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.

During the Cold War, the confrontation between two nuclear-armed superpowers often generated espionage writing in which men working for the Central Intelligence Agency were presented as tough, stoic, disciplined, physically powerful, and – thanks to their portrayal in films by actors like Harrison Ford, Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, and Chris Pine – unusually attractive and virile guarantors of American safety. During the War on Terror, however, the enemy multiplied and has become more diffuse, and the qualities required to combat terrorism (or that the public, politicians, and the entertainment industry imagine are required to combat terrorism) have changed as well. This essay will ask how retired¹ women operatives writing about their work at CIA, in both memoirs and fiction, have responded to the post-9/11 era. I analyse texts that offer a vision of the post-9/11 world order as one in which the qualities of a good spy may include empathy and maternal instinct as well as lethal martial arts skills. As the Agency has come under criticism for torture, illegal extraditions, and drone attacks, I will ask, how have depictions of women analysts and case officers² created by women writers negotiated with that criticism, and suggested other ways of envisioning the role of American intelligence?

Women have worked at the Central Intelligence Agency since its 1942 inception as the Office of Strategic Services. Many of the first women employees of the OSS, and then the CIA, had military backgrounds; most had advanced degrees; and a fair number were multilingual. They were, then, highly qualified for a wide range of roles at the Agency. Given the norms of gendered labour in the United States in the 1940s, it is unsurprising that despite their qualifications women were likelier to be assigned clerical work than other types of jobs. They did sometimes, however, get positions as case officers and in rare instances as Heads of Station and Deputy Heads of Station. A 1953 report on women’s careers at the CIA suggests that in its early years, the CIA was probably employing more women at higher salaries than was the norm in other sectors, and represented an attractive career choice for well-educated women.³

While the end of World War II saw a narrowing of employment options for American women in general, women continued to work in a variety of jobs at the Agency in the subsequent decades. By 1996, CIA Executive Director Nora Slatkin (the first woman to hold that position) could claim in a speech to the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations that one-third of management jobs at CIA Headquarters in Langley, and one-quarter of the top ‘command positions’, were held by women and that the representation of women in ‘the senior intelligence ranks’ had doubled since 1990, albeit only to just over 15 per cent.⁴ The memoirs examined in this article, which reflect conditions at the Agency in the 1990s and early 2000s, indicate that by the turn of the 21^st century the CIA’s workforce was almost half female.

My point is not that the CIA has always been a supportive place for women to work – on the contrary, as we will see, gender bias has been a persistent problem within the organisation – but simply that there have always been women working there, in considerable numbers. And yet it would be difficult to deduce that fact from most media representations of the Agency. A 2013 article for CNN by Susan Hasler, a CIA veteran and author of the novel Intelligence, notes acerbically that after Osama bin Laden was killed, virtually everyone interviewed on television about the operation was male despite the fact that the team that had pursued him for years consisted mostly of women.⁵ Even the film by Kathryn Bigelow about the bin Laden assassination, Zero Dark Thirty, which focuses on a female operative, shows her working with numerous men but only one other woman, erasing the existence of the preponderantly female team that drove the real-life operation.

Many of the best-selling fictional representations of the Agency written by men, like the novels of Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy, perform a similar erasure: in them, we sometimes see women working at CIA as secretaries but rarely as analysts or in the field. If we narrow the field of writers under consideration to men who themselves worked for the Agency, to compare them more accurately with the women I consider in this article, the picture is similar: female characters appear as wives, girlfriends, secretaries, or prostitutes but not as colleagues. A handful of men writers, it is true, have offered us portraits of women operatives from both the CIA and other intelligence services who are intelligent, competent, and well-trained; but these women also tend to be highly sexualized.

For instance, Charles McCarry’s 1973 novel The Miernik Dossier depicts a whole group of intelligence operatives from the CIA and European intelligence who travel together to Africa. There are only two women on the trip, one of them a Soviet agent who sleeps with at least two of the men in the group and is described by the CIA operative as a ‘nymphomaniac’.⁶ When the travellers’ camp is attacked at night by a hostile faction, both women end up with their clothes off — one because she always sleeps in the nude and the other because she strips off her t-shirt to stanch a companion’s bleeding – and run about dodging bullets stark naked, while the fully clothed male agents return fire. In Jason Matthews’ novel Red Sparrow (2013) the double agent Dominika is brilliant, capable, and invariably described in terms of her ‘beauty and elemental sexuality’ as well as her exceptionally large breasts.⁷ When Dominika is called on to use her extensive martial arts training, she seems to be required to do so largely unclothed, a situation that somehow never confronts her male CIA counterpart, Nate. In the novel’s climactic scene, Dominika is in the process of seducing Nate when a Russian assassin known as ‘Black’ bursts into the room to kill them both, requiring Dominika to fight Black to the death clad only in lace panties and bra. Indeed, in Matthews’ colourful prose, the lingerie is depicted as doing the fighting independently of the woman wearing it, so that Dominika is stripped of agency as well as clothing: ‘The windpipe strike had not killed her, as there were black lace panties and black lace cups holding the big blue-and-white vase, Ming, Limoges, Wedgwood, whatever, smashing it between Black’s shoulder blades in a shower of shards, and he went down on one knee […]’.⁸

Filmic and television treatments of women operatives have reproduced many of these tropes, although Zero Dark Thirty lets its protagonist both occupy the centre of the narrative, and keep her clothes on. It is worth noting, however, that Bigelow’s critically acclaimed movie made barely half the box office of the lowest-grossing Jason Bourne film. Fictional portrayals of women CIA officers have had wider success on television, where it is easier to get series with female leads greenlighted. The two best known television portrayals of women officers to date are probably the characters of Sidney Bristow, portrayed by Jennifer Garner in Alias (2001–2006), and Claire Danes’ Carrie Mathison on Homeland (2011–2020). While the two characters are quite different, and neither is one-dimensional by any means, both shows follow the example set by male-authored thrillers in portraying their protagonists as extremely competent while also focusing on the women’s sexuality in a way we do not see in portrayals of male officers. Sydney Bristow is emotionally unavailable but sexually alluring, favouring clothing like lingerie, mini-skirts, and skin-tight corsets. Carrie Mathison, while she dresses sensibly, makes deeply unwise sexual choices, presumably because of her mental instability.

