AGENTS OF CHANGE

A retired CIA analyst and field agent writes of an institution long marked by sexism and racism.

Hillsberg came to the CIA immediately after college, writing of East African geopolitics for “our premier intelligence product, the President’s Daily Brief.” Eventually she went out into the field, “collecting foreign intelligence of national security interest” and running cases with “clandestine assets.” She was far from the only woman in the spy business to do dangerous and daring work, even though the widespread assumption for decades was that a woman in the CIA was a secretary or clerk. Profiling dozens of agents from the 1960s to the present, Hillsberg notes that CIA head John Foster Dulles ordered an equity report as early as 1953, discovering that women were absent from the senior staff and averaged four degrees in rank lower than men. Things began to improve over the years, when it was finally widely recognized that women made good spies precisely because so few men suspected that they were; one female agent remarks, “I think women are better listeners and better readers of character right off the bat.” One compelling story in evidence was a young woman posted to Moscow who, apparently invisible to the Soviet-era KGB, ran an effective underground network until it was compromised by double agents. Another woman at about the same time voiced suspicions about a certain male agent named Aldrich Ames but was ignored for her trouble, to disastrous ends. And casual use of the N-word at the Africa Division on the part of the bosses may explain why one pioneering Black agent left in 1989 after just three years in the service—and, by Hillsberg’s account, recruiting women of color remains difficult. Given the Trump administration’s anti-DEI stance, one wonders whether Hillsberg’s charges will prompt meaningful reform there.

An insider’s account that makes clear that America’s most famous intelligence agency is in need of an overhaul.