Christina Hillsberg joined the CIA as an eager 21-year-old in 2006. She spent more than a decade there: traveling undercover to CIA stations across the globe, meeting with clandestine sources in cafes and hotel rooms and recruiting “assets” who would provide secrets and information to the US government.
It was thrilling, dangerous, sometimes scary work. And she was lucky to have a number of female mentors and bosses who could help her navigate it.
It hadn’t always been that way
In “Agents of Change: The Women Who Transformed the CIA” (Citadel, out June 24), Hillsberg chronicles the rampant sexism and indignities her female forebears endured. They were routinely dismissed, belittled, underestimated and harassed.
When they did succeed, their male colleagues would ask them point blank whom they slept with to get what they wanted.
One woman — who started as a secretary in the 1990s before becoming an operative in West Africa and Latin America — recalled that a senior male employee would actually grab her breasts and say “honk!” when she passed by him in the hall.
HR discouraged her from filing an official complaint.
“Oh, he’s so close to retiring,” the HR rep — a woman! — said, before adding: “You don’t want to be that girl.”
Despite the threats, frustrations and humiliations these women faced, they pressed on, often putting their lives on the line for their country.
“Indeed,” Hillsberg writes, “throughout my career at the Agency, I was surrounded by exceedingly clever and capable women . . . I became curious about their stories: Who were they and why did they join the CIA? And what was it like being a woman at the Agency in the decades leading up to mine?”
Before there was a CIA, there were women spies.
Former dancer Mata Hari, the most notorious of the bunch, seduced diplomats and military officers into giving up their secrets during World War I. Violette Szabo — a Special Operations Executive (SOE) agent for the UK — embarked on several daring missions in Occupied France, before she was captured and executed by the Nazis 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, Hall worked for the French, British and US governments, recruiting resistance fighters, supplying weapons, organizing jailbreaks and even blowing up a few bridges.
When the CIA formed in 1947, the agency recruited Hall — “the most decorated female spy in history,” per Hillsberg — and then treated her like a glorified secretary.
She “was confined to a desk at headquarters for 15 years,” Hillsberg writes, “where she reportedly faced discrimination as a woman — passed over for promotions and career opportunities and answering managers with far less experience in intelligence operations.”
The CIA realized it had a woman problem as far back as 1953. That’s when then-Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles commissioned a report to investigate the disparities in pay and position between men and women in the organization. The so-called Petticoat Panel uncovered some damning figures. Women CIA employees made, on average, about half as much money as men. Plus, writes Hillsberg: “Not a single woman held a senior executive position or an office higher than branch chief. And only 7 percent of branch chiefs were women.”
“Despite such revelations, the Agency stopped short of implementing any new policies to course correct, and it would take decades (and more decades after that) to see any real change,” she adds.
Hillsberg interviewed several former and current women CIA operatives, and “Agents of Change” highlights about a dozen of them.
Out of her subjects, Lucy Kirk joined the Agency first, in 1967. She was one of just nine women in a class of 90 at the CIA’s training facility, The Farm.
While the guys played pool and drank beer, she and the other women in her program spent all their time studying.
During her first mock agent meeting with her assigned mentor, her male classmates tried to trip her up by covering the walls in the room with Playboy centerfolds.
After her course, Kirk was sent to China — during the height of the Cultural Revolution. But once she married a fellow CIA agent in 1969, the agency stopped giving her opportunities, while her husband kept getting jobs overseas.
“The expectation was that she would simply tag along with her husband on his assignment,” writes Hillsberg.
Her husband said he got his two identities mixed up and was having an affair with one of his agents, who ended up becoming pregnant.
“We all knew it was happening,” one of their colleagues told the heartbroken Kirk.
After their divorce, she still had trouble getting a position as an operative.
“Lucy, you’re going to spend all your time shopping,” the chief at the New York City station told her when she inquired about working there. “I really don’t think you can talk to big-deal men.”
Martha “Marti” Peterson did not necessarily set out to be a spy. She had married a CIA agent and went with him to Laos, where the CIA had launched a covert war against communists there. Her husband’s helicopter was gunned down and he died, leaving Peterson bereft and not knowing what to do.
A friend suggested she apply for the CIA, and she was accepted and sent to Moscow. (She later wrote about her experiences in a memoir, “Widow Spy.”)
There, she established a cover as “Party Marti,” a fun-loving single lady in Russia who — in between throwing packages into moving cars, and retrieving cigarette cartons full of clandestine messages from the snow — spent weekends hiking with her gal pals and cross-country skiing. She also embarked on a romance with a married embassy communicator (whom she later married).
She became one of the most effective agents, the main liaison between the 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 jail and expelled from the country. Later, her male boss at the station threw her under the bus, blaming the whole ordeal on her.
Many other women risked their lives for their work. There was Kathleen (who did not give her first name), a Korean-American, whose “asset” — or source — “brought her the severed head of a terrorist in the trunk of his car,” writes Hillsberg. There was Mary, a Lebanese-American immigrant who escaped a bombing and had to abscond the Middle East with her children in secret after their lives were threatened. And there was Dori, one of the few black operatives, who started at the CIA as a 19-year-old secretary and found herself running an entire station after a coup d’état in West Africa.
Hillsberg argues that the CIA needs women — and minorities — in order to do its job effectively. And she says that the agency has been slow to admit that reality.
But that’s changing. In 2023, Congress passed the Intelligence Authorization Act, requiring the CIA to enact ways to report sexual harassment and assault that include congressional oversight.
She writes: “Women at the Agency, especially case officers, operate in an environment where men have long held power, but the tides are finally turning.”
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