Unsurprisingly, actual women working at the Agency have objected to these fictional depictions of their jobs; as one said to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd in 2015, ‘I wish they wouldn’t use centerfold models in tight clothes. We don’t look that way. And we don’t act that way’.⁹ In the 1996 speech to the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations already mentioned, Slatkin said pointedly that ‘we all know that James Bond is a fantasy and Bond women are a fantasy of a different sort. [… .] But that’s not us’.¹⁰ A spate of post-9/11 novels and memoirs by women in intelligence have attempted to offer a corrective to such popular fictional accounts while also investigating the ways that conflicts around gender, especially in relation to male colleagues, heterosexual relationships, and parenting, play into careers in espionage just as they do in other white-collar professions.

These authors generally agree in their depictions of most women at CIA, whether analysts or operatives, as stressed-out workaholics who are sharply aware that they’re judged according to both their attractiveness, and their sexual behaviour. Nada Bakos, an analyst who worked in both the Directorate of Intelligence (DI) and the Directorate of Operations (DO) during her years with the Agency, recounts in her memoir that the culture of the DO reflected a ‘seemingly impenetrable patriarchal structure’ where ‘Periodically I’d hear people refer to the “girls” on my team and whether they were attractive. Casual mentions of a woman being overweight – which I never heard about men there – somehow morphed into speculation about her technical or leadership abilities’.¹¹ Not at all coincidentally, women spies and analysts in both memoirs and fiction worry a great deal about their clothes as they try to walk a line between looking ‘attractive’ and looking ‘professional’, and to do so on the modest salary of a mid-ranking civil servant. Bakos recalls that for her job interview with the Agency, she’d ‘spent the last of my savings on a navy pantsuit from Brooks Brothers, just for this meeting – I wanted to look the part’.¹² Navy blue pantsuits reappear in Lindsay Moran’s memoir Blowing My Cover and Alma Katsu’s novel Red Widow, suggesting the kind of conservative, moderately priced professional attire that women working at CIA’s Langley Headquarters would feel suited their ‘part’, as well as their budgets.

The recurring preoccupation with clothes in these narratives points to the larger struggles women operatives have with their confidence and (perceptions of) their sexuality. Hasler’s novel Intelligence switches among several narrators, one of whom, an analyst named Maddie James, is dealing with debilitating nightmares and PTSD in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, as well as her father’s death and her own recent divorce from an unfaithful husband. Looking at a younger woman colleague who eschews demure pantsuits, Maddie thinks enviously,

Kristin is what I was fifteen years ago: the pretty, sexy, brainy young thing. You can tell from the bouncy way she walks that her self-confidence is still intact. Her skirt fits perfectly over her skinny butt. Her pantyhose are free of runs, and she’s wearing those high, high heels with the extremely pointy toes. Fifteen years ago I knew the names of the latest shoe styles and wore them and had a great butt.¹³

Yet Maddie’s colleague Doc thinks to himself,

I remember a time when Maddie wore high heels and short, tight skirts. [… .] I was her mentor. I worried that management wouldn’t take her seriously, despite her talents. I couldn’t say anything, of course. Soon, she was dressing more conservatively of her own accord, as most young women here do.¹⁴

In a similar scene in Red Widow, Katsu’s protagonist Lyndsey Duncan sceptically observes a young colleague wearing sexy ‘black pumps with four-inch stilettos’ and then tells us disapprovingly that ‘Jan Westerling stands in the doorway, wobbling uncertainly on those four-inch heels’.¹⁵ The duelling perspectives here underline the fact that a woman who dresses for her Agency job in a way she thinks expresses vibrant femininity and self-confidence is in fact likely to be deemed unserious and unprofessional, by both men and other women. At the same time, a woman who does not fuss about her appearance will also be judged for it: in Valerie Plame’s 2013 novel Blowback, for example, the female director of MI5 is described as ‘still strikingly attractive, even dressed as she was, in a plain gray jacket, no jewelry, and without any visible makeup’.¹⁶

And yet, however hard these women try – in real life and in fiction – to get their clothes, shoes, and makeup ‘right’, they still have trouble breaking through the stereotypes of women spies as hyper-sexual. In one telling case, the cliché of the hot Bond girl was apparently so irresistible that the male reviewer of one of Plame’s novels superimposed it on her protagonist in defiance of the evidence: reviewing Blowback in the Washington Post in 2013, Patrick Anderson wrote that Plame’s protagonist Vanessa Pierson ‘emerges as a smart, sexy action hero, a kind of James Bond with high heels, short skirts and a Glock in her purse’.¹⁷ In fact, Pierson wears heels only twice in the book, both times as part of a cover outfit supplied by the office; she never dons a short skirt, preferring jeans and khakis while in the field; and she keeps her Glock in the waistband of her pants. Even when CIA women try to say ‘we don’t look that way’, clearly some media prefer to ignore them.

