The CIA’s Superwomen

Christina Hillsberg’s 'Agents of Change' recounts the slow but steady advancement of women at the CIA

Author and fomer CIA ops officer Christina Hillsberg

In Agents of Change: The Women Who Transformed the CIA, Christina Hillsberg, herself a former covert CIA operations officer, aims to write a “pop history” of women in the spy service. In this, she succeeds. Rather than focus on leadership per se, Hillsberg shines her light on “everyday women of the CIA who were doing extraordinary things.” Covering seven decades from the 1960’s to the 2020’s, she traces the career paths of individual women whose stories illuminate the personal and professional ambitions, challenges, and achievements of women at the agency.

In so doing, Hillsberg unearths the human element of a story that is often buried in a cascade of data, legal rulings, and policy directives. She focuses her lens on gender discrimination, sexual harassment and sexual abuse, as well as on the personalities and pivotal moments that helped propel the agency towards a more equitable home for women. Throughout, she recounts the experiences of individual women, sometimes using pseudonyms, sometimes their real names.

Hillsberg chronicles the advancement of women from their position as “second-class citizens” to that of consummate professionals.  Initially, the role of women at the CIA, with notable exceptions, was often limited to clerical and secretarial positions. Once women  did begin to get more operational positions, promotions to the senior rungs remained infrequent. 

By the late 2010 and early 2020’s, however, the vast changes that had swept the outside world created new opportunities inside the agency for women. In 2018, President Trump appointed Gina Haspel— whose past was mired in accusations surrounding her role in the CIA’s “black sites” program, where torture was used on detainees—as the CIA’s first female director.  And by 2021, “for the first time, the agency and all of its directorates were led by women,” Hillsberg notes. Currently, women account for 50 per cent of the Agency’s workforce. 

As Hillsberg illustrates through the stories of these women, their decades-long rise  to leadership positions was bumpy and all-too-often filled with loss and disappointment.  “The CIA,” she tells us, “came late to the notion that diversity in the workforce is a good thing.”  For the “old-boys’ network,” the idea of women as colleagues and equals seemed unfathomable  for far too long.  After all, many argued, women’s availability could be curtailed by family responsibilities, while their careers could be suddenly interrupted by childbearing. Moreover, doubts prevailed as to whether women could master the skills needed to conduct clandestine operations, recruit assets, and function in war zones.  Overall, Hillsberg writes, “it didn’t seem to occur to management that the spies we wanted to recruit might respond better to someone other than a white American male graduate from a top U.S. university.”

When women did prevail and earn the chance to prove themselves, their accomplishments were often met with head-shaking disbelief and suspicion. One time, when a female trainee was given an award, a male instructor at The Farm, the CIA’s training facility in Virginia, recalled. “Several of us were wondering how many blow jobs it took.”  Another time, when a CIA officer by the name of Mary Beth Long recruited multiple assets over several tours, the agency made clear that “[t]hey didn’t trust her,” demonstrating their suspicions by sending others to meet with each and every one of her assets. Along the way, Hillsberg brings us numerous cringeworthy stories.  From the male supervisor who grabbed a woman by the breasts and went “Honk!” to the chief of station who referred to the women at the station as “cunts,” to the fellow officer with whom one of the protagonists was involved until he attacked her physically, the encounters with men are painful to read. Nor did accountability for such acts necessarily follow. Rather, reporting such incidents was often seen as tantamount to harming one’s career.

In narrating the inseparable nature of work and life at the CIA, Hillsberg relates the experiences of several “tandem couples,” those in relationships in which both partners are on agency career paths. (Female spouses of operations officers also often worked as unpaid support agents.) While some found balance by first honoring one partner’s career for a bit and then the other’s, many faltered along the way, at times due to the fact that the man’s position was higher than the woman’s and thus hard to pass up. Often, the pressures of the job, the long and frequent separations imposed by assignments, and a culture of competition made relationships untenable.

