In winter 1944, as World War II nears its end, applicants stream into an unmarked Washington, D.C., brownstone to apply for positions with the Office of Strategic Services. Each carries a card bearing a false name, the letter W, and a number. The building is Station W, part of the OSS’s recruiting apparatus. Applicants will undergo a day of psychological testing to assess their fitness for espionage, including their ability to handle confusion, frustration, and interpersonal conflict. They are introduced to their—all male—examiners.

Mundy explains how the need for a formal US intelligence service had become clear after the 1940 fall of France and the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. President Franklin Roosevelt appointed William “Wild Bill” Donovan to lead the effort, and in June 1942 the Office of Strategic Services was created to prevent future intelligence failures, gather strategic information, and conduct covert operations. Working with Britain’s Special Operations Executive, the OSS needed new agents for sabotage, paramilitary work, and intelligence analysis.

By late 1943, the OSS was recruiting haphazardly from elite universities and social networks. Recruiters established assessment schools: Station S, a Virginia farm, conducted three-day field exercises, while Station W processed candidates more quickly, particularly academics. Most women were routed through Station W, as it was assumed they were more suited to desk work.

The assessment process revealed deep gender biases. Men participated in a bridge-building exercise requiring them to transport items like an imaginary “water-cooled machine gun” (17) across a chasm, whereas women were given a filing task using index cards and typewriters. Recruiting only from high-achieving and intelligent women, the assessors wanted to gauge how they would react to menial work beneath their abilities, a situation they would certainly face in the spy service. The women were asked to assign each other hypothetical civil service grades, with only a few high grades available, to assess how they performed when “set against each other” by a lack of opportunity (18).

The Station W testing accurately predicted the challenges women would confront for decades: being underutilized, pitted against one another, and relegated to support roles despite their capabilities. During the Second World War, women had expanded into vital work including cable editing, map development, code breaking, and propaganda. They would became information guardians and file builders, establishing systems that proved critical to Cold War operations and modern counterterrorism. Yet most started as secretaries and clerks, forming a “fractious sisterhood.”

Mundy details how, at its peak, the OSS employed 13,000 Americans, of whom 4,500 were women, with nearly 1,000 serving overseas. The organization borrowed from Britain’s practice of hiring women for both desk jobs and covert operations. Historically, women spies had succeeded by leveraging inconspicuousness rather than sex appeal. Donovan readily embraced hiring women. Female applicants were remarkably accomplished: 48% had four years of college compared to just 4.6% of Americans overall, and 21% had done graduate work. One in four spoke a foreign language fluently. Assessors noted “a definite tendency” to recruit able women for jobs “well below their capacity” (18).

Mundy introduces some of the female pioneers of the service. Toward the end of the war, after Allen Dulles became the “star” scholar-analyst of the OSS, Mary Bancroft, a Bostonian fluent in German ran Allen Dulles’s best asset Hans Bernd Gisevius, a German intelligence officer secretly plotting to assassinate Hitler. Bancroft extracted vital intelligence through careful listening and psychological insight, though Dulles dismissed her methods as “stroking” and once barked, “Get the food, Mary!” (23). He paid her the minimum wage despite her crucial role and pursued a sexual relationship with her. Her intelligence helped cement Dulles’s reputation, and he later became a foundational CIA director.

Cora Du Bois, a renowned anthropologist, joined Research & Analysis in 1942 and rose to become the only woman to head an OSS branch, leading the Southeast Asia Command with distinction. After the war, she and her life partner, Jeanne Taylor, were driven from public service during anti-Communist and anti-gay witch hunts.

When the CIA was created in 1947, women remained essential but marginalized. They staffed finance and personnel offices, ran public affairs, and worked as “rovers,” crisis handlers who could fill any station need. Women built the agency’s classified database on index cards, maintaining biographical files critical for counterintelligence. These “vault women” or “sneaker ladies” worked in windowless rooms, knew everything about the most secret operations, and became fearsome guardians of information, yet were looked down upon. These vital “support” roles but considered as exclusively women’s work, both undervalued and underpaid. The women also had to put up with constant sexual advances and harassment in the workplace.

In September 1969, 22-year-old Heidi August, a CIA clerk in Tripoli, Libya, heard gunfire from her government-paid apartment. Looking out, she saw armed men dragging office workers from Libya’s television and radio stations. Realizing a coup was underway, she called the station chief, Art Close, who instructed her to reach Wheelus Air Base and burn classified papers. Heidi and her visiting friend Joanie, a clerk from Tunis Station, drove through the chaos, alerted the Air Force colonel commanding the base, then sped to the CIA compound.

