"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 57

In this episode: How Women Became Central to the Central Intelligence Agency

June 4, 2024

"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 57

Episode 57: How Women Became Central to the Central Intelligence Agency

When the CIA got started in 1947 it recruited women for one type of job: typing and filing. Very few women were out in the field gathering intelligence and recruiting foreign agents. But once they finally got the chance, they proved instrumental to obtaining secret codes and tracking down terrorists — despite sometimes facing discrimination and harassment. Women also found ways to use gender stereotypes to their advantage in their spycraft. Peter speaks with a former agent who entered the CIA in 1968, another who got her start just before 9/11, and the author of The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at the CIA.

Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.

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When she was 12 years old, Heidi August read an article in Newsweek magazine that mentioned the Central Intelligence Agency was looking to expand its workforce.

It was 1958. And a time when a young girl’s career ambitions would have been highly circumscribed. The Civil Rights Act, which prohibited discrimination, including based on sex, wouldn't be passed for another six years. Betty Friedan’s famous book, The Feminine Mystique, which introduced the idea that women could find fulfillment beyond homemaking and motherhood, still hadn't come out.

But 12-year-old Heidi, who'd read the James Bond books and watched the TV show I Spy, couldn't stop thinking about the CIA. She imagined herself traveling around the world.

So she sat down to write the CIA a letter. Here's what she wrote.

Heidi August: I'm 12 years old and I'm trying to plan a little bit ahead. And I'd like to know what the requirements are to get hired. I wrote this letter on a manual typewriter, and I didn't tell anybody in my family that I had done this.

About six weeks later, a letter arrives in the mail.

Heidi August: It did say Central Intelligence Agency on the envelope and my father picked up the mail that morning and he looked at this and he said,’ What are you doing’? [laugh] And I said, ‘well, I'm trying to find out what the requirements are to get hired.’

Heidi August: So I opened up this thing. It was rather thick. And it was a pamphlet that was entitled, Clerical Careers in the CIA. That was it.

Heidi read every page of that pamphlet about clerical careers in the CIA, carefully noting the requirements.

Heidi August: You have to be 21 years old, you have to be able to type so many words a minute, take shorthand.

She tucked away the pamphlet and what she'd learned from it.

Fast forward about a decade and Heidi's at college at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where she attends the school's employment fair.

Heidi August: I saw the CIA was there. They had a recruiter there. And I noticed that there were a lot of football players and stuff around this fellow. And I kind of waited patiently and I got up to the table and I told the guy, I said, look, I once wrote you a letter, a long, long time ago and I'm still interested.

By this time The Feminine Mystique had become a bestseller and the FDA had approved the first oral contraceptive pill. But American society was in a lot of ways, still trying to catch up with all these changes.

The CIA recruiter rustled around looking for some papers and handed Heidi a pamphlet.

Heidi August: He brought out the same damn pamphlet.

That same damn pamphlet from a decade earlier with all the information about clerical opportunities at the CIA.

Heidi August: And I said, oh, I've got that.

There still weren't a whole lot of other options for a young woman who was eager to see the world. So Heidi went ahead and applied to the CIA. She got hired as a clerk, which was an even lower-level position than a secretary.

Heidi August: And so I started there, and my first job there was learning how to make the coffee. And it was a huge, huge coffee pot, huge. When you filled it up with water, it got really heavy. I had never made coffee because I wasn't a coffee drinker.

She’d make a lot of coffee before eventually convincing the men around her that she was capable of much more, including recruiting foreign agents. But women like Heidi August didn't just face barriers to career promotion. Some faced sexual harassment.

And some former CIA officers say the systemic discrimination even had an impact on national security.

Liza Mundy: The women were early on, before anybody else, paying attention to Osama bin Laden and his activities and, they were hurt reputationally by this perception that they were just women who worked in records.

But they also say they could use those gender stereotypes to their advantage.

Tracy Walder: The fact that people underestimated me or thought I was stupid or thought I was dumb, I'm going to 100 percent use that. Anytime I had to talk to a terrorist they do not think that a woman's going to come in there and talk to them.

Coming up: how women became central to the Central Intelligence Agency. And how underestimating them may even have undermined the agency’s work.

I'm Peter Bergen. And this is In The Room.

