Significant Others - Bonus Episode: Liza Mundy on the History of Women at the CIA

Episode Date: December 28, 2023

In this month’s bonus episode, Liza is joined by Liza Mundy, journalist and author of the book, The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at the CIA, to discuss the profound influence women have had at the CIA from it’s creation in 1947 to present day in the post-9/11 world. Liza Mundy shares how women fought to become operatives, facilitated their husband’s spy careers, and tracked down Osama Bin Laden. We’re working hard on Season 2! Until then we will be releasing special bonus episodes from time to time. Want to support the show? Rate and review wherever you listen to your podcasts, and keep sending suggestions of Significant Others you’d like to hear about our way at [e-mail]!

Welcome to Significant Others. I'm Liza Powell O'Brien, and as we get ever closer to Season 2, I swear it's coming, we have another bonus episode. I would call it the penultimate bonus episode because I think we have one more before Season 2 starts, but that would drive my husband and my best friend absolutely crazy. So instead, I'll just say that I'm so thrilled to be talking today with Liza Mundy, journalist and author of the book, The Sisterhood, The Secret History of Women at the CIA. Liza, thank you so much for being here. I can't wait to hear all about what you learned on this subject. But just to orient us, could you give us kind of an overview? My book is really a history of the CIA, our most important intelligence agency and one of the most important intelligence agencies in the world. And the best known job at the CIA is to be what's called a case officer, which is a bland term for

spy. And these are essentially the fighter pilots of the CIA in the sense that it's the most prestigious sought after and for decades and decades, traditionally male posting in which a person works undercover, overseas, often under diplomatic cover. So it has a fake identity, has a pseudonym, which the officer uses in his or her real job, which is to spy on behalf of the United States and to convince foreign nationals to commit treason in their own country, to break the law by passing secrets or documents or technology to the United States in order to inform the president and national security community. So that's the most sought-after job at the CIA. There's also a huge cadre of analysts back at the CIA.

We forget this, that once this intelligence gets collected overseas that the president needs, it has to be passed back to the CIA in Langley, where thousands of very well-educated, well-versed analysts consider this new piece of intelligence that has come in and they decide how urgent it is and write up analyses that, if they're important, find their way to the president. So my book is a history of how, since its inception after World War II, the CIA needed women and hired women and tried to channel and pigeonhole women into these positions, either analyzing intelligence or archiving intelligence, because all of this top secret, incredibly hard-won information not only has to be analyzed,

but has to be archived and kept so it can be retrieved. And so the CIA built over the course of decades an incredible file card collection. A lot of this top secret information was handwritten on three by five cards. And there were women who were put in charge of that who were called the vault women or the sneaker ladies. And they knew everything. They knew every secret. So all of the information that the vault women would provide would help the case officer figure out, how am I going to bump this person? Like, how am I going to casually meet this person? How am I going to strike up a conversation?

What might I know about him? And then how am I going to persuade him to break the law, put his own life at risk, and spy for the United States? So so my book tells the story of how the CIA originally hired women into that kind of a job. It was way more than secretarial, although women were also for sure hired as secretaries and clerks to handle all this paper that is critical to a spy service's success. And so women were channeled into these kinds of jobs. But over the decades, there were women who fought their way into the spy corps, women who wanted to be the fighter pilot,

who knew that their gifts and talents lent themselves to maneuvering in a foreign country, being inconspicuous and underestimated, these qualities that are fantastic if you're working undercover trying to get people to spy. And one of the things that I think we'll talk about today is the way in which also this other category of wives, CIA wives, facilitated their husbands' careers and contributed to the success of their case officer husbands in a way that was just that. There's a chapter of the book called Housewife Cover, and that was really one of my favorite chapters to research and write. I cannot wait to hear more about that. To talk a little bit about the framework of the time,

you sort of say that post-World War II, they were more heavily recruited into these roles. Were women at all present in the CIA before that? Was that completely new? our first civilian spy service, we being the United States, not you and me. And that's a really interesting period also, because when we were surprised at Pearl Harbor, the Pearl Harbor attack that launched the United States into World War II, that was a massive intelligence failure. And that exposed the fact that the United States, which currently has 18 intelligence agencies, the Space Force being the most recent, had nothing. When we were entering World War II, we had no CIA, we had no NSA, we had no director of national intelligence. And so we had to scale up overnight as suddenly we're sending all of these young men into harm's way across the Atlantic or in the Pacific. We all of a sudden knew that we had no way to know what the enemy was planning.