After the incinerator broke, the women found a steel drum and burned files in a courtyard as Libyan Air Force helicopters circled overhead. The coup, led by Air Force officer Muammar Qaddafi, succeeded bloodlessly. The CIA had failed to detect the plot despite Libyan officers training at Wheelus. For eight months, Tripoli Station operated in limbo. Heidi, now one of a handful of remaining staff, learned tradecraft from a case officer who taught her to place dead drops, concealed messages hidden under park benches.

Aged 11, Heidi had written to the CIA after reading about the agency in newsweeklies. Growing up in Arizona, she envisioned living in Paris. In 1968, as a University of Colorado senior, she approached the CIA’s recruiting booth at a job fair. The recruiter handed her a clerk-typist brochure—the same one she had received 10 years earlier—then turned to her male classmates. After graduation, she worked at a San Francisco hotel while the agency completed her background check and offered her a GS-3 clerk position. She paid her own way to Washington.

Her first week, Heidi was placed in a windowless room folding maps with dozens of other women. When she complained, a female supervisor told her to sit down and keep folding. After her security clearance came through, she was assigned to North Africa Branch. In Tripoli, she developed film, operated the coding machine, and locked classified materials in 12 safes each evening. When the coup occurred, she was the lowest-ranking station member but the first to know.

After Libya, Heidi was posted to Bonn in March 1970, then transferring to Düsseldorf as an operational support assistant handling finance and communications. Her boss, Hans Jensen, left everything to her; she effectively ran the office. After two years, she requested Helsinki, working for station chief David Whipple, a crusty, chain-smoking World War II veteran who was brilliant but impractical. 

In 1974, Whipple received orders to serve as chief of Phnom Penh Station during Cambodia’s final siege and asked Heidi to accompany him as his only assistant. For four months, she ran his household and helped manage the collapsing station as the Khmer Rouge advanced. When Congress cut the American presence to 50 people, Heidi was one of the last to evacuate, departing under live fire in a Marine helicopter. She forged documents to evacuate a Cambodian asset’s family and received the agency’s medal for valor.

Back in Helsinki, the new station chief, Bill Simonsen, assigned Heidi to handle an asset with access to North Koreans. She helped run an operation that got North Korean diplomats expelled for black-market activities. Simonsen then suggested Heidi should become a case officer. This was virtually unheard of for a woman on the “nonprofessional track.” In July 1977, European Division agreed to sponsor her for the Farm, but headquarters imposed a condition: Because she started as a clerk and was a woman, she had to finish first in her class. If she failed, she would remain a clerk forever.

In spring 1966, Lisa Manfull, a Brown University senior, received a letter from the CIA. Lisa had been covertly recruited: Apart from her gender, she was a typical candidate for the CIA’s elite spy training program, multilingual and worldly.

Lisa’s distinctiveness stemmed from her upbringing as a diplomat’s daughter. In 1952, when she was six, her father, Melvin Manfull, was summoned to Paris to implement the US-sponsored Marshall Plan to rebuild post-war European economies. Within a few years, French became Lisa’s first language. Her childhood was often lonely, and her mother emphasized that America’s reputation depended on Lisa’s perfect conduct. During a family vacation in Catalonia, Lisa noticed Spanish surveillance on her father and wrote a report on the man’s patterns, then dropped it on his head from a balcony.

After six years in France, the family returned to America. Lisa added Russian to her French and Spanish. In 1963, while Lisa was studying at Brown, her father was posted to South Vietnam as political counselor at the US embassy in Saigon. For Lisa, the posting resulted in “two really incredible summers in Vietnam” (58). She convinced a Cao Dai general she was an expert on his sect, and worked with a bipartisan social welfare group, discovering that she enjoyed excitement and danger. 

When CIA recruiters approached Lisa, she was intrigued. It was suggested she start as a secretary, which appalled her. She purposely failed the typing exam. Lisa wanted to be a case officer, the agency’s most sought-after position. She knew how to melt into crowds, deploy foreign languages fluently, and create new personas.

After graduation in 1966, she was accepted into the February 1968 career training program and relocated to Washington. She was hired at the GS-7 level. One of her first discoveries was that men were brought straight in as GS-8s.