(Theme Music)

The CIA was created in 1947, just two years after the end of WWII. The agency grew quickly, as the United States turned its attention to fighting a new kind of war, the Cold War.

ARCHIVAL Old 1947 Newsreel: Before America’s Congress, President Truman makes the most momentous speech since the death of Franklin Roosevelt. He declares political war on Soviet Russia.

And a new enemy: Communism.

ARCHIVAL Truman Speech: The actions resulting from the communist philosophy are a threat to the efforts of free nations to bring about world recovery and lasting peace.

And the CIA's early directors, Liza Mundy writes in her book, The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at the CIA, complained about how hard it was to find good men to do the work of intelligence gathering.

Perhaps, Mundy says, that's because at the time the CIA had a certain ideal in mind about who could do spy work: mainly white men.

Liza Mundy: The common wisdom about the early decades of the spy service is that it was pale, male, and Yale, you know elite, white heterosexual.

But with all these white men that were getting hired, that meant the agency also had another need - for women.

Liza Mundy: The CIA, like all other institutions in American life, it needed women, because there's a lot of paperwork involved in spying and there's a lot of record keeping and so that was a task that women were believed to be better at than men sort of the ‘Miss Moneypenny’ role of spycraft.

ARCHIVAL Old James Bond Movie (Dr. No):

Moneypenny: ‘007 is here, sir. He'll see you in a minute.’

James Bond: ‘Moneypenny. What gives?’

Moneypenny: ‘Me, given an ounce of encouragement.’

So right from its beginning, the CIA hired thousands of women. And there was one main qualification that the women needed to have.

Liza Mundy: They, well, they had to be able to type.

So women like Heidi August were routed to be clerks and secretaries, no matter what their skills or qualifications.

One former female officer who got hired in the 1960s was fluent in French and German. She was hoping to get into the clandestine service. That's the division of the CIA that recruits foreign agents and gathers intelligence in the field. Mundy says she was an incredibly accomplished college graduate.

Liza Mundy: And when she was talking to the CIA recruiter, he said to her, the only thing they're going to care about is whether you can type. And so she actually went to secretarial school in order to get on with the CIA.

Peter Bergen: One of the big themes that I took away from your book was, right from the beginning, women were sort of controlling the information. First of all, it was three by five cards. And then, you know, eventually it was the computerization of all these records, which women seemed to be deeply involved in since the CIA is involved in gathering intelligence, that seems like quite a strong form of power to kind of control the information and intelligence flow.

Liza Mundy: For decades and decades the information flowed in and of course records had to be kept. Any intelligence that was found had to be kept in these vaults, these secure rooms that were managed by, the nickname was vault women, the vault ladies or the sneaker ladies, women who wore tennis shoes because they were on their feet all day. But they kept these file cards, these three-by-five cards, which was the brain and memory of the CIA.

You know, information is power. And so these were powerful women, even as they were kind of scorned.

It's not just that women were only allowed to do certain types of jobs at the CIA, particularly in those early decades. There were all kinds of barriers because of the culture that existed there.

As Mundy puts it, it was MASCULINE. The kind of office where in the hallways, there was a great deal of talk about who had cojones and who did not.

Peter Bergen: The guys, and they were mostly guys, in the operations side, I mean, they have a sort of particular personality profile in my experience, which is a big swinging, whatever, you know, larger than life. Uh, you know …

Liza Mundy: Fighter pilot.

Peter Bergen: Yeah. So what was that culture?

Liza Mundy: Just as you said, big swinging, et cetera. So it's a group of pretty elite men from wealthy families, particularly in the early decades, they were very protective of each other and a very powerful network and to varying degrees , working undercover and clandestine positions. It's your job to break the law of other countries. So you're dwelling in a very gray moral area all the time.

And that gray moral area also applied to relationships and to sex.

Liza Mundy: There’s a term at the Agency called “geographic bachelor.” So if you were a male case officer and you served overseas at a station and your wife didn't accompany you, basically everybody would just sort of turn a blind eye to bachelor-type behavior that was going on. There was all sorts of philandering. I mean there was one famous CIA station chief who literally wife-swapped with a British counterpart. There was lots of extramarital affairs and sort of, you know, anything went. Dewey Clarridge, one of the early station chiefs, wrote about this really frankly in his surprisingly candid memoir.

