We’re Not All Pussy Galore and Holly Goodhead: What It’s Really Like Being a Woman in the CIA (Exclusive)

Hollywood loves a spy in heels. But the real women who built careers in espionage had to navigate something far more dangerous than enemy agents: systemic sexism.

It never dawned on me when I watched all those James Bond films with my dad growing up that I could one day work in espionage. After all, the women in the 007 films of my childhood were often mere arm candy to Bond’s impressive spy skills. Even their names were a punchline — Honey Ryder, Pussy Galore, Holly Goodhead. But when I joined the CIA at 21, I found that just about everything I had learned about espionage in TV and film was wrong. Female intelligence officers weren’t sidekicks at all; they were leading ladies. And they weren’t sleeping with their agents in exchange for intelligence. Rather, they leveraged their operational tradecraft skills, emotional intelligence and educational expertise to recruit spies and steal secrets; oftentimes, they were better at this than their male colleagues.

Far from the hyper-sexualized female spies we’ve seen on screen, the real women who’ve operated in the shadows have sacrificed their personal lives, risked their safety and devoted themselves to the CIA’s mission — all in an effort to keep America safe. Marti, the first female intelligence officer to operate in Moscow, was arrested and expelled from the country. Kathleen was a first-generation Korean-American immigrant, whose asset brought her the severed head of a terrorist in the trunk of his car. Denise, a 19-year-old secretary with a high school diploma, proved her ability to run a CIA station after a coup d’état in West Africa prompted an evacuation of nearly all U.S. personnel. Their accomplishments are nothing short of extraordinary, especially given the systemic sexism they faced throughout their careers. And for every story you’ll read about, there are hundreds more that you’ll never know.

Becoming an intelligence officer was never my plan; I graduated from Indiana University with a degree in linguistics and African Studies in 2006 with dreams of joining the U.S. Peace Corps or documenting near-extinct languages in remote parts of Africa. But when a CIA recruiter visited my campus weeks before graduation, that all changed. Andy (at least that’s what he told me his name was) was impressed with my Swahili and Zulu language skills, and I was equally impressed with the glamorous picture he painted of a career in espionage. “You’d write intelligence analysis for the president and educate U.S. policymakers about Africa,” he said. “And you’d travel to the continent on a regular basis.” I didn’t need any more convincing.

When I walked through the doors at Langley months later after an intensive security investigation — and not one, but two, polygraphs — I hit the ground running. A new conflict was heating up in East Africa, and I was tapped to write about it in the CIA’s premier intelligence product, the President’s Daily Brief, or PDB. (The “book,” as we sometimes called it, was a compilation of highly-classified intelligence analysis on national security issues produced for the president and key cabinet members.)

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Soon, I traveled, undercover and almost always alone, to CIA stations across the globe. Sometimes the travel was for meetings to support my intelligence analysis, and other times, I spent countless hours in secure, covert locations leveraging my foreign language expertise to provide highly classified linguistic support to keep the president safe. Years later, when I transitioned to the Directorate of Operations, I ran my own operational cases, meeting with clandestine assets and collecting foreign intelligence of national security interest in the field. I spent hours before and after my operational meetings conducting surveillance detection — a pre-planned route with built-in cover stops — to ensure I wasn’t being followed by another country’s intelligence service.

Far from Hollywood-style chase scenes, the goal is never to “lose” your surveillance team; rather, it’s to spot them, all while making them think you’re boring enough to focus their resources and attention elsewhere. “Bringing friends” to an operational meeting could result in arrest, or even death, for the asset, and expulsion from the country for the Agency officer — an enormous amount of responsibility and autonomy.

I knew things hadn’t always been this way. The CIA was long known as an old boys’ club, and I was keenly aware that for decades, these opportunities hadn’t come as easily for women.  In 1953, Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles recognized the disparities in pay and position between male and female employees and  commissioned what would become known as the Petticoat Panel. The report uncovered significant inequities between men and women, but despite such revelations, the Agency stopped short of implementing any new policies to course-correct. It would take decades (and more decades after that) to see any real change. 

The Bond Girl has evolved over time since Honey Ryder emerged from the water in that iconic white bikini in 1962’s Dr. No, and so has the female intelligence officer. When the Bond Girl was born as a mere sexual associate of her more capable British male spymaster, women were deep in a war of gender politics across the pond at Langley. In fact, the assumption at CIA headquarters at the time was that any woman you came across at headquarters was a secretary or clerk. After all, when the CIA began, the bulk of its recruits were white men from the Ivy League. Even the most highly decorated female spy in history, Virginia Hall, whose intelligence contributions during World War II were instrumental, was confined to a desk at headquarters for 15 years after the war, where she, thanks to her gender, was reportedly passed over for promotions and answering to managers with far less experience in intelligence operations. 

The second wave of feminism continued into the 70s, birthing key milestones like the publication of Gloria Steinem’s Ms. magazine and the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade. Around that time, Gloria Hendry made history on-screen as the first Black woman romantically involved with Bond.  At the real-life CIA, female — mostly white — intelligence officers were still trying to convince men to give them a shot at running their own operational cases. In 1979, the Agency complied with the Civil Service Reform Act and began to hire more women, including into case officer roles, even if it did so while kicking and screaming. A woman named Margery was part of the first class that included women case officers, and when she stood up to give a presentation, one of her male classmates shouted, “You’re only here because they had to start hiring women!” Without missing a beat, Margery looked him dead in the eye and said, “I’m here because I’m so goddamn good.”

