The hidden history of female spies and CIA agents

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 wayIn “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 .

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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 sev...