Peter Bergen: I have it. I haven't read it. Now you…yeah. I need to read it.

Liza Mundy: Yeah. I mean, he names names..

Peter Bergen: Oh.

Liza Mundy: …and, and shares details. Uh, and he even talks about how if you're cultivating an asset in a foreign country, you want to invite them to your home to watch pornography because this was a forbidden perk in many countries. And so if you had some American pornography, it was another form of inducement. And so this is the sort of climate in which the women of the clandestine service were trying to operate.

It's easy to imagine this type of workplace culture in those early decades of the sixties and the seventies was one rife with sexual harassment. Mundy heard this from former officers she interviewed for her book.

Like one early female case officer, who went to a meeting known as a turnover.That’s when a case officer who is moving to a new location hands off an agent they’ve recruited to another case officer. But she found herself fighting off sexual advances from her colleague instead.

Liza Mundy: She shows up so well prepared, and her own colleague chases her around the bed and wants, as she said, to do a quickie. So that was what she had to contend with.

Heidi August, who’d written that letter to the CIA and received back a pamphlet about clerical opportunities, entered the CIA in those early decades of the geographic bachelor where women were expected to keep the files and make the coffee.

It was 1968. She was 21 years old and remembers her first day.

Heidi August: They put me in a big room with a bunch of other young women, no windows, and we were taught how to fold maps. And I'd always been interested in living overseas. And so I'm going through and I'm looking at this, you know, map of Paris, map of Rome…

She folded the maps and learned to make the coffee and eagerly waited for a chance to leave the United States.

She got that chance about a year after she’d entered the CIA. There was an opening for a clerk at the CIA station in Libya. The office was located on the U.S. military base there, in Tripoli. In Libya, Heidi typed and filed and did whatever else the men in the office needed.

Generally, she had to figure out a lot of things on her own.

Heidi August: There were no women there that I could call on, talk to, get help. None.

In the late 1960s, the CIA was in Libya as part of the American effort to counter the Soviet influence in Africa, and to maintain access to the country's vast oil reserves.

Heidi August: Now, as luck would have it, on the morning of September the 1st, 1969.

(Sound of gunfire, people shouting, then crowds cheering that fades underneath her words)

Heidi August: I could hear gunfire. And what that was, was the Gaddafi coup and I assumed that the military was taking over the country, because these troops that were coming down the street, and I could watch it, uh, they're all wearing uniforms.

It was Labor Day, an American holiday, so not everyone was at the office that day. Heidi’s apartment wasn't far from the Libyan Ministry of Communications.

Heidi August: So I did call my boss, who was actually the chief of station in Tripoli, and he, he worked out of the embassy, which was, oh, I would say maybe eight or nine miles away from where I was.

And, I apologized for bothering him, and I said, I think there's a military coup underway. And he said, how do you know? And I said, well, there are all these troops coming down my street, and they've gone into the Ministry of Communications, which was the one and only radio station in all of Libya. And I said, this doesn't look good to me.

Heidi's boss told her she needed to make her way to the office as soon as possible and destroy all the classified material before the troops carrying out the coup could get their hands on them.

Heidi was a clerk - she had never expected to find herself in the middle of a coup. She'd watched ONE training video on how to use the incinerator that they had at the office in case they had to destroy sensitive documents. But she had never actually used the incinerator before.

Heidi August: What's important is that you've got to light that thing while it's outside. If you light it inside the building, you're going to burn down the whole building.

Helicopters buzzed overhead.

Heidi August: It took us about three days to get rid of all this stuff. We had, oh, probably maybe 20 feet of files?

It was a bloodless coup.

Heidi August: Gaddafi had given us a date by which time the base had to be closed.

It took some time to get the CIA office and the military base closed up. In the meantime, Heidi, who'd proven herself adept under pressure, began helping out one of the male case officers to do dead drops. That's when CIA officers leave secret messages for the foreign agents they're recruiting. She’d place a coded message in an empty ginger ale can and leave it under a bench for the agent to pick up.

She enjoyed the excitement of this work, but then learned she was getting transferred to Bonn, Germany, which she says was kind of like being back in Washington, DC.