Women at the CIA continued bullishly proving their worth in espionage operations well into the 80s — even if that meant returning to the streets to run clandestine operations just one week after giving birth, a common practice among women case officers at the time. Similarly, women continued to make gains elsewhere — on the Supreme Court, in space and onscreen. In 1983, actress Maud Adams appeared in all her skinny-dipping glory in the first Bond film named after its female protagonist, a step forward for women, if you could ignore that the actual title of the film was Octopussy. The world-renowned jewel smuggler, played by Adams, led an all-female gang of confident, capable women. At the CIA, women were also banding together, although you can bet they weren’t scantily dressed in black leather bikinis like Octopussy’s crew. They weren’t, however, allowed to wear pants, only dresses or long skirts with hosiery.  

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Now that there were more female case officers, women could  focus their efforts on securing sought-after recruitment cases. Interviews and archival materials suggest that the widely held belief among their male counterparts at that time was that women simply weren’t  equipped to recruit assets — that is, formally ask a person to commit to a clandestine relationship with the CIA. Women had families and children to tend to — how could they possibly have the time to develop a source to the point of recruitment? Instead in a best-case scenario, women were given operational handling cases — maintaining relationships and debriefing assets who were already recruited for foreign intelligence — or safehouse management responsibilities. 

But that started to change in the mid-80s around the time when intrepid women set up the Directorate of Operations Women’s Advisory Council (DOWAC). And soon after, another group of women created a mentoring program for women that reached across Agency directorates. Grassroots efforts like these were responsible for later advancements such as the inclusion of women and minorities on promotion panels, an equitable process for doling out field assignments and the creation of a childcare facility on the CIA’s grounds, among others.

This momentum continued into the 90s — a decade full of significant strides for gender equality and yet fraught with problematic notions on the treatment of women. In the Bond world, it seemed they were moving closer to getting their on-screen depiction of the female spy right,  due in large part to producer Barbara Broccoli, who is credited for bringing more balance and inclusivity to the films. The role of “M,” for example, was now played by a woman, Judi Dench, and the Bond Girl was no longer a one-dimensional stereotype. At the same time, the systemic discrimination women had been experiencing for decades at the CIA was brought to light with the publication of the CIA’s Glass Ceiling study in 1991. That study helped pave the way for a landmark gender discrimination win against the Agency in 1994 and, a year later, a separate class action suit in which the CIA agreed to pay more than $1 million in back pay and salary increases to settle charges of gender discrimination.

With Broccoli at the helm, the Bond franchise continued its trajectory of strong female roles into the 2000s with more developed characters like Jinx (Halle Berry) in 2002’s Die Another Day. Jinx would be a “different kind of Bond Girl,” Broccoli told Berry. “working alongside Bond in a new way,” one which showcased her abilities as a spy on par with those of Bond. 

In 2012, Naomie Harris became the first Black woman to play Miss Moneypenny and the only “Moneypenny” with a first name: Eve. Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux) appeared in both 2015’s Spectre and 2021’s No Time to Die — the first of Bond’s love interests to return in a subsequent film. Seydoux described her character as using her mind, rather than her appearance, to woo Bond. Moreover, Lashana Lynch’s portrayal as Nomi, who takes on the 007 title, No Time to Die, stirred up much discussion over whether the next James Bond should be a woman, prompting many current and former female intelligence officers to ask, “Why not?”

In the same way the Bond Girl progressed in the 2000’s, leading to its strongest female portrayals yet, women also made notable strides at the CIA, culminating with the first female director, Gina Haspel, in 2018 and the first female director of operations that same year, Elizabeth Kimber. Much of this progress was due in part to record recruiting in a post 9/11 world. Many of the women I worked with played key roles in counterterrorism, and for a time, I was involved with tracking terrorists like the mastermind behind the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, Harun Fazul.

As of 2023, women made up 45 percent of the CIA workforce. Still, the Agency has continued to flounder in terms of recruiting, retaining and promoting women of color. During Haspel’s tenure as director, Langley reinvigorated its efforts to bring diversity to its ranks, fostering its long-standing relationships with minority serving institutions and developing corporate sponsorships with professional organizations that promote professional and academic development of underrepresented communities. The Agency even launched a new recruitment website in early 2021 devoted to hiring more diverse candidates, a top priority of Director Haspel, but even today, minority women still make up only 13 percent of the Agency population. 

“If you look at data on non-retirement and departures, it starts to become obvious that we have a problem with women and minorities who are leaving early,” Sue Gordon, former principal deputy director of national intelligence and CIA veteran of more than 30 years, told me. And this was before Trump’s recent executive order rolling back diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility initiatives across the government. Attempts to find that recruitment website and other pages on the CIA’s diversity and inclusion initiatives result in an error message: “The page you requested doesn’t exist.” 

At a time when women’s rights are severely under threat in our nation, it’s more important than ever to amplify the voices of female intelligence officers and their extraordinary accomplishments. The women who courageously broke  down barriers and shattered glass ceilings so that women like me could come along years later and reap the benefits. Some were considered the troublemakers of their time, even still to this day, and others, trailblazers. I like to think they’re both.

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Agents of Change: The Women Who Transformed the CIA by Christina Hillsberg comes out June 24 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.