Skip the corsets, we’d rather have childcare: gendering spycraft in genre fiction and memoir

ABSTRACT

In ‘Skip the Corsets’ I ask how female former operatives writing about their work at CIA have responded to the post-9/11 era in both memoirs and fiction. I analyse texts that offer a vision of the post-9/11 world order as one in which the qualities of a good intelligence specialist may include empathy and maternal instinct. As the Agency has come under criticism for torture, illegal extraditions, and drone attacks, I look at how depictions of women intelligence specialists created by women writers have negotiated with that criticism, and also suggested other ways of envisioning the role of American intelligence.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Obviously, those actively engaged in clandestine work would not be able to write about it; thus people usually wait until after they have left the Agency to publish anything about their experiences there.

2. In CIA parlance, operatives who work in the field – the people most of us think of as ‘spies’ – are called case officers, not agents, a term which is reserved for the foreigners who provide case officers with information. I will refer to those sources of human intelligence by the more common term ‘assets’ to avoid confusion with the CIA officers who run them, and I will use ‘agents’ as a general term for people who work undercover for the world’s intelligence agencies. Of course there are numerous types of intelligence work at the Agency other than going undercover overseas; the job most often represented in the texts I examine here is that of ‘analyst’, someone who pieces together the information coming in from overseas.

3. While the study by Jacqueline, The Petticoat Panel, does not make this point explicitly, it sometimes mentions individual women’s salaries, which I was able to compare with averages in other industries during the same time period.

4. Slatkin, “Executive Director Speech,” 3.

5. Hasler, “The Invisible Women,” n.p.

6. McCarry, The Miernik Dossier, 136.

7. Matthews, Red Sparrow, 23.

8. Ibid., 375.

9. Dowd, “Good Riddance, Carrie Mathison,” n.p.

10. Slatkin, “Executive Director Speech,” 1.

11. Bakos, The Targeter, 211.

12. Ibid., 42.

13. Hasler, Intelligence, 28.

14. Ibid., 12.

15. Katsu, Red Widow, 130, 142.

16. Plame, Blowback, 69; my emphasis. Plame wrote her memoir under her married name, Valerie Plame Wilson, but her two espionage novels under ‘Valerie Plame’, and she and her husband divorced in 2017. I refer to her throughout, therefore, by her unmarried name.

17. Anderson, “Blowback,” n.p.

18. I have yet to encounter a single lesbian CIA employee in espionage writing, but given that the Agency stopped denying security clearances to homosexuals only in 1995, it is not surprising that the already small pool of women who worked there long enough to retire and start writing does not include (m)any lesbians.

19. Moran, Blowing My Cover, 31.

20. Katsu, Red London, 35.

21. Ibid., 269.

22. Weisberg, An Ordinary Spy, 55.

23. Fox, Life Undercover, 75.

24. Bakos, Targeter, 96.

25. Plame, Fair Game, 56.

26. Bakos, Targeter, 212.

27. See Judith Lorber, The New Gender Paradox, 17.

28. For a particularly barbed analysis of neo-liberal feminism, which they term ‘equal opportunity domination’, see Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser, Feminism for the 99 per cent.

29. Bakos, Targeter, 273.

30. Plame, Fair Game, 56.

31. Ibid., 100.

32. Hasler, Intelligence, 92.

33. Cleveland, Need to Know, 177.

34. Ibid., 12.

35. Ibid., 185.

36. Ibid., 277.

37. Katsu, Red Widow, 180.

38. Katsu, Red London, 174.

39. Ibid., 312–3.

40. Ibid., 332.

41. Bakos, Targeter, 34.

42. Cleveland, You Can Run, 164.

43. Katsu, Red Widow, 276.

44. It is striking how different these treatments of women colleagues at other intelligence agencies are to many male-authored CIA fictions, in which the FBI are often portrayed as incompetent dolts and SIS as effete and untrustworthy.

45. Katsu, Red London, 109, 110.

46. Ibid., 274.

47. Gilbert, “Homeland,” n.p.

48. Hasler, Intelligence, 76.

49. Hasler, “Invisible.”

50. Bakos, Targeter, 208.

51. Ibid., 131.

52. Plame, Fair Game, 68.

53. Hasler, “Invisible.”

54. Bakos, Targeter, 179.

55. Ibid., 97.

56. Fox, Life Undercover, 157.

57. Plame, Fair Game, 87.

58. Katsu, Red Widow, 293.

59. Ibid., 328.

60. Plame, Fair Game, 143.

61. Fox, Life Undercover, 185.

62. Ibid., 190, 197.

63. Other people at CIA have said that Fox’s account of this episode is filled with inconsistencies and cannot have happened as she describes it; she insists she altered details for security reasons but that the core of the story is true. See Chozick, “This C.I.A. Officer.”

64. Fox, Life Undercover, 209.

65. Ibid., 211.

66. Ibid., 218.

67. Ibid., 88–9.

68. Ibid., 107.

69. I am grateful to Dr. Thomas Gregory for this information.

70. Grey, The New Spymasters, 66.

71. Ibid., 67.

72. Ibid., 67.

73. Parker, (dir.), Manhunt.

74. Weisberg, An Ordinary Spy, 205.

75. Fox, Life Undercover, 69.

76. Grey, The New Spymasters, 219.

77. Hasler, Intelligence, 256.

78. The one exception to date is Plame’s memoir Fair Game, which was made into a movie in 2010.

79. Pauline Blistène, personal communication, April 12, 2023.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Erin G. Carlston

Erin G. Carlston is Professor of English at the University of Auckland. She is the author of Double Agents (2013) and Thinking Fascism (1998) as well as articles on the CIA in popular culture, Paul Celan, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Audre Lorde, Marcel Proust, Mary Renault, and Alfredo Véa.