The compulsory sexiness of this fantasy version of the female operative contrasts sharply with the constraints on their sexuality women describe in memoirs and fiction. While the ‘honey trap’ is a recurrent plot point in male-authored fictions, it is extremely rare in works by women for an operative to use sex to ensnare a target, or anyone else. Instead, the (exclusively heterosexual¹⁸) protagonists of these memoirs and novels, when they are unmarried, worry intensely about dating; they often have great difficulty maintaining relationships because of both the peculiar pressures of their line of work, and concern about their own reputations, easily compromised by sexual relationships with men either in or out of the Agency. Moran’s memoir describes an explicit sexual double standard at the Agency, such that new recruits were told that men would be allowed to have foreign girlfriends and to visit prostitutes, ‘as long as you don’t see the same prostitute more than once’. Women, on the other hand, were told their partners would be free from monitoring only if they were American citizens, and even then, ‘you will want to be mindful of your “reputation” and how it can impact your career’.¹⁹

In Katsu’s novels, part of Lyndsey Duncan’s backstory is that she had an affair in the past with an SIS officer named Davis Ranford; when their relationship was discovered it blew up her career, but not his. In the sequel to Red Widow, titled Red London, Lyndsey reflects on the double standard that derailed her:

She’d been fed to sharks who didn’t like it when young women were too successful, who felt they needed to work a little harder for rewards, but for whom no amount of hard work and sacrifice would be enough. She’d learned that already, the hard way. She’d known at the time that she shouldn’t get involved with an officer from a foreign intelligence service, but everyone knew of officers who broke that rule all the time, though the ones who got away with it were typically men.²⁰

Later Lyndsey thinks to herself, ‘A woman in the business had to be careful with her reputation. It could be used against you. A complaint circulating among peers – “You heard how she managed her big success?” – about taking shortcuts and the like’.²¹

Joe Weisberg, a former CIA case officer who created the hit TV show The Americans, touches on the complications for case officers of sleeping with assets in his novel An Ordinary Spy, and implicitly questions whether such affairs are really any more fraught for women than for men. His protagonist, Mark Ruttenberg, is falling in love with a woman he is meant to be recruiting, and reflects that

I had heard stories of officers doing worse—or at least doing comparable things—and surviving. [… .] A female C/O I’d actually met at Headquarters was rumored to have slept with an agent she’d recruited for the entire two years she was running him. She hadn’t been fired, I’d heard, because the intel was so good.²²

Ruttenberg, and possibly Weisberg, might believe that a woman could get away with such behaviour, but the women writers studied for this article make it clear that if it ever did happen, it would have been an exception.

In any case, Ruttenberg’s affair does in fact contribute to his dismissal from the Agency, suggesting that at best male operatives as well as females can also find their careers sabotaged by romance. And indeed, the picture all these writers draw of the frantic pace of work for analysts makes it easy to believe that whatever the conditions out in the field, employees of the DI working at Headquarters might never have time to pursue an affair even if they were not worried about their reputations. In her memoir Life Undercover, Amaryllis Fox recalls her boss telling her that when at Langley she could never take classified material anywhere outside her compartment, saying,

Remember, just because everyone else has clearance, they don’t get to see what you got and you don’t get to see what they got. If you’re eating in the cafeteria, your lunch conversation better be about your love life. And none of us has time for one of those.²³

While sexuality, in a broad sense, is one arena where women writers have clearly felt a need to push back on cultural stereotypes of women at CIA and to interrogate the Agency’s own double standards, the more prevalent concerns in both their memoirs and their fiction are topics scarcely touched on in male-authored CIA fictions: pay inequities, harassment and bias within the organisation, the importance of women’s friendship networks, and parenting. Many of these women, even in writing thrillers, deal with subjects less associated with the work of John le Carré or Robert Ludlum than with feminist non-fiction like Madeleine Kunin’s New Feminist Agenda (2012) or Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Unfinished Business (2015).

All the novels and memoirs I read for this article were written well after 1986, when a class-action lawsuit was filed by hundreds of women who had worked in the DO accusing the Directorate of systematic gender bias. The pattern that had emerged as far back as the OSS days, of hiring women in large numbers but sidelining them into less challenging and less remunerative jobs than men, created ‘what lawyers for the women described as the CIA’s “pervasive culture of sexual discrimination”. Nearly a decade later, the Agency quietly settled with the women, providing them $940,000 in back pay and granting twenty-five retroactive promotions to the victims’.²⁴ Despite that lawsuit and others, and the efforts that were made to promote more women, Valerie Plame found when she was working at the Agency in the 1990s that there were still very few women in

the top ranks of the operations cadre. [… .] The female operations officers didn’t like the obvious inequities, but it seemed there was little we could do to improve the situation, other than keep trying to rise through the ranks and change the system from within. The dinosaurs were still running the show in the DO and most just thought women were not up to the job.²⁵

Bakos reports comparable sexism in the DI: ‘At times I’d make a quick suggestion that was noticeably better received when one of the men in the room said the exact same thing a few minutes later’.²⁶

At the heart of the difficulties women operatives both describe in their own lives, and create for their fictional protagonists, lies the entrenched gender inequity of the neoliberal late capitalist workplace, which makes it so much more difficult for women than for men to have demanding careers, successful marriages, and children.²⁷ Although the noxious concept of ‘having it all’ was not originated by feminists – it was originally a book title imposed on a reluctant Helen Gurley Brown by her editors – it thoroughly permeates the neo-liberal, lean-in feminism that women CIA operatives seem to have embraced in the 90s and early noughties.²⁸ In their memoirs, both Bakos and Plame recall looking in some desperation to older women at the Agency for reassurance that they would be able to have families while sustaining their careers. Bakos writes ominously about realising that ‘I’d recently turned thirty-seven’ and says that she had ‘searched for women at the Agency who proved that the feminist aspiration of “having it all” was an actual option. But at least at the CIA, they didn’t seem to exist’.²⁹ Plame, too remembers hoping to find

[…] a respected senior female officer to help me. I wasn’t looking for a formal mentoring relationship, just a model who could show me how to retain my femininity, perhaps have a family, and still be an outstanding operations officer in a male-dominated business. To my dismay, I found that few women had managed to ‘have it all’ […].³⁰

Once she did start a family, Plame had to try to manage a very high-pressure position at the Agency while raising twins:

I struggled with the challenges every working mother faces finding a balance between the incessant demands of home and office. On the one hand, I recognized and understood that I needed to be available to travel worldwide on a moment’s notice to smooth out a liaison relationship or debrief a promising [redacted]. On the other hand, I also wanted time to enjoy being a mother to my twins. [… .] When I had to deal with pressing operational issues I had no choice but to bring the toddlers into my office on a Saturday. Making decisions on how much money to offer a potential asset while handing crayons to my daughter who sat under my desk was strange indeed, but not without humor.³¹

In woman-authored CIA fictions, the casual sexism and conflicts around parenting described in these memoirs take on a much more dramatic cast. Sometimes the demands of the job simply interfere with being an actively involved parent, causing CIA-employed mothers – like other professional women – enormous guilt. Another of Hasler’s narrators in Intelligence, Vivian, tells Maddie that she cannot join her counterterrorism task force because she has promised to take her son to the Renaissance Faire that weekend; Vivian thinks to herself,

I’ve already let him down twice in the last month. I forgot to pick up a gift for his best friend’s birthday. I was the only mother who didn’t bring in something for the school’s May Day Celebration. I have been letting him down steadily for the last seven years. So what’s the right thing to do here? Let down my country or my son? Great set of choices, as usual.³²

All of Karen Cleveland’s novels revolve around the agony of being a CIA mother, usually using threats to a protagonist’s children as the catalyst for the plot. In Cleveland’s first novel, Need to Know, Vivian – not to be confused with Hasler’s character of the same name – is an analyst in the Russian section at Langley with four children, who learns at the beginning of the novel that her husband Matt is a Russian sleeper agent. From there, the story unrolls in a series of flashbacks illuminating the intense conflicts Vivian has always felt between motherhood and her job. Scene after scene depicts her anguish at having to put her children in day care, at the fact that Matt spends far more time with them than she does, and over her inability to quit her CIA job because, she believes, they need her salary. Even once she realizes her husband is a Russian agent, she balks at turning him in because not only will he go to jail, she will lose her job and with it the health insurance their special needs child requires to survive.

In addition, Vivian is reluctant to quit her job simply because she cares about it and admits to a share of personal ambition, even while seeing no way to balance work with family life: ‘I wanted both. Time with the kids, and a rewarding career. But it didn’t seem possible’.³³ Cleveland also pointedly underscores the difficulty for a woman operative of learning, or maintaining, essential job skills once she has children: at one point Vivian thinks, ‘I took a beginning Russian class years ago; then [my first child] arrived and I never went back. I know some basic phrases, recognize some words, but that’s about it. For the rest I rely on linguists or translation software’.³⁴ Since Vivian’s job is hunting for Russian sleeper agents, knowing Russian would presumably be important to her work, not merely an interesting hobby; the implication is that national security is actually endangered by the lack of support for mothers who work in intelligence.

Cleveland further renders Vivian’s otherwise stock ‘having it all’ dilemma particularly sinister by gradually revealing to the reader that her situation has been engineered by her husband – who is still actively working for the SVR (Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service) despite his assurances to his wife that he is not – and by Vivian’s mentor and close friend, an FBI agent who is secretly a Russian operative too. Every time she has wanted to quit work to spend more time with her children, her husband has lovingly coaxed her back to her job, stressing their precarious financial situation and reminding her of her commitment to her work. In fact, we realize though she does not, he simply needs her to stay at Langley so that he can keep extracting information from her and sending it to Moscow.

Ultimately Matt pressures Vivian to commit a series of deeply treasonous acts on the premise that this is necessary to protect their children. ‘“Please, Vivian”, [Matt] says, and the urgency, the desperation, in his voice sends a rush of fear through me. “Do it for our kids”’.³⁵ At the point where her situation seems completely hopeless, the family is miraculously rescued by her FBI agent friend, who arranges for the whole family to be whisked off to a beautiful tropical island and, supposedly, hidden in the Witness Protection Program. Vivian enjoys a year of being a full-time mother, and then finally decides she wants to go back to work at the Agency, telling herself that ‘for the first time, it’s actually my choice’.³⁶ She thus uses the language of neo-liberal feminism to assert her own agency in making this decision to re-prioritize her career. The reader knows, however, that her husband and her FBI friend staged the entire ‘Witness Protection Program’ scenario between them so that once recovered from her burnout, Vivian could be nudged back into the Russia division where they need her. Vivian’s first experience of feeling in control of her life is in fact orchestrated by the SVR, which also makes her final ‘choice’ of a career at CIA for her. Overworked and underpaid by her own government, she is available to be viciously exploited by a foreign government that uses her desires for love, marriage, motherhood and meaningful work for its own ends. It is not a happy picture of the life that awaits a female intelligence professional who wants to have a family.

Katsu paints an almost equally grim portrait of CIA motherhood in Red Widow, in which once again maternal love is depicted as the lever that can make women agents do anything and everything. Theresa, the titular ‘Red Widow’ of the novel, is pressured into cooperation with the Russians by threats to her son. She soon comes to realize that the Russian operatives she has agreed to help are vicious thugs, but knows she cannot stop working for them because they will hurt her little boy:

You don’t give your son over to a monster. It was her job to protect him, to stand between her precious boy and the monsters. Even the cold-blooded murderers and confirmed war criminals. She was only one woman, but she was his mother.