Hillsberg places her stories within the legal and policy benchmarks of each decade. Citing landmark law, notably the Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade granting abortion rights to women, and efforts at legislation embodied in the introduction of the Equal Rights Amendment (which has failed to pass), she tracks the societal context that underlay efforts for the advancement of women at the agency. In 1991, the CIA’s Glass Ceiling Study ”found discrimination and artificial barriers for both women and minorities.”  Women ”made up 40 percent of the workforce, yet they held only 10 percent of the Senior Intelligence Service positions, the senior-most level at the CIA.”  Also in the 1990’s, a gender discrimination suit brought by former CIA operations officer Janine Brookner, and a subsequent class-action suit, resulted in costly judgments against the agency, previewing a future where more inclusive policies would reign. 

Years later, in the “Groundbreaking 2010’s,” Hillsberg writes, CIA Director General David Petraeus commissioned former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to lead a study into the low numbers of women in leadership positions at the agency. The final report made 10 recommendations, each aimed at expanding women’s ability to secure leadership promotions. The report focused on issues related to carving out achievable paths for women in terms of skills development, diversity in access to the applicant process, and flexibility in the workplace.  Only “unofficially” did the study “include a section” emphasizing the need for zero-tolerance when it came to “gender discrimination, sexual harassment, and unlawful bias,” Hillsberg notes.

Throughout, Hillsberg, who spent a decade at the CIA after signing up as an eager 21-year-old in 2006, invokes cultural references to paint the atmosphere of change underway. She cites Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” and Oprah’s emergence as “the first woman to produce her own talk show” as groundbreaking events in the “Empowering Eighties,” and the rise of Girl Power as symbolized by the Spice Girls popularity in the “Promising yet Problematic Nineties,” as  among the many cultural mirrors that were afoot inside as well as outside the CIA. 

But she sees none as more telling than what went on in the James Bond movie franchise. Hillsberg credits the “iron-fisted” producer Barbara Broccoli, daughter of series founder Albert R.  “Cubby” Broccoli, with elevating the image of women agents and associates from bikini-wearing seductresses, with names like Honey Rider and Pussy Galore, to that of professional female spies, including, of course, “M” as Bond’s female boss at MI6. By 2021, in No Time to Die, “the Bond franchise was placing women at the center” of a film, Hillsberg writes. Although she  expresses disdain for the use of Octopussy as the name for “its first female protagonist,” she is nonetheless appreciative of Broccoli’s hand in transforming the Bond franchise towards “strong, complex female roles.” 

Tectonic Shifts

None of this forward movement, either in the movies or in reality, came out of the blue. Hillsberg identifies geopolitical events and cultural shifts which led to the vast changes in the culture of the agency. One is the fall of the Berlin Wall, ending the Cold War and thus calling for refocusing the energies and knowledge base of the organization. But it was the Sept. 11, 2001, al Qaeda attacks on the United States that proved transformative. The need for a “sudden shift” to counterterrorism left the agency “suddenly facing a new kind of threat—one it found it was ill-prepared to combat.” This “meant that the agency was desperate to gain any insight into the Middle East and potential terrorist plots.” As a result, more doors for women opened as “the agency was recruiting employees at a record pace,” and “female analysts in CTC were finally taken more seriously.” Women of color, however, still faced continuing barriers. Into the 2020’s, “the agency continued to flounder in terms of recruiting, retaining, and promoting women of color,” even as Director Haspel prioritized “hiring more diverse candidates.”  

Another transformative socio-political moment for Hillsberg’s narrative is the #MeToo movement which, in Hillsberg’s assessment, came late to the CIA. In the early 2020’s, the need for greater attention to sexual assault came to the attention of the agency and the general public due to the 2020 arrest and later conviction and 30-year prison sentence of Bryan Jeffrey Raymond, a case officer who had videotaped “a woman who was partially naked and unconscious” and who had a history of sexual assault against women.  