And so the Office of Strategic Services was created. It was the predecessor to the CIA. And then at that time, many, many thousands of women were recruited into this effort because the guys were all shipping off to fight. So as we're building these intelligence agencies, it was this tragic, glorious moment where women for the first time were competed for. Their talents and gifts were competed for, particularly college-educated women in the intelligence services. So there were thousands of women recruited to build the spy service during the war. After the war, in spying,

as in every other sector, women were told, thanks very much, ladies. You know, you knew this was just going to be temporary. OK, maybe you enjoyed it. Maybe you felt valued. But it's time to go home and make way for the returning men so there will be jobs for them. So I don't know if this came up in your reporting. I suspect at least part of it did. When women were sort of forced admittance to some of these roles, I don't really subscribe much to, you know, some genders being particularly good at one thing or the other. However, I can imagine that there are some strengths that maybe women were demonstrating in some of these positions. Was that like recorded at all that they say, oh, it turns out they're actually really good at this or that? Oh, absolutely. Because there was a series of studies done starting in the 1950s. There was a study done called the

petticoat panel when some, but it was really called that. And some of the women who had stayed on after the war and hung on were dissatisfied with why they were not being promoted the same way that men were. And so some studies would be done in the 1950s. And then when lawsuits started being filed in the 1970s, and the men really interviewed just didn't hesitate to share their stereotypical views of what women could and couldn't do. And the belief was that women were patient and careful and diligent. And so they would be great working in the vaults, but that women would not be taken seriously in male-dominated cultures, which was every culture in the world. And again, that women lacked the sort of balls or moxie to close these deals and to convince somebody to spy and lacked the ability to stick with it.

Once you recruit an asset, you have to handle that person. You have to watch out for that person's well-being and safety, teach them how to have meetings, teach them how to stay safe, and often teach them how to work a miniature camera, how to take surreptitious photos. And so there's a lot of tradecraft that a person would have to be taught. And it was believed and held. Also, the belief was that when a woman got married, she would quit. And so she wasn't worth the training dollars that were going to be put into teaching her tradecraft because she was just going to quit.

And of course, what was never recognized was that many of the women in my book, if they intended to get married, they wanted to have tandem careers. If they married a fellow spy and they wanted to stay with the service, they didn't want to quit. And they were made to quit or made to resign and then become housewives who helped their husbands. But what women also, the strength that it turned out that women had in this situation was the ability to move around inconspicuously, to be taken for granted, to be underestimated, to have people in foreign countries think, oh, she's just a secretary. She's not important. We're not going to bother to surveil her or follow her or track her because what could she know that's important? And so it turned out that women's inconspicuous being underestimated was a huge advantage.

And it also turned out, and we should have known this from World War II, actually, is that when it comes to handling an asset, to taking care of somebody, this may or may not be an innate genetic trait that women have, but women certainly have tens of thousands of years of specialized training and taking care of people. And during World War II, there was a remarkable American woman named Virginia Hall. And if people have heard of anybody working in American espionage during World War II, it's probably Virginia Hall. There's a wonderful book about her called A Woman of No Importance. And she operated in occupied France because she spoke fluent French and she was posing undercover as a French woman.

And she ran a network of French women who would help exfiltrate allied airmen if they were shot down in occupied France. help exfiltrate allied airmen if they were shot down in occupied france they would hopefully be smuggled out in order to fly again as opposed to being captured by the germans and so she and and french women would um would pose as girlfriends of these guys and they would teach them how to be how to pose as a frenchman and how to smoke french cigarettes and how to wear French clothes and how to not look like an American and how to not walk like an American. And so she ran an exfiltration network in which she had to take care of the airmen and had to take care of the women who were working as part of the network. So it really should have been recognized that if anything, women had certain either innate qualities or ingrained qualities that would enable them to be very good at taking care of and handling assets. And again, the ability to just

seem unimportant. And that is a great asset. I have undervalued it all my life, apparently. Okay, so eventually women do start muscling their way, for lack of a better term, into these positions of more import and more influence. Does that, are we skipping over the housewifing chapter? Is that what this chapter called Housewife Cover, readers would meet a woman named Lisa Harper, who was recruited out of Pembroke College, which was the woman's college at Brown University, in 1966. And she was recruited to join the clandestine service with the hope on her part of becoming a case officer, becoming a spy, the fighter pilots of the CIA. And instead, they tried to route her. They had just sort of dangled this manipulatively. And once she signed on, they tried to route her to become a reports officer, which is working at a desk in a foreign station, handling the reports, then sending them back to Langley. And that's an important job, but it's not the job she wanted.