That’s what mothers did.³⁷

Even the fictional protagonists in these novels who do not have children themselves are motivated by concern for their friends’ children. Katsu’s Lyndsey Duncan is, for the most part, unconcerned about being childless; we’re told ‘she’s not counting the years she has left to make babies’.³⁸ Yet in addition to befriending Theresa in Red Widow, Lyndsey makes another woman’s children her top priority in Red London. While Lyndsey is nominally working with her ex-lover, SIS officer Randall Davis, to bring down a Russian oligarch, her loyalty shifts to the oligarch’s wife, Emily, as she realises how unconcerned Davis is with the welfare of Emily and her children. With traps closing around him, the oligarch plans to abduct his and Emily’s children, disappear, and prevent Emily from ever seeing them again. Lyndsey tries to argue that MI6 must protect Emily and her children, saying to Davis, ‘You’ve got to do something about this. You can’t let the [British] Government help him do this. We can’t be responsible for taking her kids away’. Davis unhelpfully responds, ‘“What do you mean? The Crown isn’t responsible for the end of her marriage; that was in motion long before we got involved” … . I don’t understand why you’re being like this, he says, but he means he doesn’t understand why she is complicating a straightforward intelligence operation with emotion’.³⁹ Lyndsey realises she will have to take matters into her own hands, and kills the oligarch’s henchmen herself; after the massacre, while Emily clutches her screaming children to her, Lyndsey tells her, ‘I said I would take care of you’.⁴⁰

The importance of heterosexual female friendship networks is perhaps the most consistent theme in every memoir and novel I have read for this project, and the one most overlooked in other media treatments of the CIA. In popular TV shows, and, as I mentioned, even Zero Dark Thirty, female operatives are frequently depicted as the only women in the room, seeming to work almost exclusively with male colleagues. In contrast, while women CIA writers tend to agree that ideally women will find reliable male friends and mentors at the Agency, in their writing it happens with some frequency that male colleagues are either indifferent like Davis, or, worse, actually in league with Russians, jihadists, or other national enemies. Women operatives both real and fictional counter by building networks of women friends that can transcend inter-agency rivalries and sometimes even national hostilities.

Bakos describes her emphasis on supportive friendships with other women as an impulse that began as early as University, when she joined a sorority. After she had a serious car accident, she writes that her sorority sisters rushed to the hospital and says that

On that day, I formed a bond that has carried across decades—through marriages, divorce, health scares, and more. It’s one I’ve sought to re-create in the circles of women I would later meet on teams everywhere from Langley to Baghdad.⁴¹

That pattern is repeated in fiction. In Intelligence, Maddie and Vivian rely on their friendship with each other and with another woman analyst to sustain them during a brutal and ultimately unsuccessful counterterrorism operation. In Cleveland’s second novel, a terrorism specialist at the Agency is blackmailed into committing treason when her baby is kidnapped from his childcare centre. A female journalist gets involved in the case and the two women begin sharing information, the journalist thinking, ‘My best chance of getting to the bottom of this—our best chance – is if we work together’.⁴² Her language is echoed in Red Widow, as Lyndsey’s friendship with the traitor Theresa begins when they discover that Lyndsey’s much-loved male mentor and boss is the evil mastermind behind a plot designed to destroy both of them: ‘The two women exchange a knowing look. They’re in this together now. They will both succeed – or both fail. Together’.⁴³ So they join forces, along with a ‘sympathetic’ female FBI agent, to bring down the boss. Valerie Plame also emphasises inter-agency cooperation among women, when Vanessa Pierson saves the life of the female Director of SIS, who goes on to support the younger woman’s career.⁴⁴ In Red London, the theme of female solidarity is carried so far that even Russian women turn out to be important allies.

Furthermore, in Red London Lyndsey’s friendship with Emily starts to gain the intensity of a romantic relationship: ‘She has never had such an intense friendship with another woman’, we’re told, and then Lyndsey reflects again, ‘She’s never had this kind of closeness, not even with a lover. Is this what relationships are supposed to be? It’s like a marriage’.⁴⁵ Lyndsey also becomes friends with a former CIA case officer, Dani, an African-American woman who quit because of the sexism and racism she encountered at the Agency, and has become a private investigator. The two women begin as competitors, but come to trust each other. As with Lyndsey’s friendship with Emily, their relationship is infused with the language and affect of romance although both women are explicitly heterosexual. For instance, when she and Dani drive out to Hampstead Heath to share information, Lyndsey thinks that they’re protected from surveillance because ‘Any onlookers will think the two dark figures in the car are only two teenagers snogging’.⁴⁶ The point seems to be not to suggest some repressed erotic energy at play between women operatives, but rather, to account for the emotional intensity and centrality of female friendship and to emphasise how crucial it is to both team success in operations, and individual survival within the Agency. Read in concert, these espionage novels sometimes seem to suggest that the principal enemy of women spies is not so much the Russians, the Iranians, or any other political target as it is the patriarchy itself. Female friendships are thus essential to protecting women and children in the face of male power and male-dominated institutions, whether these are represented by Russian thugs or Western intelligence services.

***

While Homeland was on the air there were criticisms of the show’s focus on Carrie Mathison’s bipolar disorder and consequent volatility; it was frustrating to see a representation of a supposedly brilliant woman consistently doing stupid things. ‘Carrie is a terrible spy’, wrote Sophie Gilbert for The Atlantic. ‘If this weren’t a television show, she wouldn’t be allowed within 10 miles of Langley’.⁴⁷ Yet most of the women-authored CIA fictions I have read also feature female protagonists with a range of emotional and psychological disorders. Sleep disturbances like insomnia and nightmares are a recurrent complaint among fictional women operatives. In Intelligence, as I have already mentioned, Maddie has nightmares and PTSD for which she takes an SSRI; less seriously, but suggestively, she chews her fingernails. Her friend Vivian, in addition to being ravaged by maternal guilt, obsessively rescues possums from the road and then thinks to herself, ‘Obviously, the sort of person who rescues possums is emotionally ill-equipped to deal with terrorism on a daily basis’.⁴⁸ Vanessa Pierson is prone to panic attacks, and smokes and drinks too much, trying to conceal her drinking from colleagues.

Writing about the real-life analysts hunting for Al-Qaeda, Hasler claims that, especially after the 9/11 attacks, ‘These women broke down in tears, struggled with guilt, depression and the physical impact of stress. They juggled the job with the demands of motherhood, eldercare and other personal issues that don’t disappear after a terrorist attack’.⁴⁹ Even absent the extraordinary pressure on people in intelligence after 9/11, it is not hard to understand why the ‘ordinary’ stresses and dangers of intelligence work, the pressures of trying to reconcile romantic relationships and potentially motherhood with the demands of the job, and the sexism women operatives confront in the workplace might induce serious mental health problems. Add to this the need some of these writers describe to tamp down their feelings so as to forestall accusations of feminine weakness, and one begins to wonder how women manage to survive working at the CIA at all, let alone to do it well.