Lisa Manfull’s CIA training began in 1968 with weeks at Langley headquarters, then proceeded to “the Farm”—Camp Peary in eastern Virginia. Recruits learned tradecraft fundamentals: spotting, assessing, and recruiting assets; devising surveillance detection routes; steaming open envelopes; picking locks; and practicing “bumping”—striking up conversations to make contacts.

Lisa quickly discovered the recruiters had deceived her and she was being steered into the “female channel.” In her class, only five recruits were women, all training as analysts or reports officers. Men were trained as case officers and became the elite “fraternity” of the agency. They had no intention of sharing their privileges with women.

Lisa’s classmate Janine Brookner, a divorced single mother with a master’s degree, also aspired to be a case officer. When Brookner told a female counselor her goal, the counselor flatly told her she would not be one. After completing the full training course, no division chief would hire Brookner. She ended up in a basement office working for an illegal domestic spying operation.

Lisa did well during training but was sent for extra psychological assessment without explanation. After three days with a psychiatrist, she was deemed qualified, but the agency cut her training short. After completing only the one-month “ops familiarization” short course, she was told to return to headquarters. She could not get an assignment as a case officer without full certification. At headquarters, Lisa worked in limbo, watching young men her age being mentored and taken to lunch by senior officers. 

There were no female station chiefs, and few female case officers. The few senior women Lisa encountered were discouraging rather than supportive. Meanwhile, the “vault women” guarded the agency’s institutional memory in windowless rooms, maintaining files on index cards. They knew everything about the most secret operations but were looked down upon. Secretaries in typing pools vastly outnumbered them. “You could come in with a master’s degree in French, and they would put you into the typing pool,” said Jonna Mendez—“The first job was to get out of the typing pool” (72).

Eloise Randolph Page, a Richmond-born blueblood, was the topmost female officer in the CIA’s clandestine service and by far the most unhelpful to younger women. Born in 1920, she studied French and music before becoming Wild Bill Donovan’s secretary during World War II. In 1945, she joined X-2, the OSS unit with access to England’s Ultra code-breaking dispatches, helping identify adversary agents and build a roster of 3,000 known or suspected spies.

After the war, Page tracked technical advances and helped wage the Cold War’s scientific competition with the Soviet Union. In 1957, as chief of the Scientific and Technical Operations Staff, she compiled reports warning of an imminent Soviet satellite launch and predicted a window between September 20 and October 4, a CIA gatekeeper dismissed her intelligence as Soviet disinformation. After Sputnik launched on October 4, Page’s value was better recognized.  

Page rose to GS-18 partly through persistence and partly, she suggested, because she possessed compromising material on influential men. Though powerful, she exerted influence from a bureaucratic position rather than an operational posting. To Lisa Manfull, Page represented everything to avoid.

In 1953, after women peppered Allen Dulles with questions about advancement, he convened an all-female “petticoat panel” to study discrimination. The panel found men readily shared views that women were emotional and quit for marriage. When the panel sought employment statistics, the institution claimed numbers were “classified,” effectively torpedoing the report.

Sexual harassment was pervasive throughout this era. Pornography, used for elicitation overseas, became a harassment tool at headquarters. One deputy director of operations insisted on women wearing skirts when briefing him. When Dick Stolz asked a group of CIA women in the mid-1980s if any had experienced sexual harassment, every hand went up. The CIA asserted control over officers’ sex lives through polygraph “lifestyle” questions; men received lenient treatment while women who reported relationships faced intense scrutiny.

As a result, marriage to a colleague was the obvious option for women seeking personal relationships, but it exposed them to a demeaned spousal identity. When Lisa reported her engagement to case officer David Harper in 1969, the head of career training called screaming, assumed she would quit, and demanded she repay $30,000 in training costs. Another trainee, Jeanne Newell, lost her promised Farm slot when she reported being engaged.

Lisa and David Harper married in September 1969. When Harper was posted to Copenhagen, which had no case officer job for Lisa, she was told to resign and give up her security clearance—standard practice for women whose spouses were transferred overseas. In Denmark, Copenhagen Station began exploiting her under “housewife cover,” sending her on assignments without pay or recognition, a standard technique. One rainy night, she spent three hours conducting a surveillance detection route to meet an asset nobody else wanted to handle. Management expected her to contribute as an unpaid spouse, with no entry in her personnel record.