And that's an important job, but it's not the job she wanted. And so she battled her way into the spy service. Buts at the CIA, but also in the U.S. State Department, if a female officer got married, she was made to resign. I know. And you think, what? In the 70s and 80s? Yeah. Wow. And so this was true in the diplomatic corps as well. And so this was true in the diplomatic corps as well. It was thought that a woman, it was still thoughtistically in the way that a diplomat or a spy would need to be supported by a spouse. And so women had been expected to do this for their husbands and still were. So this idea

that had been in place now for decades, that if a diplomat went overseas, a male diplomat or a male spy, of course his wife would come with him. And of course she would be expected to work unpaid on behalf of the U.S. government. And so if she was the wife of a diplomat, she would be expected to stuff Christmas baskets, to roll bandages, to host really important receptions and cocktail parties, really to work full time on behalf of her husband's career. And her husband would be evaluated in his performance evaluations. In part, one of the categories would be, was his wife a full partner? So with Lisa Harper at the CIA, she was expected to fill that role for her husband now. And so she had to resign, but she still went overseas with him. And she used her training to help out in the station to

handle people, to venture out on a rainy night to pass a message when nobody, none of the paid people in the station wanted to do it. And this was just what was expected. And so, you know, eventually she would get paid a little bit as a secretary at the station, but nothing like she started as a GS-7 and she was being paid, if at all, as like a GS-3, like what was called housewife cover. She was literally a housewife at this point. The hardship for a CIA wife was that her husband would be working overseas ostensibly as a U.S. diplomat under diplomatic cover. So he had a day job as a diplomat. He had a night job as a spy. So she had to help him out as a spy, and she had to help him out as a diplomat as well. So she had to fill all the functions of a diplomat's wife. But then she

had to be ready if a secret needed to be passed that her husband was unavailable to pass, she would go out and do it. Or if there was a message that needed to be picked up, it's called a dead drop, picking up a message from under a park bench or receiving a handoff when somebody passes a piece of paper to you in a newspaper, the wife would do that and she could do it convincingly again because she's inconspicuous. And another really important part of a job, particularly in countries that were either communist occupied or adjacent, would be to handle a walk-in. And that's a really important intelligence gathering asset is a person who hasn't been recruited, hasn't been spotted at a diplomatic party. And wives help with that kind of spotting as well. But a person who

has secrets they want to volunteer. And so the person finds out who the local CIA officer probably is and just presents himself at the doorstep. And that's a really pivotal moment because that person might be surveilled by the KGB and it's about to be grabbed. So if the CIA officer is off on another assignment and somebody rings the doorbell in the middle of the night, the wife is the one who answers the phone and the wife has to know who to call, what the code signal is, and all of this critical tradecraft the wives had to be trained in as well. So the character in my book, the real-life character of Lisa Harper, is trained how to do all of this vitally difficult, scary, risky, high-stakes tradecraft. But for about 10 years, she had to do it unpaid, working as a housewife on behalf of her

husband. And she would eventually insist upon being sent back to the CIA training facility called The Farm and insist upon being given the full training and then hired as a case officer herself. It would cost her her marriage, ultimately. She and her husband served together in some assignments in Africa, but she quickly emerged as such a superior officer. Many people told me her gifts and talents at this job were such that it created stress in their marriage. And also, she was still kind of responsible for helping him, but she wasn't receiving any of the kind of help that her male colleagues were accustomed to receiving. And it turned out that once they separated and she served in Paris, her first solo tour, it was just easier for her, even as though there were

hardships. Because part of the way in which a CIA officer figures out who to recruit from a foreign country is by spotting people at diplomatic cocktail parties. You know, who has the information I need? Who might be recruitable? Who could I sidle up to over cocktails and invite home for dinner? Because I think this is another important part of Housewives and how they helped. Anybody who watches James Bond movies, and who doesn't, thinks that a lot of spy work takes place in casinos and on ski slopes, and it almost never does. And instead, what happens is you see somebody, and you might bump them in the grocery aisle at the local grocery store, literally.

