To The Contrary

Funding for To the Contrary, provided by: Coming up on To the Contrary: There are more and more stories coming out about the women who, as scientists or as espionage agents or intelligence analysts or mapmakers, were really laying the groundwork that would enable the success not only at the D-Day landings, but at the sort of amphibious landing and assaults that we were mounting in the Pacific.

Hello, I'm Bonnie Erb.

Welcome to To the Contrary, a weekly discussion of news and social trends from diverse perspectives.

When we think of the CIA, we often think of men.

The spies, the operatives, the directors.

However, one author is shining a light on the historical impact of women in the CIA and how they fought for their place within this secretive organization.

From being pigeonholed to secretarial roles and objectified, to contributing to the organization's most significant successes.

Joining us today is Liza Mundy, a renowned journalist and bestselling author whose latest book, The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women in the CIA, uncovers the incredible stories of these pioneering women and their transformative influence on the CIA's culture and operations.

So, Liza Mundy, welcome to the program, and thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you so much for having me.

It's great to be here.

Now, you've written other bestselling books, including one on women code breakers.

What led you to women in the CIA?

Well, really, it's a successor to Code Girls. The Sisterhood is in some ways a successor volume to Code Girls, which tells the story of how women really pioneered our modern intelligence community.

People in Washington today, I think, have a hard time appreciating how little intelligence gathering ability we had in World War II.

When World War II broke out and when we joined the war after Pearl Harbor, we didn't have a CIA, we didn't have a National Security Agency, we didn't have a director of national intelligence.

We really had no intelligence gathering ability, as became clear after the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor.

And because all the young men who normally would have staffed an intelligence agency were now signing up to fight and shipping off to the Atlantic and the Pacific and the European Theatre, it was really women who built our early intelligence apparatus that the organizations during the war that then became our modern intelligence agencies.

And this was true in codebreaking.

And that was the topic of my book, Code Girls, about more than 10,000 women who came to Washington during the war to develop the ability to basically hack into enemy code systems.

And at the same time, there was a parallel cohort of women who were recruited into our espionage establishment.

And during the war, it was known as the Office of Strategic Services.

It was seen as, as they called it, pale, male, and Yale. But in fact, there were thousands and thousands of women who joined that operation and helped build our intelligence gathering and analysis abilities during the war.

And then after the war, that effort became the Central Intelligence Agency.

It's so interesting because I never thought about the parallels before between codebreaking and the CIA, but they're so obvious when you think about it.

So tell me how women helped build the structures that became the spies around the, you know, the organizations of spies around the world who keep the U.S. or who are supposed to keep the U.S. safe from invasion and other things, bad things that potential enemies may do.

Right, intelligence gathering was and remains key to our national security.

And in the case of codebreaking, again, this entails hacking into enemy systems.

And there was a lot of that during the war.

And there continues to be a lot of that now.

And it's a controversial endeavor, during World War II, it was incredibly crucial to the success of our efforts in the Pacific.

Reading the Japanese code systems, the Navy and the Army and the Pacific, Japanese Navy and Army as well as in the European Theatre.

And, you know, a lot of our knowledge of where to launch the D-Day invasion came about through codebreaking, through reading Japanese messages.

And because Japanese diplomats were enabled to look at the fortifications along the coast of Normandy, Hitler's fortifications, along the coast of France and reported back on where it was well fortified and where it wasn't.

And that's, one of the reasons that we knew that Normandy would be the right place to invade on D-Day.

That's just a small example.

But it was, it was really women back in Washington who were reading those enemy messages again, because the men were all fighting.

And similarly, during World War II, we had to build really from scratch our ability to send intelligence officers to really all over the world, to try to elicit secrets from people who had access to German intelligence or German military secrets or Japanese or other Axis nations.

And we really had never done that before.

A little bit during wartime, during the Civil War, but generally during peacetime, our intelligence analysis and intelligence gathering would kind of shut down.

We weren't comfortable with it.

We really didn't know how to do it.

And European nations and England in particular had much older and more sophisticated spy organizations.

So the United States had to get started.

A Wall Street lawyer, Wild Bill Donovan, who was a World War I war hero, was tapped to be head of the OSS.

He went over to England to sort of, like, learn how to do this and have interviews and learn from the British.

