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Whenever we think of the CIA or CIA agents in general, we tend to summon the images of handsome, manly men who drink, sleep with countless women, know several forms of combat and are the kings of suave.
On the other hand, whenever we think of female CIA agents, we tend to think of beautiful women in tight-fitting clothes with their cleavage exposed, especially because that’s how they’re portrayed in popular entertainment. Additionally, these women are excellent martial arts and, most notably, in seduction. As much as we’d all like to believe that type of character as the truth and standard for every female agent out there, the reality is much different than anything portrayed on the big screen. Female agents are much more human, diverse and intelligent than their two-dimensional character stereotypes.
CIA agents, or Office of Strategic Services (OSS) agents, date back to World War II. During this time, the roles women filled in OSS operations were secretaries or other forms of administrative work. It was the 40s, after all, and it was still believed that a woman’s place was at home while men went out and” fought the good fight.” However, slowly and over decades, women began to saturate the operative field.
A significant way this was accomplished was through the implementation of “contract wives.” Contract wives were the wives of current CIA operatives who also received CIA training. In a transcript meant for internal review, Meredith (her last name has been excluded for safety precautions) recalls, “Back then we didn’t allow any officers who were married to go […] without the wife going through the full […] course.”
The ideology surrounding the CIA was that women were “risks” to operations because they had the ability to get pregnant. It was a widely held belief that women would most certainly get pregnant and start families, thus making them “bad candidates for any other positions other than secretary work and contract wives. Yet, the very men who believed this had families as well.
Meredith again recalls a conversation she had with the Deputy Chief of Europe:
“He said to me, ‘I really don’t believe in women being ops officers.’
I said, ‘I don’t understand. Why is that?’
And he said, ‘Well, because you know they’ll have families.’
And I said, ‘You know, almost all of your male ops officers have families, too.’
‘No, no, no,’ he said, ‘You might get pregnant. First of all, you can’t be an ops officer while you’re pregnant and, secondly, you’ll have to take all that time off.’
I had two children at the time. And I said, ‘Well, it’s okay because I’ve been fixed.’
And immediately he said, ‘Well, okay, you seem like a reasonable candidate. We’ll put you in for that.’
So I went ahead.”
Of course, Meredith was lying and proceeded to go on her first tour while being pregnant. It was her first tour with her husband and she wasn’t going to miss the opportunity for a promotion.
Another female spy, Susie, an Iranian translator, recalls in that same transcript, “Females, as Carla mentioned, were secretaries most of the time and the most they could aspire to was branch chief.”
Promotions were difficult to come by and the work it took to get promotions usually meant that the women had to leave their families behind. Disproportionately to men, women had to face a deeper sense of guilt for leaving their husbands, children and houses. While on the other hand, men leaving their households was more or less normalized and not held against them as a point of contention.
Women back in the OSS days, especially, had to fight for opportunities for advancement. After decades of women taking a back seat, an uprising, so to speak, in the 80s occurred and women made the decision not to be second choice anymore. They proved themselves to be better operatives by being more aware of their surroundings, able to make friends more easily than men and good at playing dumb so that men would trust them with secret information.
Patty, an ex-CIA agent says, “Because we are the ‘nurturing’ part of the equation, we are non-threatening, [and] if we play our cover at all, they assume that we’re not intelligence officers.” This paved the way for the next generation of spies who, unfortunately, also got a lot of the same flack as women of the OSS.
However, the new generation of female spies was – and still is – faced with a stereotype that stays with them no matter how hard they try to wash their hands of it. The image of tightly clothed women in leather who use their beauty, style and female prowess to seduce foreign dignitaries is still fresh in the public’s mind. For the modern spy and even the ones before them, this is often the case.
Female Spies: Not the Glamorous Life
Valerie Wilson, a former covert CIA operations officer told The Daily Beast, “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked by seemingly reasonable people whether I had to sleep with sources to get the intelligence, and did I carry a gun and have I ever killed anyone? The answer to each of those questions: no.”
The lives of female spies are not nearly as simple, elegant or glamorous as they appear to be. Instead, it is still tainted with the air of misogyny. Wilson also recounts that a lot of her higher-ups were white men. People tend to gravitate to other people who are like them. So, who did these men gravitate to? They gravitated towards young white men who entered the agency, resulting in a disproportionate set of promotions. Women were still being barred from moving up to higher levels. A notable reason for this stems from the lack of female presence and also the lack of female mentorship within the CIA.
Wilson also recalls, “As I was working my way up the ranks at the CIA, I began to look around for a female mentor – someone who could show me how it was done. Someone who was able to retain her femininity, able to juggle a family and still be respected for her operational judgment. I’m sorry to say that I never found that role model. All the potential mentors in the ops arena, at least, were either divorced, had no children or struck me as dysfunctional in some way. It was distressing, but not surprising. That was the legacy of waiting so long to bring women into the ops ranks in a meaningful way.”
The most prominently publicized attempt to break the glass ceiling was the movie “Zero Dark Thirty”. “Zero Dark Thirty” is inaccurate in several ways, but it is still the most recent and realistic portrayal of a female CIA agent to date. The movie stars Jessica Chastain, who plays a woman named Maya, based on Gina Bennett, who was the leader of the mission to assassinate Osama Bin Laden. Maya does not wear tight clothes. In her missions, she’s not anyone’s sexual entertainment or “honeypot.” Instead, her character is shown pushing forward with her team to find a terrorist.
Women in the CIA have lived in a state of constant fighting with their bosses, with their colleagues and with their image. They are the operatives with untapped potential who often get overlooked like so many women in other sectors of the business world. They are more than the two-dimensional characters in movies and much more than the secretaries men once believed them to be. They are the spies who are able to get the information. They are the spies who hide in plain sight. They are the ones who, alongside men, must work a job with no glory that strains their relationships. They do it for the good of their country.
“The fact is, none of us are sitting here because we didn’t work hard and we didn’t look for opportunity, because they weren’t often handed to us as a woman. And to take sacrifices and to take risks and to step out of the box and to do all those things. We took them.” -Patty, former CIA Agent.