Heidi August: Basically it was typing, filing, you know, the ordinary stuff, making coffee. And I thought, you know, there's got to be something better here in this job.

It would take her 10 years at the agency before she'd officially get that opportunity. She'd gotten sent to Finland where she had a boss who turned out to be a real mentor. He began teaching her the job of how to be an operations officer, working undercover to gather intelligence and recruit foreign agents who'd be willing to betray their own countries.

Heidi August: The whole Cold War at that point was raging. So I was trained on the streets of Helsinki real time. He gave me a couple of cases to handle and after some time he said to me, ‘You're really in the wrong career category.’

That boss in Helsinki saw her potential. But in order for her to actually advance and move from being just a clerk to a full-fledged CIA case officer, she’d also have to go through official CIA training at a facility known as The Farm.

Heidi August: That was a six-month program where they duplicate life overseas.

Her boss told her that as a woman, she needed to finish top of her class at the Farm to prove herself.

Heidi August: Because I had learned all this stuff before I ever got there, for me it was a breeze.

So she finished number one. And while it had taken her 10 years, she was finally a CIA case officer.

Heidi August: I was having the time of my life.

Peter Bergen: At the time you joined the CIA did you face harassment, discrimination?

Heidi August: I didn't really, the only thing that I, that I when I was talking to the European Division personnel officer about what I wanted to do, and he said, you know, there's no mommy track in this. If it's your idea, you know, you want to get married and you want to have a family, you're gonna have to leave. That was just the way life was, you know, you said, okay, I understand. There was no other course of action you could take.

In lots of ways, the culture inside the CIA matched the one at large in American society.

In the 1950s, when women first began working at the CIA, it was believed women were good at specific tasks and couldn't be expected to handle others. So they were channeled into certain areas: keeping the files, writing the reports, and rarely went into operations. At the same time, these women recognized that sometimes gender stereotypes and assumptions could be used to their advantage. Author Liza Mundy again.

Liza Mundy: Ideally, if you're a spy operating overseas, what you want is to be inconspicuous. The more inconspicuous, the better. The more underestimated you are the better. This is why Harriet Tubman was one of the great American spy mistresses of all times, you know, running this incredible exfiltration network ofenslaved Americans from the south to the north is ’cause nobody thought that a Black woman would be that capable and in charge and running this incredibly sophisticated operation.

And Heidi August figured out a way to use gender to her advantage while she was recruiting foreign agents in Geneva, Switzerland. Heidi was working undercover and attending meetings at the United Nations office in Geneva.

Heidi August: And I noticed sitting there one day, I'm looking around the room and I see all kinds of women sitting behind their country microphones and I thought, well, this is really interesting. All of our targets are here. You’ve got the Russians, you've got the Chinese and there was a big coffee lounge. So I started going there during breaks for coffee. And I started chatting with some of these women. And some of them had very, very interesting jobs. So I went back to my boss and I said, I have never, in the years I've been employed by this Agency, I've never seen a case of a woman agent. The agents are all men, and I said, you know, these women here, at least in Geneva, have got wonderful access to things.

So I said, ‘I'd like to try just one case.’ He said, ‘Okay’.

Heidi got a tip about a woman who was working for the embassy of one of the countries of interest to the United States. This woman apparently liked to play squash.

Heidi August: So, I found out that there was one squash club in Geneva. And I went down there one day just to sort of see what this is all about.

Heidi figured out that the woman belonged to the club. So she began hanging out there and eventually became friendly with the woman, who offered to give her squash lessons. They’d play a couple of times a week.

Heidi August: And then afterwards, we'd go out for a drink. And we got to be very, very good friends. I would have liked her even if I wasn't working.

And, long story short, it took me a year to recruit her. It doesn't happen like what you see on television where it happens in 10 minutes. Sometimes it can take two years.

This woman would eventually supply Heidi with the encryption key that her country used to send coded messages. It was something the CIA was very keen to get their hands on.

Heidi August: I had a special concealment device made for this operation, it was basically a case for holding tennis rackets.

Inside the case there was a secret compartment where the agent would hide the device.

Heidi August: And I'll tell you if I had my choice between a female agent and a male agent, I'd take the female any day. Women are much better agents than the men. They're much more observant. They have much better memories. They write better.