And one of the things that he did, he went to a meeting with his British colleagues and they let him in on this secret that the British had already figured out was which you, they would go to the women's colleges in the UK, colleges that educated women and they would pluck likely young women college graduates and employ them at the spy service.

And so while Bill Donovan reportedly emerged from one building and one meeting and he had written the word women, on a legal pad and circled it, you know, that understanding that women were going to be key to this effort.

And there's really a flowering literature and also film catalog about women's efforts during World War II, women who were active in the resistance, women who ran exfiltration networks and espionage networks in France, in occupied France and elsewhere.

And there was also, there were also teams of women in the United States who worked as analysts.

Because one of the things people forget is that when intelligence officers are out in the field gathering all this important information, it comes back to Washington, and it has to be analyzed and it has to be vetted for its accuracy, and it has to, and records have to be kept and reports have to be written.

You know, it sounds boring, but it's critically important.

And there were women back in Washington doing this work.

When I was doing my reporting for The Sisterhood, I, you know, uncovered photographs as well of women at these giant tables with stacks and stacks of paper.

They were helping, you know, design maps as we were, you know, invading occupied countries or bombing campaigns or airdrops.

We needed geographic information about the countries that we were dealing with.

And so there were women mapmakers, there were women intelligence analysts.

And one of my one of my favorite examples of wartime espionage is that there was, there was a young woman who was a graduate of Smith College.

Her name was Julia McWilliams, and she was looking for a way to serve the war effort.

She wanted to join the Women's Army Corps, the WAC, but she was too tall.

And so she found her way into the OSS and began working as Wild Bill Donovan's clerk.

But war time is an accelerant, right?

War is an accelerant of medicine, and it's an accelerant of science and technology and it's accelerant of people's careers.

So within a year or two, Jody McWilliams was sent out to China to do intelligence analysis work there in China.

And she contributed to analysis during the war.

She also met her future husband.

He was a State Department mapmaker.

And then, they fell in love.

And then after the war, many of these women who served the war effort were told, you know, Thanks very much, ladies.

It's time to return to your, you know, regularly scheduled lives and get married and have children. And so Julia McWilliams left the intelligence effort, but, she did marry her, husband, Paul Child, who continued working for the State Department.

They went to France.

She had an epiphany when she had a French meal and learned how that food could taste.

And she became known to the world as Julia Child.

So one of the advantages that, one of the many things, the many things that World War II gave the world, freedom and democracy and liberation for Europe and all of the great things that came out of the war, American food tastes much better than it would have if Julia Child had not joined the fledgling intelligence effort.

So, that's one of my favorite anecdotes, but.

Let me, let me back you up a second before you go on to the next anecdote and please keep in mind where you were going.

But you say she was drawing maps.

Does that mean just copying maps?

How did they do it back then?

Well, Julia Child was not a map maker.

Her husband was a State Department map maker.

You know, that's a great question.

How they did that?

Because when we were, when we, the United States, was mounting all these amphibious landings in the Pacific to try to take back.

And I was just a couple of months ago, I went to I used to live in France, but I went back on vacation and went to Normandy for the first time.

And God, what a heart changing.

Yeah.

Epiphany that is to go see where things land, see the old German bunkers.

And there was still, there was still barbed wire, rusty barbed wire, around the tops of the cliffs that the Germans had laid to make the American troops have to step over on top of everything else, these huge cliffs, barbed wire.

But anyway, go ahead.

No, absolutely every American should take that tour if they could.

I've taken the same tour that you have.

And when you, you know, on the point to hawk when you're up there and you see that what the men, the cliff sides that the American men had to scramble up.

It's just extraordinary.

And moving just, I mean, it's unforgettable And so we, you know, in Europe, we had some knowledge of what the coastlines and geography were like.

But the in the Pacific War, which was really the theatre of war that the United States was primarily responsible for.

So there were all these coastlines that we really had very little knowledge about in not only the islands like Guam that we were going to try to retake, after they had been captured by the Japanese.

But coastlines in Indonesia and elsewhere in the Pacific.

So the mapmaking entailed looking at existing records in Washington, working with, doing liaison work with other countries and other, other intelligence agencies.

But also, there was along with Julia Child, on the boat to China was an anthropologist, an American anthropologist named Cora Dubois.

She was Ph.D., she was an open lesbian, which was okay during wartime, very much not okay for decades after the war.

Why okay during the war, though?

