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Janine Brookner, who battled communist spies and boorish male bureaucrats alike during a pioneering career as a CIA officer and later became a fierce advocate for women and whistleblowers in the intelligence community, died May 11 after a long struggle with kidney disease, “fueled at the end by a highly aggressive cancer,” according to her longtime companion Colin Thompson. She was 80.

“She was an exemplary CIA case officer and then a lawyer who represented men and women employees of the U.S. government, often successfully, seeking redress from a government that had treated them unethically and unfairly,” Thompson,  a retired former senior CIA officer himself, told SpyTalk. Recently, Brookner had been representing victims of the so-called “Havana Syndrome,” a mysterious disease thought to be caused by some kind of directed energy weapon targeting State Department and CIA officers.

“She was as hard as nai…