With inclusion and gender parity, however, came new problems. One was a tendency to put the blame on women when things went awry, at times disastrously. In December 2009, a suicide attack by an Al Qaeda double agent on a U.S. military base in Khost, Afghanistan, resulted in the deaths of nine people at the base, including seven CIA officers. In the aftermath, as a CIA investigation sought to understand how the attack could have been prevented, officials and others looked around for who to blame. They cast their sights on Jennifer Matthews, the chief of base, who was among those killed in the attack. Many claimed that Matthews lacked the skill set to run the base as she was a counterterrorism expert, not someone equipped to run a base. Unable to defend herself from the grave, she was widely blamed for failing to have the turncoat searched at the base entrance and allowing too many of her team to welcome him at the team house., calling it, Hillsberg relates, “a very feminine act.”  Matthews’ defenders, chief among them Gina Bennett, a retired former case officer, at the time a CTC officer, “believed it was easy to blame Matthews because she was a woman.” 

“It’s so incredibly unfair,” Bennett concluded. “The reality,” Hillsberg offers, “is that it was much too complicated to place the blame on any one person,” adding that many of the early warning signs turned out to be “in play well before the asset arrived at Khost.”

As in any profession, not all women performed admirably. And not all men oppressed the women in their midst. There are plenty of episodes of women supervisors who made life as a woman within the agency more difficult for women. Meanwhile, numerous men are portrayed as essential to the empowerment of women at the agency, coaching and promoting them. The chief of a woman named Kathleen, for example, “took her under his wing, mentoring her on how to brief Congress and adjust the tone of her voice so that they didn’t ‘eat her alive.’” 

Although Hillsberg notes that at times women may have made consequential errors of judgment, she fails to examine the contradictions inherent in the greatest sign of female empowerment at the agency, namely the appointment of Gina Haspel as its director.  Haspel was widely reported as having overseen the “black site” prison in Thailand where top al Qaeda suspects were tortured with “enhanced interrogation techniques.”   

The alarming contradiction between the rise of a woman to the very top of the agency and Haspel’s appointment makes one wonder why her role in the torture program did not ultimately exclude her from consideration, though in fact her prioritization of diversity and her appointments of women to top positions has markedly empowered women at the agency.  The lack of a deeper exploration of the accusations surrounding her past raises the question of whether Hillsberg’s portrayals have told us everything we need to know.

Gainful Employment

And then there is the overarching question, what did women contribute overall to the agency and its mission? “[T]argets and recruited assets,” she tells us, “were sometimes more likely to open up to them than their male counterparts.”  Others saw women as  “better listeners” than men, more able to avoid detection in the field, and equipped with intuitive skills that allowed them to see what others might miss. Janine Brookner, for example, observing inappropriate behavior of Russian mole Aldrich Ames, worried that he was a “security risk” and reported it to her station chief, who decided not to follow up on the complaint. Eight years later, Ames would be found guilty of spying for the Soviet Union.  And when it comes to leadership and personnel matters, women mattered as well.  Hillsberg brings us Chief of Station Dori, who signaled the importance of accommodating family concerns by adopting flexible hours for herself in order to tend to matters at home.

Ultimately, Hillsberg’s effort is commendable and well told, bringing to light the harms of past policies, the toll the many pressures of life and work at the agency took  on women, the “gumption” that her protagonists showed time and time again, and the progress that women have made to this day.  Or at least until Donald Trump took office and unleashed his anti-DEI purge targeting women, minorities, trans people and anyone who worked on initiatives to recruit and help them get ahead.  

“[L]et’s just say it’s still a work in progress,” Hillsberg noted in Agents of Change, largely completed before Trump returned to the Oval Office. The progress of women at the CIA thus remains an aspiration, if ever more so. 

Karen Joy Greenberg is a Future Security Fellow at the New America Foundation and author of Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of American Democracy from the War on Terror to Donald Trump and Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State. This is her first piece for SpyTalk.