Or you might meet them at a reception or a bar, but then you invite that person to your home. Invite that person to your home because that's the quiet environment where the case officer is in control of the situation. And you wind that person and you dine them and you cook them to dinner and you invite them back. And in this quiet, clandestine environment is when you make that ask ultimately. And so this, again, was a setting in which wives were incredibly important and really expected to produce high-level meals at a moment's notice. I'm just thinking of all the ways I would get my husband killed in this scenario. I would be absolutely the worst recruit. I don't want to have anyone over ever. I'm going to bed at eight o'clock. I don't care what else is happening. I'm a total blabbermouth.

I cannot keep a secret. It would be all over. Well, if not killed, fired. You know, his career would tank. But, you know, also to that point, during the Cold War, a lot of wives were on board. They would do their best, at least, because they believed, rightly so, in the anti-communists. do their best, at least, because they believed, rightly so, in the anti-communists. This was an existential contest between the United States and the Soviet Union. A nuclear war was always a real possibility that people lived with. And so the women really bought into this, and they did their best. Even as though, like you, I feel the same way. I might not have had

the ability, but I would have tried, I think. But when we move into the 60s and of ambiguous role during the Vietnam War. There was certainly involvement in the Phoenix program and some of these what became assassination programs that cost many, many civilian lives. But the CIA's analysis about the course that the Vietnam War was taking and the likely outcome was good. And so they were telling the president things that he didn't want to hear about the likely outcome. But wives became much more conflicted over helping during that period. And well, I imagine many of their children were also being, you know, drafted. Exactly. So, right, right. And so just as you say, it would have been hard enough at any time. But when you're not so sure anymore that you believe in the mission, then it becomes even more complicated. had to contend with was it was very common. There was a lot of what we would, and this is such a problematic verb, but there was a lot of what we would call womanizing in the spy corps. And there

was a lot of pathological infidelity. And while Bill Donovan and then Alan Dulles, who was one of the most famous early directors of the CIA, they were just unfaithful. I mean, they would have been me too'd out of the workplace, one hopes very, very soon. So, but, but so a lot of behavior was accepted in the male spy court. And, and ultimately a lot of marriages ended and, and there was taking of second wives, you know, and, and remarrying and, and, and, and so these wives who had served faithfully overseas for decades, if they were divorced from their husbands, whether or not they wanted to be divorced, they were entitled to no pension, no benefits, no financial recognition of their service. And one of my favorite anecdotes in this book is when Barbara Colby, the wife of CIA Director

William Colby, decides to right that wrong. And she uses her graciousness and her intellect and her social skills and her social standing. And she sails into all these Senate offices, John Stennis and all the old Southern lawmakers who are very charmed by Barbara Colby, who just knows how to work a cocktail reception and a Senate office. And she helps bring about, with the help of Pat Schroeder, one of the first female members of Congress, a law that guarantees wives and ex-wives who have served overseas for their husbands for I think it was 10 years at least a portion of their husband's pension and a portion of their husband's benefit and that was she she did essentially what was called she ran an operation against the CIA itself wow what year

was that that took place oh gosh um era yeah it it I think it started in the 1980s. And so and I think the law was also passed in the 1980s. Could have even been the early 90s, but I think it was in the 80s. And so, you know, she had been described as that occurred on behalf of the wives. And then she helped run an operation along with another woman working in the office that helped CIA families, liaison with CIA families. They realized that it was still very difficult for an ex-wife to even find out about these benefits because this woman's husband would have been working undercover under pseudonym. And the CIA doesn't like to even acknowledge that somebody ever worked there. And so she would call some central number and say, well, my husband so-and-so-and-so worked at the CIA and now we're divorced and I think I'm entitled to these benefits. And they would be told, we don't know what you're talking about. We've never heard of them. And so they, Barbara Colby and a couple of Confederates on the inside, it was an inside job,

