The Sisterhood by Liza Mundy

The subtitle of this book is "The Secret History of the Women at the CIA".  The book jacket says that this is a history of "three generations at the CIA- the women who fought to become operatives, transformed spycraft, and tracked down Osama Bin Laden.

It's a big book with 400 pages and a long section of notes at the end for references. The book makes it clear that historically the CIA was an "old boys club" and women were considered for only secretarial jobs, no matter their capability or qualifications. Since the CIA was formed after WWII, it is not a surprise that women were treated as second class citizens in 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s and even after that. It's the 21st century and women are still fighting for their rightful place in society in general. Equal rights for women, although enshrined in law, is far from satisfactory in practice in the society.  But, consistently the CIA used spouses to do spy work for their husbands because the wife's role provided the best cover. However, the wives were not CIA employees and were not on the payroll. However, they were expected to take the risks that entailed. The book makes the point again and again, that CIA was by far the worst agency in the US government in terms of treatment of women. Sometimes the repetitiveness of this point got too frequent for me and I felt like saying, "come on, give me some exciting stories from CIA's files!" Nevertheless, many of the instances of bad behavior of the men towards the women are so terrible that you wonder if these men had any wives, sisters or mothers.

Operational roles were reserved for the men and women were regularly relegated to secretarial jobs like typing pools, data entry and data analysis. Some women successfully fought to get operational jobs and case officer roles for handling foreign assets. But, it was actually the data analyst roles that allowed the women to be on the forefront of predicting events and finding high value targets. In fact, the analysts, that were mostly women, were repeatedly and for years, were warning of potential of coordinated attacks by Osama Bin Laden's ragtag bunch of jihadists. The neocons in the administration, however, could not wrap their heads around the idea that any non-state actors could cause substantial damage to the US. Not only did the neo-con power-players in the administration, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, repeatedly ignore the warnings by the analysts of the potential for danger coming from OBL but they were completely focused on proving that the danger actually resided in Iraq and Iran. The administration repeatedly asked for proof of WMDs and potential of attacks from them, and the analysis repeatedly pointed to the absence of any data that supported these wild theories. But, it is impossible to prove a negative. So, the analysts were ignored and 9/11 happened.

Finally, it was the group of women data analysts who tracked down OBL and this time they were believed and the operation to capture/kill OBL was given the green light based on the analyst's recommendation.

It's a long book and it goes into a lot of detail of retired women from the CIA and also about women still under-cover (with pseudonyms) and the trials they had to survive to get them to be taken seriously. It was a lot of investment of my time to read the whole book. If the subject is of interest to you, by all means, read it.