It was it was overlooked.

She was, it was more of a.

They needed warm bodies too much.

Yeah, yeah.

So there just wasn't the there wasn't the paranoia that set in after the war, during the McCarthy era and J. Edgar Hoover and just all of that.

I mean, that's in some ways that's a separate topic.

But in some ways it's actually very much related.

World War II was a time of mandatory enforced inclusion.

We don't often think about it that way, but it was an inclusive time when groups of citizens who normally would have been kind of kept on the margins of government service and military service were called, were called to show what they could do.

So the Tuskegee Airmen, the Navajo Code Talkers, an open lesbian.

However though, I want to say about because I was thinking before you mentioned the Tuskegee Airmen, yes, they existed, but they were not treated equally.

Absolutely.

Despite their bravery and their amazing accomplishments.

Right.

And that was, that is a point very well taken.

And that's very important to point out.

But it was a start.

And certainly the U.S. military was segregated during World War II and that shouldn't have happened.

But I think in the ensuing decades, recognition has been, increasing recognition to the contributions of these groups of citizens and to women as well who also weren't recognized or appreciated for many years after the war.

And I do think it's important to remember that during World War II, the Axis nations were not inclusive at all.

I mean, by definition, the Nazis were doing everything they could to eliminate their Jewish population, as well as other groups of otherwise German citizens.

And the Japanese were not bringing, say, women into the war effort.

And that is a difference between the Allies and the Axis.

And it is one reason, that the good guys won in this case and the good women as well.

But to your point about the coastlines.

So an anthropologist, Cora Dubois, is sent to the theatre of war, to Asia, to work with local groups, with local groups who are supporting the Allied war effort.

to gather intelligence again, about this geography that the United States just didn't have very much knowledge about.

As we were mounting these amphibious landings.

There was a woman, I mean, this is a little bit off the topic, but there's a lot of literature now coming out to women who contributed during the war.

And there was, there were women cartographers.

There was a woman navigator who helped chart the ocean currents that would be affecting these amphibious landing.

She wasn't in the espionage effort.

She was a scientist.

But there are more and more stories coming out about the women who as scientists or as espionage, you know, agents or intelligence analysts or mapmakers were really laying the groundwork that would enable the success, not only of the D-Day landings, but of the sort of amphibious landings and assaults that we were mounting in the Pacific, you know, these terribly dangerous and bloody battles in the Pacific that were going on as well.

So, the drawing of maps, just it necessitated going to the Library of Congress to figure out, you know, what we had and then working with foreign governments and then working with people on the ground in these foreign countries to gather this information.

Yeah, it was a massive effort and it involved a lot of paperwork and one of the stereotypes about women at the time was that women were good at paperwork.

That women were good at keeping records, that women were patient and meticulous and able to do this sort of painstaking analysis.

And while, in fact, some women were parachuting into occupied France, like the men of the OSS, there were a lot of women doing analytic work.

And in the years after the war, it would be not a great path to advancement.

So as you said, you know, all the directors of the CIA for decades and decades and decades were male.

So doing the hard archival record, keeping reports, writing work, was not as glamorous, but it was so important because if you're an intelligence agency, you need every scrap of every piece of intelligence that's ever been collected.

And for decades and decades and decades, this was kept on file cards, three by five file cards, at the Central Intelligence Agency and the people who had access to and knowledge of those records were women, and they were known as the Vault Ladies.

Or the Sneaker Ladies or the Vault Women.

And they were sort of scoffed at and scorned, except if you were a CIA officer working in Moscow and you were trying to target somebody who might be able to pass secrets from the Soviet Union to the United States.

You would learn of a person and you would, there was literally a woman in the records office at the CIA named Ruth, who was an expert on every KGB officer, their family, their connections, and who they knew, where they went.

So you would see, you would say, you would cable Ruth and say, Can you give me everything that we know about this person that I might target to try to turn them as an asset to collect intelligence? And the officers in the field were so aware of how important those women were and how important this, they were like the brain of the agency and that all of that information, all of those records would eventually be put into a database.

And that too was often done by women.

And again, although it wasn't as glorified, either institutionally or in, you know, James Bond, that's really not the character that you're focused on.

Although there are some characters in John Le Carr novels, there's a character named Connie who is sort of a vault woman.