reached out to all of these ex-wives, all the ones they could track down. And literally some guys had like four. And they called them all. They got them all onto the campus of Langley and had a meeting in this facility called the Bubble. It's the auditorium. And they explained to them how to obtain their benefits. Oh, that's a great scene. I know you were focusing on women, but I'm wondering if there were any, especially now that I think the, you know, sounds like the gender divide has broken down a little bit at the CIA, thanks to the law. Are there any stories of male spouses that are playing a supportive role to the female operative? Yes. And I should also say that I interviewed men, male case officers, including a wonderful man named Mike Sulik, who became head of the clandestine service and was very, very happy

to talk about the contributions of his late wife, Shirley Sulik, a black woman married to a white man. And she served in Moscow with him. When I say served, she supported his career as a wife, and she was incredibly vitally important to and very enthusiastic about car chases and eluding Soviet surveillance and helping him elude Soviet surveillance so that he could do what they call drop a foot, which is jump out of the car in order to communicate with an asset. And Shirley was apparently just a wonderful person. She died a couple of years ago, and he was very, very happy to talk about his role. So I just want to hasten to say that there are definitely men who recognize the incredible role that their wives played. But to your point about supportive male spouses now, the answer is yes and one of the people i interviewed um is now congresswoman abigail spanberger she's a member of congress from virginia uh she's going to run for governor in virginia and um her well she was a case officer overseas and uh and she was married at the time and this was before really the heyday of of working remotely

And this was before really the heyday of working remotely. But she had children and her spouse did have the detection route, a very complex route to even get to your meeting and then a complex route to get home. So she would be basically incommunicado for a couple of days. So you really, the spouse really does have to be the at-home hands-on spouse, particularly if they're children. And it's still a challenge for women and men, this kind of job. But she did have a spouse who was willing to be what they call the trailing spouse and to facilitate her career. But it is still really challenging for parents. And she, I think, ironically enough, finds that, I think she has three kids, And she, I think, ironically enough, finds that being a member of Congress, believe it or not, is more conducive to family life. I have lots of questions also about the history of same-sex romance and marriage in the CIA. Thank you for mentioning that because, you know, there were decades and decades where if you were gay or lesbian, you were not hired. That's right. You would be hammered in your polygraph on, it was called the lifestyle questions. And you would be hammered.

Have you ever slept in bed with a woman? You'd be asked, have you ever slept in the same bed with a woman? You know, what are your sexual fantasies or what, you know, what sort of thoughts do you have? Have you ever kissed? And so you would be weeded out if the polygrapher could find any information. And then if any same-sex behavior among people who were hired, you would be just booted out immediately. No recourse. And it wasn't, I think it was the 90s when that was- Would that have been part of Don't Ask, Don't Tell initially?

Yeah, I think it might have happened before Don't Ask, Don't Tell because that's the military. But it shouldn't have been the case ever. And the assumption was that this person would be more subject to blackmail. But again, the heterosexual shenanigans that were taking place routinely, including by one Aldrich Ames, who is the famous CIA officer who betrayed his country and the agency by passing the names of Soviet agents who were working for the USS, but for the US passing those names to the KGB and those agents were executed. And Aldrich James was a womanizer, drinker, case officer. His dad was in the CIA and his behavior was just winged up, heterosexual behavior. I mean,'m girlfriends imagining the behavior that the you know in the older times that the um the spousal support units had to put up with absolutely their service yeah there was a

phrase called being a geographic bachelor so if you were sent overseas to a place where you're it was dangerous or whatever and your spouse couldn't or wouldn't accompany you you consider yourself a geographic bachelor and any any sort of behavior was just kind of tolerated by your by your colleagues um but i'm sorry what was your question no i i uh i i'm just sort of you know i'm having nightmarish fantasies about same but same people had to deal with right so same-sex behavior uh or you know our our um identity being gay and lesbian was not permitted, but it is now. And there are, you know, employee support groups, assistance groups, and certainly same-sex partners will accompany their partners, their case officer, spouse, or partner overseas and support in the

same way. So we have made some in the right direction exactly how did you become interested in this subject right so i um my last book code girls was about the women in world war two who were recruited to become code breakers for the american intelligence service that is now the nsa uh it was a could that's the code breaking service during the war. And there were more than 10,000 women who came to Washington during World War II to break Japanese and German codes. And it was vitally important to the outcome of the war. And it was, you know, an example, we use words like inclusion now, and maybe they attract sort of eye-rolling in corporate settings. But World War II was really an example of inclusion. And it's one reason that

