Witnessing a Slice of Sisterhood at CIA
BOOK REVIEW: THE SISTERHOOD: THE SECRET HISTORY OF WOMEN AT THE CIA
By Liza Mundy / Crown
Reviewed by Leah Florence
The Reviewer — Leah Florence recently concluded 34-years of service with the CIA. Among her assignments were: Dean of the Sherman Kent School for Intelligence Analysis, Senior Advisor to the Director of Intelligence at the National Counterterrorism Center and Presidential Daily Brief briefer.
REVIEW — Liza Mundy’s most recent book, The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at CIA, recounts the struggles and triumphs of female CIA officers as they vied for the right to do a “man’s job” and for their work to receive the attention and recognition it deserved.
Although the content is not as comprehensive as the title suggests, the book gives the reader an insider’s view of how women have fought to succeed in a secret world long dominated by men.
The first half of The Sisterhood delves into the hurdles faced by women in the clandestine operations area during the early days of the CIA, and its predecessor organization, and through the 1990s.
Having grown up myself in CIA’s analytic directorate, I now have a much better understanding of how these women risked their careers to bring a class action lawsuit against the Agency to rectify decades of structural biases.
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The second half of the book brings to life the experiences of female CIA analysts as they tried to gain traction about the importance of Usama bin Ladin and Al-Qa’ida, followed by their long hunt to find UBL. The author takes a deep dive into the origins of terrorism analysis at the Agency, probably due to the prominence of women working the issue early on, and the relative abundance of unclassified information on the subject.
The Sisterhood would have benefitted, however, from interviews with a wider array of women who work, or formerly worked, at CIA. The book makes little mention of the changing roles of women in the scientific, digital, or support fields, which are so vital to CIA’s mission. The sisterhoods Ms. Mundy describes were replicated in some form or fashion across the broader Agency.
As an analyst hired into the Agency in the late 1980s, I could relate to the difficult experiences of the women as described by Ms. Mundy. But over my 34 years with CIA, I saw real change, as women rose to the senior-most levels of the organization, fostered programs to support women and minorities, and became coaches and mentors to the women behind them. Is there more to be done? Certainly. And I have confidence that my CIA sisters, and brothers, will continue to root out the vestiges of inequality.
I’m sure some people will read The Sisterhood and think there are other sides to these women’s stories. There always are. But these are their stories, and Ms. Mundy does an engaging job of telling them.
The Sisterhood earns a solid three out of four trench coats
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