NEWLY released interviews with female CIA officers have given us a
rare window into the lives of women in America's ultra-secretive
intelligence agency.
The four female officers began their CIA careers as entry-level
typists, but worked their way up during the 1960s and 70s to reach the
highest ranks of the organisation. Along the way, they gathered crucial
intelligence using methods that were impossible for male agents to
replicate.One agent, called only "Carla", says an enemy operative once told her about a plot to destroy an embassy because he thought she was "just a woman who wasn't very bright".
"He would seek me out. 'Oh, could we talk?' He would tell me, 'I just love talking to you because you're not very bright'," Carla says.
"And I would just sit like this (innocent expression) ... But it worked. He told me about a plot to bomb the embassy and we arrested him and his gang of merry men as they crossed the border.
"He just told me everything and I got tons of intel out of him because I was just a woman who wasn't very bright."
Carla joined the agency in 1965. She retired in 2005 after becoming Deputy Chief of the CIA's Africa Division.
She believes women were better than men at picking out foreign agents.
"I always said if I ever wrote a book, I would start it with 'You could tell 'em by their socks'," Meredith said.
"With all the (redacted) having such horrible clothes and horrible shoes and socks, the surveillants had good ones," she said. "That would never occur to my husband to look at."
Female agents often worked undercover with James Bond style gadgets, The Daily Mail reports. Bugs were implanted into compact mirrors and evening gowns.
The agency is trying to demonstrate how far women have advanced through its hierarchy over the last few decades.
Today almost half of the CIA's top-level employees are women, including the agency's Deputy Director Avril Haines, who was appointed by President Barack Obama in August.
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