(Music)

Heidi eventually became one of the few women station chiefs-that’s the top official running the CIA’s operations in a foreign country.

It was 1985. Heidi was sent to Malta. It was the first time the CIA had opened a station there. Malta is close to Libya where Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, whose coup Heidi had witnessed earlier, was helping to finance global terrorism. There'd been a number of deadly terrorist bombings in the region, like the one on the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, and a series of hijackings. And this was also the case in Malta.

ARCHIVAL NBC Newscaster 1: Another hijacking tonight out of Athens Airport, the same airport where the TWA hijacking originated last June. This time, it's an Egyptian airliner with about a hundred people on board.

ARCHIVAL NBC Newscaster 2: The jetliner was hijacked shortly after takeoff from Athens Airport en route to Cairo. Greek officials say it was forced to land in Malta where it remains on the ground.

Three Palestinian men had hijacked EgyptAir flight 648 and diverted it to Malta, where they demanded fuel so the flight could continue onto Libya.

The hijackers wanted to get to Libya to negotiate the exchange of the passengers they were holding hostage for the release of some members of the Palestinian militant group The Abu Nidal Organization.

The hijackers began to threaten to kill the hostages if their demands weren’t met.

They shot an Israeli woman and threw her body onto the tarmac. Then another.

Then they began to shoot the Americans.

Heidi August: There was a tall woman that was brought to the door of the plane. And she was told to get down on her knees, because she was much taller than the hijacker. She got down on her knees. And he put a pistol to the back of her head and shot and you see this flash, and she just tumbled right out, right onto the tarmac.

The Egyptian government, which is now taking responsibility for this, because it's their aircraft, they were going to send a rescue team to rescue the hostages.

Now I had never, nor had the Agency ever had any experience in what you do on the ground in a hijacking that involves U.S. citizens or anybody. From the ‘70s into the ‘80s, we had all of these terrorist incidents involving hijacked planes. And this was the first one to my memory where we had an Agency officer on the ground at the time.

The negotiations continued. In the meantime, Egyptian commandos had started arriving. Their plane was parked out of sight of the hijackers’ plane. They’d come up with a plan to pose as food suppliers and to storm the hijacked plane.

But the Egyptians bungled that rescue from the start. It was chaotic. They used explosives, which ended up killing some of the hostages. And one of the hijackers set off a grenade.

Heidi August: We had no idea who was alive, who was dead. There were just a lot of dead people on the ground. It turned out, it was the bloodiest hijacking on record, until September the 11th.

Peter Bergen: So this set you down a path of becoming interested in counterterrorism

Heidi August: Yes, it, it certainly did. I had to go into the morgue at the hospital to do a positive identification on the deceased American. And I had gotten her passport.

The woman was Scarlett Marie Rogenkamp, who’d worked for the U.S. Air Force.

Heidi August: So I had her picture of what she looked like before the hijacking. Because when you shoot somebody in the back of the head, they don't look the same as on the front, as I found out. From her passport, I had her mother's phone number, you know, for emergency contact.

And I was talking to the State Department. They said, well, ‘We're happy to call the mother for you’, and I said, ‘No, I think I would like to talk to her myself.’ There were many similarities between this woman and myself both from California, about the same age.

And so I called her. It was the Thanksgiving holiday, and I don't think she knew that her daughter was going to Cairo to celebrate the holiday. And I said, ‘Look, Mrs. Rogenkamp. I will make sure that Scarlett's remains get to California as soon as physically possible.’

Heidi managed to call in a favor from a friend at British Airways who arranged to get the body on a commercial flight out of Malta.

Heidi August: On the way out my office door, I'm going down the hallway and I'm passing the embassy supply room. And I realized that I needed an American flag to go on that casket. So, uh, stole the flag and took it out there.

It was the death of Scarlett Marie Rogenkamp that would solidify what Heidi would do for the rest of her career at the CIA.

Heidi August: I had actually said to this corpse, this woman, that I sort of felt I knew her. I said, well, because of you, I'm going to make a career on terrorism.

And Heidi wasn't the only one who'd turn her attention to counterrorism efforts. Things were shifting both inside and outside the CIA. In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed, and Liza Mundy says the US began to turn its attention away from the Cold War and communist foes.

Liza Mundy: We get into this very confusing period in the early 1990s when, the communist adversary, it looks like, has just imploded and the main adversary has gone away. And, and all of these top officials at the CIA and throughout the national security establishment, who have built their careers on the contest with the Soviet Union, this existential contest to avert nuclear war. Now all of a sudden the world has shifted in ways that people don't yet understand. Congress is talking about, well we should have a peace dividend. Let's claw back funding from the intelligence community. Do we even need a CIA?

And it's at this same moment that women in the US are demanding more publicly that they be treated fairly in the workplace. And some even begin to call out sexual harassment.

ARCHIVAL 1991 Senate Testimony: Today, The Senate Judiciary Committee is meeting to hear evidence on sexual harassment charges that have been made against Judge Clarence Thomas…

In October, 1991, Anita Hill testified in front of the Senate judiciary Committee, which was led by then-Senator Joe Biden.

ARCHIVAL Senate Testimony: We are here today to hold open hearings on Professor Anita Hill's allegations concerning Judge Thomas.

Hill testified that Judge Thomas had sexually harassed her while she worked with him.

ARCHIVAL Anita Hill: He got up from the table at which we were working, went over to his desk to get the Coke, looked at the can and asked, ‘Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?’

Her testimony was unlike anything that was heard before at a Supreme Court nominee hearing. A committee of 14 white men grilled her live on TV.

ARCHIVAL Anita Hill: He referred to the size of his own penis as being larger than normal , and he also spoke on some occasions of the pleasures he had given to women with oral sex. At this point, late 1982, I began to feel severe stress on the job…

Despite Hill's testimony about repeated sexual harassment over a period of years, Judge Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile Anita Hill faced death threats.

Liza Mundy: Those of us who were in Washington during that period remember the Anita Hill hearings and the Clinton administration and the Lewinsky scandal and women all over the government challenging this power structure. It’s also the period of Class action lawsuits, you know, women bringing these class action lawsuits.

Either the women prevailed or they settled which amount to prevailing. And I think in many of the cases the women who brought those suits suffered in their own careers and fell on their swords for the next generation.

And the CIA was no different. A group of women came together to file a class action lawsuit against the CIA, saying they had been denied promotions and faced discrimination.

In the settlement of that case, the LA Times reported that the CIA quote “discriminated systematically against its women secret agents for years.”

Liza Mundy: I was actually told by a male case officer part of the settlement of the class action lawsuit was that the federal government would continue to observe and make sure that these women were not punished.

But he said, the case officer, he said everybody knew who they were. And so when discussions would be brought up about advancement and appointments, it was made sure of that the women, that their careers did suffer because they pushed back.

Still, women like Heidi August pushed for change and pressed to see more women in leadership roles. And with more women entering the Agency, they began to form a sisterhood.

Heidi August: In the early ‘90s, late ‘80s, early ‘90s, a group of senior women and myself got together, and we made up a list of what we called the nifty 50, the top 50 jobs in the agency And we did basically a study. How many women had ever occupied any of these 50 jobs? Zero. So I then went to the Director of Operations, and I said this is totally unacceptable. There are no role models here for anybody.

It's during this same period of turmoil, both in terms of changing geopolitics and sexual politics, that a change was also beginning to happen in the focus of the CIA.

At least by one group of analysts who begin to pay attention to something new: a group called Al-Qaeda and its charismatic leader - Osama bin Laden.

Liza Mundy: There’s a group of women analysts, who, you know, in some ways started out at the Agency in kind of low level positions where they were very well trained to do analytic work.

The unit, made up mainly of women, was known as Alec Station.

Alec Station was led by a brilliant and irascible CIA officer who preferred working with women because he felt they got the job done better than men. At the CIA, Alec Station’s focus on bin Laden was regarded as being so over the top that they were sometimes referred to as “the Manson family.”

Liza Mundy: The women of Alec Station were, early on, before anybody else, paying attention to Osama bin Laden and his activities and his funding and his intentions and his capabilities, and paying attention to al Qaeda, connecting these dots and, they were hurt reputationally by this perception that they were just sneaker ladies, that they were just women in tennis shoes.

The perception of women who worked in records, women who worked in, in information management, And I think that hurt the credibility of the early women who were paying attention to what was at the time not a sexy topic. Before 9/11 counterterrorism was not the glamorous place to be, it was not where you wanted to be.

Peter Bergen: So tell us what they were worried about, predicting, and how it was received.

Liza Mundy: Their main job was to write intelligence products for the President's Daily Brief or for other classified publications, which are how intelligence gets passed both at the CIA and in the national security community. It's passed through publication. They're not signed by the author. It's not bylined. You have to get your colleagues to what they call “chop “on any piece that you're writing. You have to get your colleagues to agree with what you're saying. And that is really hard when you're a 30-something female in what's regarded as a backwater.

These women at the CIA were warning the Bush administration that an attack by Al Qaeda was coming. One of the women even authored a President's Daily Brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.”

On August 6th, 2001, when he received that presidential briefing, President George W. Bush was on vacation at his ranch in Crawford, Texas.

Despite the warnings, Bush didn’t interrupt his vacation. I've studied this part of American history for more than two decades. And while there are multiple reasons no action was taken by the Bush Administration before 9/11, the women Mundy interviewed believe that gender was a factor.

Liza Mundy: The failure to listen before 9/11 is the geopolitical and national security consequence of this sort of, channeling of women into roles that are regarded as niche, as not that important.

And then when they do their work so well, the failure to listen to their expertise, and to take it seriously, I think, I mean, you know, there are lots of reasons why 9/11 did happen and why we didn't foresee it coming, but, but the women certainly believe that their gender and their position as women and their marginalization during periods in the workplace that that was one cause of our failure to anticipate it and our failure to act.

Needless to say after 9/11, counter-terrorism was no longer a backwater. The CIA became an organization focused on targeting terrorists. Its goal was to find the terrorists, capture them, or kill them.

Resources were flowing in as the agency expanded its efforts, and women helped fill the counterterrorism ranks.

Tracy Walder entered the CIA the year before the 9/11 attacks. In college she was studying Middle Eastern history. In fact, the CIA recruiter came to her sorority house. It was Rush week. Which meant her sorority was trying to recruit new members.

(Sounds of sorority members chanting and cheering)

Tracy Walder: We do a pretty ridiculous thing called door chants, and we just get excited and scream our sorority’s name for people to get excited to come in our house. And so our rush chair took a picture out of Playgirl magazine of a completely naked male and put it up on like this transom window inside of our house so that we would all look up.

And the door swings open and outside is this elderly gentleman, you know in a suit with his pen and paper waiting to talk to me. And so I think I was praying that he wouldn't think we were ridiculous and I was also praying that he wouldn't see the naked dude on the other side of the window. I guess I felt at that point that there was no way I was going to get the job.

She did get the job. And eventually ended up in Iraq on the hunt for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who would eventually lead Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Tracy Walder: So he was our target, and obviously we were trying to find him, some of his henchmen.

Peter Bergen: Did you face barriers, as a CIA female officer that male officers didn't? And did you get any kind of harassment or did you feel opportunities didn't happen because you were a female, or was that a non-issue?

Tracy Walder: I can only talk about my lived experience, right? It is in no way to diminish an experience that any other woman has had. I never had an issue, I never didn't get promoted or didn't get sent somewhere because I was a female. I was never harassed because I was a female but just because I never experienced anything doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Peter Bergen: So often you were one of the only women in the room. Obviously when you're at the CIA, you're saying it's sort of a non-issue. But in places where culturally, a woman like you, in a position of authority who they have to deal with and they wouldn't deal with women otherwise, except in a private context, they may not even see women outside their immediate families, you know, what was that like?

Tracy Walder: I can't say the country, but it was an African country actually. It was a place where our station in particular had a very bad relationship with the local service. It was myself and a male case officer.

And, um, they just laid into me and anything I had to say. And, you know, they would call me Malibu Barbie or Barbie or little girl, why should we listen to you? But my colleague completely stuck up for me and was like, if you want this information, you can get it from her. Like that was kind of how he handled that.

But the fact that people underestimated me or thought I was stupid or thought I was dumb, I'm going to 100 percent use that to my advantage. Anytime I had to talk to a terrorist they do not think that a woman's going to come in there and talk to them. They were just like ‘whoa … there’s a female here.’ And it takes them so long to process that by then I've gotten what I need.

(Music)

As important as it is not to underestimate the capabilities of women at the CIA, it would also be a big mistake to underestimate their capacity for wrongdoing. Like when the agency, as part of its global war on terror used interrogation methods like waterboarding and sleep deprivation - methods a U.S. Senate Intelligence report said violated quote “U.S. law, treaty obligations, and our values.”

Peter Bergen: Quite a number of the women in your book were either involved or deeply involved in that, to include Gina Haspel, who later went on to become the director of the CIA.

Liza Mundy: This is a very dark period. And, there were women who said I see what's happening. And I am not going to get involved with this and you can't make me and I'm not going to do it. And uh, I won't have any part of this. And there are still analysts you would talk to who will say, we got information from these sessions that we would not otherwise have gotten who will still defend the interrogation systems.

(Music)

Like so many workplaces, the CIA has undergone all sorts of changes since women first entered its ranks nearly 80 years ago.

In 2018 Gina Haspel - who faced a tough confirmation process because of her role in the controversial CIA coercive interrogation program - became the first woman to lead the agency.

But like much of American society, the CIA is still grappling with how best to prevent gender discrimination and how to deal with sexual harassment - even in 2024.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: Sexual misconduct cases lifting the shroud of secrecy surrounding the CIA and prompting dozens of women to come forward and share their own stories of abusive treatment within the agency.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: A female CIA trainee who came forward about being sexually assaulted at the spy agency's headquarters in 2022 has now been terminated.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 3: A bipartisan report says there was little or no accountability or punishment for those found to have committed sexual assault within the CIA.

Liza Mundy: There's some similarities, I think, to any workplace. There were systematic, institutional reasons, barriers to women's advancement. But the environment of the CIA is unique in that it does have this clandestine component in which it is your job as a case officer to break laws in foreign countries. A lot of your meetings are taking place in undisclosed locations. People are operating with pseudonyms. You do live in this gray zone sort of netherworld where the boundaries and the rules aren't always clear and the opportunity for abuse of those situations, either of the populations of the countries where you are or of your colleagues, the opportunity for abuse is greater in an environment like that.

Tracy Walder: What I do appreciate is that for these women who are victims at CIA, that at least there's Congress looking into it. Right? And at least there's some publicity around it. And my hope is that it will enact institutional change.

And Tracy Walder has become a fierce advocate for getting even more women to work in national security.

Tracy Walder: I think diversity is everything in the intelligence community. We are dealing with foreign countries. Diversity of thought, diversity of culture, diversity of religion, diversity of race, diversity of gender, all of those things are super important because we need those perspectives, to help us understand these cultures.

(Music)

In the meantime, Heidi August - who retired in 2003 after 35 years at the Agency - well, she misses the job, which despite those barriers she faced, she really loved.

Heidi August: There's some of us who have stayed together, some of the women. We had kind of a close group. In fact, if you've read Liza's book The Sisterhood, that sisterhood is alive and well.

(Music)

These days Heidi isn’t chasing terrorists around the globe - at least that’s what she says anyway…

Heidi August: To let you know how my life has changed, in about an hour, I have to go to a TEA [laugh].

If you enjoyed this episode and want to know more about the topics and stories we discussed, we recommend The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at the CIA and Code Girls by Liza Mundy. And The Unexpected Spy by Tracy Walder. All of those are available on Audible.

And for more about the women who investigated and studied Osama bin Laden, you might enjoy our episode 20: “On the Trail and Inside the Mind of Osama bin Laden.”

CREDITS:

IN THE ROOM WITH PETER BERGEN is an Audible Original.

Produced by Audible Studios and FRESH PRODUCE MEDIA.

This episode was produced by Alexandra Salomon with help from Holly DeMuth.

Our executive producer is Alison Craiglow.

Katie McMurran is our technical director.

Our staff also includes Erik German, Laura Tillman, Luke Cregan, Nathan Ray, Sandy Melara, and JP Swenson

Our theme music is by Joel Pickard.

Our Executive Producers for Fresh Produce Media are Colin Moore and Jason Ross

Our Head of Development is Julian Ambler.

Our Head of Production is Elena Bawiec.

Maureen Traynor is our Head of Operations.