the Allies won the war, the willingness to bring women into the war effort to the talents of the Tuskegee Airmen, you know, black male pilots, the Navajo code talkers. The Allies were not perfect in their inclusiveness. The army was segregated, but it was a more inclusive time. And it made the difference at a time when we were fighting Nazi Germany, which was the very definition of non-inclusive and the genocidal regime. And the Japanese as well. That was a very traditional society and women were not brought into the war effort. So I was interested in that topic. So I was interested in that topic. And then sources were telling me, just to sort of shift course for a second or to fast forward to more recent times, that there was a group of female analysts at the CIA in the 1990s, women having been channeled into these desk jobs that were less sexy but very important. There were women analysts who, after the Soviet Union collapsed in 91,

were starting to pay close attention to these fighters, these stateless terrorist fighters, Islamic extremists, who had been fighting in Afghanistan to help drive out the Soviet infidel as part of what they called jihad,viet on against the infidel and there were women analysts who were paying attention to fighters who had come from other countries but weren't returning back to their countries and instead were coalescing into this um uh for a long time the u.s and other intelligence services didn't even know their name the name but it was al-qaeda they would eventually figure out that it was called al-qaeda it was this disconnected group of fighters who were communicating with each other and and conspiring but didn't have the backing of a state or an army didn't have uniforms and they were being financed by this guy named osama bin

laden who the women started paying close attention to and taking very seriously in the 90s and early and mid 90s when very a hard time in this very bureaucratic building, Langley, making their voices be heard. And the moral of that is that it can be an advantage in a spy service if you're a person moving about the street in a foreign country. If you're a person moving about the street in a foreign country, but being inconspicuous and underestimated in a powerful bureaucracy that's very competitive and very elitist, being underestimated is not an advantage when you're trying to when you're trying to convince people with a vested interest in an old threat, the Soviet Union, that now resources should be shifted because there's a new threat and you've spotted it and they've never heard of you and you're just in your 30s and you're a woman but you're seeing this thing and the reason they're not seeing it is because they've been watching the soviet union for 20 years and so um hearing about that group of women and also knowing that this ability to target terrorists became even more important after the intelligence failure of 9-11 when these terrorists had to be tracked all over the world and ultimately you know about 10 years later Osama bin Laden was tracked and found I knew that there that women in this role this new role called targeter that really built on what the vault women had done. Learning the biographies

and the connections of enemy agents was something that women had been trained to do at the CIA since 1947. And whether it was Soviet scientists or members of the KGB or now terrorists, they knew how to build biographical profiles. They knew how to understand human connections and who's talking to whom and why that matters. And so if you're Osama bin Laden and it's 2009 or 2010 and you know that you're being hunted. And so Osama bin Laden wasn't using a cell phone, wasn't on the internet, didn't have an IP address. He was hiding out in a compound in Abbottabad,

Pakistan. But the women targetters knew, okay, he's not online anywhere. We have all this great technology now, but we can't target him because he's not online. But he's got to communicate with family members or with other terrorist leaders or with his couriers who take messages. with family members or with other terrorist leaders or with his couriers who take messages. So they were able, they knew how important human connections are. It's not finding you, it's finding who knows you or who's related to you or who you have to communicate with. And do they use a cell phone or are they on the internet? And these concentric circles, you're going to find out who is on the internet and you're going to pinpoint them and you're going to follow the gene and you're going to find the compound and you're going to look at aerial surveillance

technology and you're going to see oh well we can't see inside that compound but we're going to look at the laundry on the line that we can see and so how many children are likely living there how many families are there bodyguards there and where are they living and where are the how old are the children probably because if we're going to take out bin laden we want to minimize civilian casualties and so women have built this ability to do this kind of really nuanced targeting and tracking nosy yeah that's a perfect job for my mother yeah she would be very good at this yes wait what when does that job start? How much are they paying? Well, it's a career track now. It's a career track now, but just along the lines of

what we've been saying, it was a career path that was sort of born during the early 1990s, and it was not a prestigious job to have. What? You're just kind of following people. You're just learning some biographical stuff. That's not sexy and exciting. So it was women who began to develop the ability to do that. So I started having interviews with these women who served more recently to try to understand how that job of targeter came to be, but also try to understand why these women back in the 90s had such a hard time getting their voices heard. And that's when it became sort of clear that it had to become a big history because you really had to understand what these women had contended with and the stereotypes against women that really had prevailed for so long during the Cold War. And the 90s were this pivotal time where the Soviet Union collapsed in 91. The adversary is gone and democracy is going to win, we think, all over the world, you know, yay. And so Congress, you know, wants to not defund, but take back a lot of the CIA's funding. Does it even still need to exist?