Interestingly, in a 2021 article titled ‘The Emotional Detective’, authors Jessica Ford and Amy Boyle argue that in some recent television crime series, the female detective’s emotional instability and irrationality are represented as strengths; the idea is that troubled women make better detectives because they can empathise with the trauma of victims. While the idea of treating the hackneyed trope of women’s irrationality as a ‘plus’ appears problematic at best, it is nonetheless significant that in espionage fiction – a genre closely related to crime fiction – women operatives are so frequently portrayed as both emotionally unbalanced, and extremely good at their jobs. In both espionage and crime novels, the protagonist is confronted with the need to untangle clues in the pursuit of preventing or avenging a crime, often racing against time and usually confronting violence. In both genres, women writers often indicate that heightened emotional sensitivity, to the point of fragility and even neurosis, makes their protagonist better at doing that kind of intelligence work. And in many of the espionage texts cited here, such emotionality is portrayed as a distinctively feminine quality.

In both memoirs and fiction these women reiterate that national security as well as individual women would benefit if the CIA could change its culture to embrace the emotional qualities, values, and perspectives of women, although they are not always clear about how to define these. It is obvious that not all women at the Agency embrace ‘emotional sensitivity’, or even ethical behaviour, as a guiding principle: Nada Bakos uncritically mentions that one of her most important female mentors had advocated, and participated in, waterboarding, for example.⁵⁰ For that matter, Gina Haspel, the Director of the CIA from 2018–2021 and the first woman ever to lead the Agency in a permanent capacity, authorized and participated in torture sessions at a CIA black site, and then destroyed video evidence of the torture.

Nonetheless, the writers I have analysed point to a range of skills they believe women excel in. A ‘woman’s perspective’ might consist simply of being sensitive to something men are not usually socialised to think about; Bakos claims to have realised early on during the invasion of Iraq the effect that widespread rape was having on the fabric of Iraqi culture and Iraqis’ response to the occupation. She suggests that ‘none of the male war architects back in Washington’ had thought about sexual violence as a weapon of war, and she argues plausibly that the failure of American forces to recognise the problem contributed to the invasion’s disastrous outcomes.⁵¹

For Valerie Plame, taking a gendered approach to the job can be a matter of other people’s expectations: that is, just because female operatives are female they are expected to do a kind of emotional labour that Plame presents as a key aspect of being a good CO:

Being a case officer is a little like being a mother and you can easily become the focus of the ire and frustration leaking from other things in the agent’s life. [… .] And perhaps because I was female, I heard way too much in the way of intimate details of my agents’ lives. Solving their problems, or at least helping them feel better about them, is essential to keeping the ultimate success of the operation.⁵²

Susan Hasler, while cautious about wading into what she describes as the ‘minefield’ of gender stereotypes, nonetheless suggests, like Plame, that ‘women do have a special genius for the job’ because of their socialisation as women. ‘Suppressing one’s ego is an important part of being a good counterterrorism analyst’, writes Hasler:

First, you have to be willing to admit up front what you don’t know. The amount of data is so large that no one individual can look at all of it. A good analyst acknowledges her blind spots and networks with other analysts to fill them. When it comes to ego suppression, women are just better at it than men.⁵³

In other cases, women CIA writers seem undecided about whether there really are differences between male and female intelligence workers and, if so, whether they result from socialisation or something more like ‘instinct’. Bakos wavers back and forth on the issue of whether male and female operatives think and behave differently. On one hand she scoffs at the assumption some detainees in Iraq made that as a female interrogator, she ‘would fall back on some innate motherly instinct and take pity on them’.⁵⁴ Yet she admits that in fact she did feel sympathy for the men she questioned, especially when they had families. At times Bakos seems to want to argue both in favour of, and against, essential gender differences, using terms like ‘thinking like a woman’ while simultaneously denying that success in intelligence work has anything to do with gender:

Ambitious women shouldn’t have to adopt stereotypically male behaviors or character traits. Yet even today, when inroads into the upper echelons of management still feel like a form of cultural success, many women take the path of least resistance—acting like a man. This demoralizes women employees and kneecaps the effectiveness of the overall organization. Because often, even if only in hindsight, it seems clear that thinking like a woman is sometimes the better option. To be clear, I think the argument that you might be better at one job or the other based on gender is false, be it man or woman.⁵⁵

Amaryllis Fox comes down more unequivocally on the side of essential gendered differences, praising ‘the unique skill set women bring to this work – the emotional intelligence, aptitude for multitasking, and keen intuition that make women such exceptional operatives’.⁵⁶ Plame similarly claims that ‘by nature women are good problem solvers’.⁵⁷ And in Red Widow, Katsu implicitly promotes an empathetic and ethical approach to intelligence work that she identifies with women, while denouncing men’s ruthlessness: Lyndsey and her FBI ally force a friend of her evil boss, Eric, into implicating Eric, and the friend lashes out by telling them that the whole corrupt plot the men have devised – a plot that has sacrificed numerous innocents, both American and Russian, to their own ambition – is just the way the CIA works. The women’s failure to accept this proves that they, and by implication women in general, are not fit to be operatives: ‘Here’s the other thing you don’t know, either of you’, the man snarls at Lyndsey:

‘[…] what Eric did, that’s the way it is at CIA. We’re supposed to be bold. We’re supposed to do the things nobody else can. You want to be all high and mighty and make us out to be the bad guys, but it only goes to show that you don’t get it. We didn’t do anything wrong here. The ends justify the means—you’ve heard that before, haven’t you, Lyndsey? Well. This is what it looks like’. He stares hard at her. ‘If you think what Eric Newman did was wrong, you don’t belong and you never will. [… .] If you don’t think big, you’re not doing your job’, he says belligerently. ‘The only crime is getting caught’.⁵⁸

