Are you a fan of true crime, history, adventure, James Bond? These nonfiction books on espionage may be just what you’re looking for.
I found “The Sisterhood: The Secret History of the Women at the CIA” by Liza Mundy absolutely riveting. Along with a bit of general history of the Central Intelligence Agency, the book tells the stories of select women with CIA jobs, exciting tales of spycraft, and snippets of their adventures.
Because of movies and books, most people used to think there weren’t any women in the CIA. Mundy tells us, “The women were there all along, though the agency sought ways to suppress their voices and set them against one another, even as the male leaders relied on their loyalty, their skills at elicitation, their attention to detail, and their insights.”
It’s true that most agents in the past were male. Most women started out as file clerks or secretaries or translators, and some became mapmakers or followed money trails, and a select few became agents. During World War II, “The Germans considered bringing women into the Nazi war machine and decided not to. They felt women belonged at home. So did the Japanese war cabinet.” But the Allies employed women, understanding that clerks and assistants had access to “wonderful files” full of vital information. Also, “Gender helped quite a bit when surreptitiously picking a lock to gain access to a hotel room.” Women were often disregarded while working in plain sight, and many an unsuspecting man was eager to impress a pretty woman with his knowledge of secrets.
Mundy writes, “Being underestimated because of gender (or any other reason) is an advantage when you are a spy on the street trying to move around unobserved. Being underestimated is a problem for everybody when you are a woman (or anybody) in a national security community trying to make yourself heard about something important you have discovered.” Yes, women often had difficulty getting their observations past the CIA bureaucracy. This led to several intelligence failures, because their findings were ignored.
There was also outright misogyny. One CIA director decreed that “female employees must wear high-heeled pumps even in the parking lots.” How silly! Mundy tells us that “office sex was assumed to occur as a matter of course. And people thought it was amusing. And so, women … had to navigate a workplace in which they were assumed to be, on some level, playthings.”
In addition, “Women who aspired to serve abroad were told to forgo having a family, whereas for men, having a wife and children was encouraged.” In fact, wives were often unpaid workers, acting as hostesses, passing messages, and more. At some point, women began to build alliances to encourage, mentor, and stand up for one another.
Mundy’s tales of operatives include a young woman called “Tall Julia” in 1944 whose married name after the war was Julia Child. One woman in 1969 found herself in the midst of a coup in Libya, and another was involved in the Iranian hostage crisis in 1980. I was especially interested in how deeply women were involved in identifying al-Qaeda early on (but “nobody wanted to hear about it”) and in the search for Osama bin Laden.
“It’s not that women are better. It’s that women bring something different to the table,” Mundy concludes.
“Spy work can be fun,” one woman said. So can this book!
“Ghosts of Honolulu” by Mark Harmon and Leon Carroll, Jr. reveals the untold story of espionage in Hawaii before, during, and after the WWII attacks on Pearl Harbor. Carroll is a retired Naval Criminal Investigative Service Special Agent, and Harmon is the star of the popular TV series “NCIS.”
The book introduces us to several major players, both in the United States and Japan, focusing on Hawaii’s naval intelligence Special Agent Douglas Wada. Wada, the son of Japanese immigrants, grew up speaking both English and Japanese. He spent part of his youth in Japan, so he understood Japanese traditions and mindset, but he always felt loyal to the United States.
Wada was recruited in 1937 to serve in naval intelligence to “sniff out sympathizers, spies and saboteurs.” He became “the first Japanese American agent working within naval intelligence anywhere in the world.” But he wasn’t allowed to join the Navy, because it didn’t accept Japanese Americans. Part of his duty was to assess the loyalty of local Japanese Americans. His work involved counterintelligence and counterespionage, but for Wada, there was “a lot less cloak-and-dagger work than expected, or even hoped.” Rather, he was told, “Each investigation should be regarded as a scientific problem, requiring careful analysis, logical reasoning and the practical demonstration of factors.” And “catching people isn’t always the strategic thing to do.”
As you can imagine, it gets pretty exciting in the run-up to Pearl Harbor, on both sides. One thing I found most interesting was the Japanese secret communication scheme, with signals using bedsheets strung on clothesline, lights in windows, flashing car headlights, and more. They also sent secret messages in weather reports on Radio Tokyo.
The appendix reveals what happened to the main people mentioned in the book. The manuscript needed a final editor, and I suggest you write down the many names you encounter, to remember whose side they’re on, but it makes good reading for history buffs.
Happy reading!
Mary Louise Ruehr is a books columnist for The Portager. Her One for the Books column previously appeared in the Record-Courier, where she was an editor.