So it's this really uncertain time. Pencils down, everyone. I think that's solved. Yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Why do we even need a spy service? Yeah. Yay. But they were contending with all of this vestigial, stereotypical thinking about women. Vestigial.

I mean, it's echoing exactly the story that I heard this week on The Daily, the New York Times podcast, about the Israeli intelligence woman who told them what was going to happen, and they said, your imagination is too vivid, basically. You're hysterical. You're a hysterical woman. Yes. I've been tracking that closely. There have been a number of articles about that, and I'm actually writing a Substack post about to try to, there have been at least seven or eight remarkable stories about the woman analyst in the New York Times Daily podcast, which is that that reporter wrote this just stunning article in the New York Times about this female Israeli analyst who was stationed in the Southern Command watching the border and uh and and seeing battle preparations and and planting of flags yes invasion yes yes um infiltrating the border downing a helicopter and so she also knew that a document had been obtained that was the hamas attack plan and that the the the battle preparation she was seeing they were using language that was also in the attack plan. And so she put together a very comprehensive report saying, no, this is real. These are preparations for war, and they believed that this was an imaginary scenario, that it was aspirational on the part of Hamas. So there was that woman that the United Times

talked about, but there were also young Israeli female soldiers, a team of spotters, who were also studying. They were just assigned to sit at computer monitors, the same kind of grindingly detailed job, literally studying. And one of them said, I knew every rock. I knew every building. And they, too, could see activity that was clear to them that it was serious military preparation. And they, too, tried to get their voices heard. And one of them was told by her commander you are the eyes you're not the brain it is just your job to to see what's going on but not to analyze it and and also one of

them one of the ones who survived uh said um that she was told women aren't good at analyzing so so it's definitely the case of course that that lowerlevel male soldiers can be told, you know, sit down, shut up, it's not your job. The leader's, it's their job to think. But in that scenario, she was specifically told women aren't. So, there was a gender component to that. So, it is horrific to think that, you know, what I was writing about happened 25 years ago. And at the CIA, it is recognized now, I think, much more clearly that you have to have all the talent has to be at the table. And if you're hunting bin Laden, you need the female trackers, even if they're not high-ranking officials. That when President Obama says, well, what's your confidence level that he's really in the compound? And the higher-ups are saying, well, I'm not sure we got the Iraq war wrong and maybe we got this wrong too.

I mean, literally, literally saying that. The ground-level female targeters are saying, oh, we know he's there. We are 100% accurate. And they were listened to that time. So it's very troubling to know that this mindset has not gone away. Underestimate women at your own peril. At your own peril. Yeah. Okay.

My final question is something we ask everyone. You can answer it in any way you like. And that is, is there a person or an event or a thing that you would consider a significant other in terms of your own trajectory in your life? Well, I am very, you know, being an author is really lonely, solitary work. And, you know, like everybody else, I'm very grateful for my family. And, you know, my husband can't write the words for me and, but is very good at bringing me coffee and and being a cheerleading squad and and altering my workspace to make it as as sort of comfortable as possible. And so I but I have to. Yes.

So that person. But I have to say writing never gets easier and you never feel like you get better at it actually like every book is hard and it's just hard in a different way but over the years you do at least get more patient with yourself and you say okay this draft isn't getting good but uh but i but i will i've got smart friends and i'll show it to my smart friends and they'll help me make it better so i would just say also over the years building up a really trusted set of friends and colleagues who will read drafts and help make it better. That's great.

Well, thank you so much for coming and talking to us. This was really, really interesting. Thanks again to Liza Mundy for joining us and thank all of you for listening to these bonus episodes. Our next batch of Significant Other Stories will be here before you know it. We can't wait to hear what you think of them and everything else we do. So keep the feedback and suggestions coming by emailing us at significantpod at gmail.com.