At least in fiction, however, patriarchal values do not always have the last word: after Eric is caught and has to flee the country, he is replaced by a new woman boss. We’re told that she ‘seems like a good leader’.⁵⁹

The issue of gendered differences in intelligence work inevitably circles back, in these works, to motherhood. We have already seen the way concern for children drives the emotions and actions of women protagonists in espionage fictions, and this theme also appears in memoirs. In addition to her comment about taking on a maternal role as a case officer, for instance, Plame refers to the ‘ferocious maternal protectiveness’ she felt towards her own children and how it affected her reaction when her cover was blown by officials in the George W. Bush administration.⁶⁰ But it is Fox who most emphatically insists that not just her approach to work in the field, but her entire rationale for doing intelligence work, was driven by her experience of becoming a mother. Working as a case officer when she was pregnant, she writes that she asked herself ‘Should a future mom really be out preventing the sale of WMDs to terrorists? Could a future mom possibly choose not to?’⁶¹ Like Hasler’s protagonist Vivian, Fox feels like a bad mother, but also does what she does because she is a mother; the choice between her child and her work feels false, since her work is another way of protecting children:

[… .] with each new threat, there are the conjured faces of those children—just as innocent as mine—whose lives hang in the balance. [… .] How can I walk away from my daughter, knowing that I might not return? How could I stay, knowing that I can stop an attack that will kill another version of her, half a world away, a little girl in the United States or Pakistan whose mother sent her off to school with the same wordless love?⁶²

In the climactic scene of Fox’s memoir, she describes convincing a man with ties to Al-Qaeda to call off an imminent bomb attack in Karachi by drawing on their shared experiences as parents of children with asthma.⁶³ She offers him clove oil to ease the symptoms his asthmatic four-month-old baby is experiencing; in return he gives her alyssum to treat her own child. ‘He gives me a look of knowing sympathy, parent to parent, lamenting governments’ inability to keep the air clean. [… .] As operatives, he and I are on different sides of this struggle, fighting each other. As parents, we’re on the same side, fighting for our kids’ right to breathe’.⁶⁴ After learning that the attack has been cancelled, Fox reflects again on the need for empathy in doing intelligence work, the importance of attempting to engage with the perspective of targets, assets, and even enemies:

I think of the dusty room and the wheezing baby, with her nostrils flared wide. I think of her dad, making choices to protect her—from pollution and air strikes and drones. I think about how everybody believes that they are the good guy. And how the trick of the thing is seeing that, from one angle or another, we all actually are.⁶⁵

Fox acknowledges that some of her colleagues scoffed at this attitude, and reproached her for not fully committing to the mission: ‘I know he’s thinking I’ve gone soft since I had my girl. And he’s right. But what he doesn’t understand yet is that soft works. Soft is how we end this war [on terror]’.⁶⁶ Throughout her memoir she holds firm to her argument that empathy is the single most salient factor in good intelligence work. About interrogating a detainee, for example, she writes, ‘It isn’t waterboarding or enhanced interrogation that uncovers the location of those lethal heaps of nails and explosives. It’s slow, hard-won mutual respect’.⁶⁷ When discussing recruitment – portrayed in many espionage novels as a sad and sordid transaction – Fox waxes positively poetic, saying that at its best, the initial connection between case officer and target is

one of the most soulful, vulnerable moments two humans can share. A leap of faith to make the world a little safer, while putting their lives, their families’ lives, in each other’s care. Those are the relationships that last decades, that end wars, that prevent attacks. Those are the relationships that change history.⁶⁸

Fox is undoubtedly the most non-conformist of the crop of former CIA agents who have published memoirs in the last 20 years, more flower child then steely-eyed operative. We may also take her claim to have viewed her field work as a committed act of maternal caretaking with a grain of salt, given that she actually quit the Agency soon after the birth of her daughter and the alleged encounter in Karachi. Nonetheless, her belief that empathy – driven, in her case, by maternal sentiment – is the key to useful, productive intelligence work is echoed not just by the other women writers I have examined here but by other observers of the world of espionage.

In his 2015 book The New Spymasters, British journalist Stephen Grey argues that old-fashioned relationship-building has been discarded in the war on terror in favour of militarised approaches, particularly ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques and then drone warfare. The argument for abandoning traditional intelligence strategies has been that radical Islamist networks are impossible to penetrate in the same way that Western intelligence was once able to penetrate the Soviet sphere. But the real difference between the Cold War and the war on terror, Grey counters, is that the twenty-four-hour news cycle and political pressures now combine to require instant and showy results. Drone attacks on terrorist leaders make good press; the fact that almost all such attacks also kill civilians – according to some estimates, as many as nine civilians are killed for each actual terrorist⁶⁹—and thus generate even more antagonism towards Western powers is swept under the carpet.

Grey quotes numerous intelligence agents, many of them former CIA and most of them men, who make the same points about the bases of good intelligence work as do the women whose work I have been analysing. Emotionally intimate relationships, agent after agent told Grey, are the key to getting reliable intelligence. He quotes a Stasi officer he met who said that ‘I can think of no useful spy who was not the result of a genuine friendship’.⁷⁰ An unnamed CIA veteran told him that what ‘worked’, in intelligence, was ‘having that ‘incredibly close personal relationship with someone’. Without the emotional skills to make those friendships, ‘you are not going to succeed’.⁷¹ A CIA recruiter Grey spoke to, nicknamed ‘Frank’, also emphasized the patience needed for the ‘art of intelligence’, the art of building relationships:

As Frank saw it, American politicians in the twenty-first century, particularly after the attacks of 11 September, had become unable to give the art of intelligence a chance. They grasped at immediate responses (such as invading Afghanistan) because they were in a rush, even if, as happened in Afghanistan, it took a decade to get out again.⁷²