She knows everything about the Soviets, and she tracks them, and that was a role that women really did play, both in the United, both in England and in the United States.

And that would, there would be a direct line to the women who before 9/11, well before 9/11, were paying attention to this shadow group of terrorist fighters who went by the name al-Qaida and who were led by this man, Osama bin Laden.

And there was a direct line between the women who were the brain of the agency, who understood how to make connections and the importance of biography, and who's talking to whom and who knows whom, and the women who began to try to build an awareness of this new threat that, to our national security, that set in after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

When you talk about women, the sisterhood, we're talking about white women, right?

There were no women of color included or were there?

There were women of color, but not to the extent that there should have been.

And there are women of color represented in my book.

And but the CIA for decades and decades was a very exclusive, you know, not just a men's club.

But again, the pale, male, and Yale part of it, it was a very networked place.

And so if you were part of this Ivy League group, you would be part of that network.

You know, recruitment was for decades done out of Ivy League universities.

And, there was also a network and still is, of Greek American intelligence officers.

But these were very male and so women of color, you know, we talk about intersectionality.

And that was certainly the case that women of color, in some cases would be recruited and hired and would often inevitably be channeled into the human resources.

But never writing codes for computers the way they did for NASA in the South, for the space program.

The women of Hidden Figures. No, more often they would, the institutional energy would go into channeling African-American men and women into the personnel operation.

And that's fine if you want to work in personnel, but if you want to be an intelligence officer, if you want to be an analyst, if you want to work in the Directorate of Science and Technology, then it's not good when you're being channeled into personnel.

And so there were certainly decades during the 70s and 80s when the CIA could maybe produce numbers saying, Well, we're doing bette at hiring employees of color. But then if you actually looked at where they were sort of pigeonholed, it would be in the personnel operation.

And I do cite women who worked in the personnel operation at the CIA, who really were very important mentors to other women in terms of telling them, this is what you need to do.

Tell me quickly about these women who are mentors to other women.

Yeah.

Who were, who made a big difference in the lives of other women.

But women of color and white women in terms of from their perch in personnel, they helped advance women within the agency because they even though they themselves have been pigeonholed, they understood what the steps were needed for, for advancement.

Were women there raped?

Was their sexual harassment?

How bad was it?

Oh, there was, it was a total mad men environment.

It was, the women there described during the 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s and 90s that there was a l of sexual harassment in the workplace, the women were seen as, you know, sort of office candy.

And this was true again, this was true in the advertising sector.

This was true in corporate America, that the women who were secretaries, or officers, alike, were seen as playthings.

It was a very sexualized workplace.

And I think what's different about the CIA is a lot of the work does take place in clandestine settings, particularly overseas.

There are a lot of secret meetings, one-on-one meetings, and so, and also, CIA officers working overseas are dwelling in this sort of gray region where their job is to break the laws of other countries and to persuade foreign nationals to pass secrets, to become traitors.

So there's a lot of living outside the law in foreign countries and just a lot of moral grayness.

And so women officers who I interviewed, you know, just had really hair raising stories of being hit on and assaulted and harassed, not only by, more by he men they worked with, than the men they were recruiting as assets And were they in any situation where they could report this?

Was there any justice there?

Were the men ever held accountable?

For decades and decades there was really nobody to apply to.

And again, this was true in other workplaces, but I think it was particularly true in a clandestine environment where, you know.

One officer told me about, she was working in a foreign country, and she was kind of, what happens when you're a CIA officer in a foreign country is you cultivate assets.

These are the foreigners who are going to pass secrets, and you generally work with an asset for three years.

Then you move on as the officer, and then another officer will come in and take over that asset.

It's called the turnover or the handover.

So she was going to take over this.

She entered a hotel room and was chased around the bed by her own colleague, as opposed to preparing for the important meeting they were both about to have.

And there was nobody for her to take this.

Yeah, I would imagine it was way too early for that.

And very sad to see, but amazing the contributions that these women made.

And thank you so much, Liza Mundy.

Your new book is called The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women in the CIA. Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you.

And that woman did rise to become the first female division chief at the CIA.

So she persisted and prevailed.

Go girls.

Thank you.

That's it for this edition.

Keep the conversation going on all our social media platforms and visit our website, pbs.org/to-the-contrary.

And whether you agree or think to the contrary, see you next week.

Funding for To the Contrary, provided by: