk!” When she passed by him in the hall.

HR discouraged him to file an official complaint.

“Oh, he’s so close to turn”, HR representative – a woman! – said, before adding, “You don’t want to be that girl.”

Despite the threats, disappointments and humiliations these women face, they often presented their lives on the line for their country.

“Indeed,” writes Hillsberg, “throughout my career at the agency, I was surrounded by extremely smart and capable women. My?”

Before there was a CIA, there were women spies.

Former ballerina Mata Hari, the most notorious gang, listening to diplomats and military officers to give up their secrets during World War I. Violette Szabo – a Special Operations Executive Agent for the United Kingdom – entered some courageous Nazis missions during World War II.

The Germans actually considered another woman, the American Virginia Hall, “the most dangerous of all allied spies.” A New York Post columnist has worked for the French, British and American governments, recruiting resistance fighters, supplying weapons, organizing prison and even blowing up several bridges.

When the CIA was formed in 1947, the agency recruited the hall – “The most decorated female spy in history” by Hillsberg – and then treated it as a glorified secretary.

It was “limited to a table in the headquarters for 15 years,” writes Hillsberg, “where she is reported to face discrimination as a woman – passed for promotions and career opportunities and much less experienced response managers in intelligence operations.”

The CIA realized that there was a woman’s problem in terms of 1953. This is when the Central Intelligence Director Allen Dulles ordered a report to investigate salary inequalities and the position between men and women in the organization. The so -called Petticoat panel revealed some harmful figures. The women of CIA employees earn, on average, about half of the money as men. Plus, writes Hillsberg: “No single woman held a high executive position or an office higher than the branch chief. And only 7 percent of branch chiefs were women.”

“Despite such discoveries, the agency stopped implementing any new policy on the correct course, and it would take decades (and more decades thereafter) to see any real changes,” she adds.

Hillsberg interviewed several operatives of previous and current women, and “change agents” highlights about a dozen.

From its subjects, Lucy Kirk joined the agency first, in 1967. She was one of just nine women in a 90th class at the CIA training facility, The Farm.

As the boys played the pool and drank beer, she and other women in her program spent all the time studying.

During her first meeting of the agent mock her assigned mentor, her male classmates tried to travel her covering the walls in the room with Centerfolds Playboy.

After its course, Kirk was sent to China – during the height of the Cultural Revolution. But once she married a CIA agent in 1969, the agency stopped giving her the opportunity, while her husband continued to get jobs overseas.

“The reception was that she simply labeled with her husband in his task,” Hillsberg writes.

Her husband said he took his two mixed identities and was making an affair with one of his agents, who ended up pregnant.

“We all knew it was happening,” one of their colleagues told Kirk’s broken.

After their divorce, she still had problems to take an operative position.

“Lucy, you will spend all your time in the shopping,” the boss told the New York City station when she asked to work there. “I really don’t think you can talk to great men.”

Martha “Marty” Peterson did not necessarily be defined to be a spy. She was married to a CIA agent and went with her to Laos, where the CIA had started a secret war against the Communists there. Her husband’s helicopter was shot for purpose and he died, letting Peterson stay and not knowing what to do.

One friend suggested that she applied for the CIA, and she was accepted and sent to Moscow. (She later wrote about her experiences in a memory, “widowed spy.”)

There, she placed a cover like “Marti Party”, a single fun lady in Russia, who between packets in driving cars, and receiving cigarette cartons full of clandestine messages from Snow-Snow weekends walking with her Gal and cross-country skiing. She also began a romance with a married embassy community (with whom she married later).

It became one of the most effective agents, the main liaison among Americans and their most important contact.

It was exciting but dangerous. She was betrayed by a double agent and captured by the KGB, thrown in prison and expelled from the country. Later, her male boss at the station threw her under the bus, blaming her entire experience.

Many other women endangered their lives for their work. It was Kathleen (who did not give her first name), a Korean-American, whose “asset”-or the source “brought her the watched head of a terrorist in the baggage of his car,” Hillsberg writes. It was Mary, a Lebanese-American immigrant who escaped a bomb and had to withdraw the Middle East with her children in secret after their lives were threatened. And it was Dori, one of several black operations, which began in the CIA as a 19-year-old secretary and found Hersf running a whole station behind a coup in West Africa.

Hillsberg argues that the CIA needs women – and minorities – in order to do its job effectively. And she says the agency has been slow to accept that reality.

But that is changing. In 2023, the Congress approved the act of intelligence authorization, demanding that the CIA enter ways to report sexual harassment and attack involving congressional supervision.

She writes: “Women in agencies, especially affairs officers, operate in an environment where men have held a long time, but the tides are eventually returning.”