The 2013 documentary Manhunt highlights the role of the ‘sisterhood’ of women analysts who spent two decades tracking Osama bin Laden. In the film, former case officer Marty Martin, who boastfully compares men doing field work to ‘jet fighters’ and ‘gangsters’, jokes about the disdain he and other field operatives felt for the mostly female analysts back at Langley. Yet Martin himself repeatedly stresses ‘care’, ‘trust’, and ‘respect’ as the essential elements in relationships with assets.⁷³ In Weisberg’s An Ordinary Spy, a former CO named Bobby Goldstein tells the protagonist Ruttenberg about blowing the cover of one of his assets, and about realizing that the guilt he felt was not for mismanaging the operation but purely because he had betrayed the trust of a true friend.⁷⁴

Obviously, then, if empathy, sensitivity, care, and respect are (according to the women cited here) especially feminine qualities in intelligence work, they are not exclusive to women, nor do all women in intelligence have them. What would it look like, though, if those qualities were not only inculcated in everyone in the field, regardless of gender, but were also guiding policy decisions – and, for that matter, making their way into blockbuster film scripts? Does ‘empathy’ have any role to play in espionage today, given the militarization of intelligence work, the proliferation of decentralized terror cells, and the political preference for drone assassinations over the slow and difficult processes of recruiting assets and negotiating with enemies?

Let us admit that it is harder to recruit assets in jihadist networks than it was in the old Soviet Union or even in the IRA. Furthermore, it is undoubtedly true that most American operatives would have a much harder time passing as locals in, for instance, rural Syria than they would have in cities in the Soviet bloc; undercover work is unquestionably more difficult in this new context. But does it follow that the ‘art of intelligence’, involving as it does a skill set that has been coded as feminine, is necessarily defunct?

Interestingly, both Fox and Grey raise the idea that relationship-building can look like discrete diplomacy as well as like running assets, and remind us that empathy and respect are also important when we are dealing with avowed enemies. In an early interview with the CIA, Fox stressed the need to understand – really understand, through meaningful conversation and emotional connection – the psychology of terrorists. Her debriefers asked her after an exercise if she felt that

I got all the inputs. Of course not, I tell them. I’m missing the most important input of all: sitting with a cup of tea across from someone who trusts me enough to tell me why he’s planning to fly a plane into a building. ‘That’s what I wish I understood’, I say.

They say, ‘So do we’.⁷⁵

Grey also evokes the image of tea-drinking, after acknowledging that in Afghanistan, British and American agents could not blend into the local population and that ‘very few Afghans’ were ever going to be willing to work for the CIA. But what the Americans could have done more often, Grey argues, was ‘something as simple as picking up the phone to [the enemy], or joining them somewhere neutral for a cup of tea’.⁷⁶

It is impossible to know whether such an approach, widely implemented, would have worked better than the policies successive American governments have tried to carry out in Iraq and Afghanistan. The writers I have read for this project, though, would almost certainly say that it could hardly have worked worse. All of these post-9/11 writers express anger and frustration about the conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, sometimes to the point of depicting the Pentagon and/or the White House as the Agency’s worst antagonists. They describe the early 2000s as a period when the positions, aims, and interests of the CIA were overtly at odds with government policy and political decisions, and are particularly enraged about the distortion of intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Given the pool of writers I am studying, of course, it is probably not coincidental that to a woman they are angry about those wars, since by definition the people who are now publishing memoirs and novels about that time period are those who are no longer working at CIA. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were, in fact, the reason that many of them quit. Presumably many intelligence specialists who were happy with the direction that the Agency took during those years still work there, and they may vastly outnumber the malcontents who now publish novels in which they write passages like this one, bemoaning the moral failures of American intelligence:

The [Agency] could have told the President exactly what would happen in Iraq if only we had had the courage to do so. The [Agency] could have told him before the fact that invading Iraq would fan the flames of global jihad. Instead, we waited until it had happened, until the whole world was saying it, to come out and—timidly, apologetically, pathetically—say it ourselves. Instead of providing the insight that might have prevented war, we allowed ourselves to be bullied into providing an anemic casus belli based on flaky sources. Sources we didn’t believe in ourselves. Of course the President wouldn’t have listened to us if we had told the truth, but we might have saved our institutional soul. If there is such a thing.⁷⁷

What, then, can we conclude about whether, and how, women CIA workers and writers have affected the culture of the Agency or perceptions of intelligence work? The reality is that they may not have – not yet. Their novels and memoirs make it clear that they value qualities like emotional sensitivity and an ethic of care, and that they strongly oppose some U.S. government policies, especially with regard to the war on terror. But they agree that promoting those qualities and opposing those policies at an institutional level would require a widespread change in the culture of CIA, where they themselves probably represented a minority viewpoint. Additionally, in terms of any impact on policy-makers or public opinion that these writers may have, we have to concede that their work has not been very widely disseminated: while some of their books have sold adequately well, they are not in the same league as the Ken Folletts, the Tom Clancys, or the Vince Flynns. Nor have most of these books been picked up for adaptation as movies or television shows, platforms with a much larger audience than most print media.⁷⁸

If we read this literature not in terms of its influence on public opinion, however, but simply as an effort to offer a less masculinist, more culturally ‘feminine’ vision of intelligence work, then surely it has value as a counterweight, a way of putting what Amaryllis Fox calls ‘softness’ on the other side of the scale to black sites and drone warfare. It matters that there are people who used to work for the CIA – people who speak from intimate experience of the organisation and its operations – who assert the importance of human intelligence work and show us what that might look like. In the words of political theorist Pauline Blistène, ‘Spy fiction is the democratic counterpart to undemocratic activity within democracies’.⁷⁹ In the face of the US government’s distortion of intelligence to justify war, and the overall trend towards authoritarianism in the U.S. and around the world, espionage writing that contests hegemonic political and media representations of the war on terror is therefore engaging in, and needs to keep engaging in, important democratic work.

Disclosure statement

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

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.

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.