Transcript of Uncovering the hidden roles of CIA women

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Welcome to the Watch floor. I'm Sara Adams. When people think about intelligence history, they picture men in suits, smoke-filled rooms, lone operatives, sneaking over the borders with assumed identities. They rarely picture women. I mean, women were there. Some of the most effective intelligence officers are completely invisible. And that's what we're going to talk about today. Women whose work shaped wars, dismantled networks, exposed moles, and most importantly, saved lives. This was without medals or fan fair, and lots of times without their names, even attached to the success. These women weren't symbols. They weren't recruited to prove a point. They were chosen because they were damn good. That's exactly why most people have never heard of them. If you have never noticed this, intelligence history is usually reported backwards. When an outcome happens, it can be a victory, a defeat, exposure, or a failure, then they retrofit this clean narrative that tells the story. But of course, in the process, a lot of pieces get put aside that really don't fit into this myth of intelligence and intelligence collection and intelligence operations. Women in intelligence have often been reduced to two simple categories. One is support roles, right?

Like they're working as a secretary. And the other is, Oh, they're just this crazy anomaly, right? This one-hit wonder. And neither of these are accurate. From the earliest days of organized intelligence, women were collectors, analysts, cryptographers, couriers, and case officers. They ran sources. They penetrated hostile territory. They identified threats others missed. A simple way to think about it is this. If intelligence is a machine, these women weren't the decoration on the outside or even the instruction manual. They were part of the gears that kept it running. Many of them have been obscure for real reasons. First is a lot of the work remained classified. Second, their success was quietly incorporated into their organizations as an institutional success. Third, they were deliberately erased to protect sources and methods. We can't have these undercover case officers be tied to the individuals they associated with. A lot of this came out in the thread of this idea when Valerie claims identity was exposed, and then a lot of people were making the complaints, Hey, if you expose an undercover CIA officer, it also exposes all the historic relationships they made over time. That's a very, very dangerous thing for people who worked with the US government and trusted that they would be kept safe and their identity would not be revealed.

Now, to understand modern intelligence collection, and today's debate of human intelligence versus technical intelligence, you really need to understand some of the women who developed this tradecraft in this art. So let's start with one of the most effective intelligence officers during the Second World War. She really finally has gotten a lot of her praise. This is Virginia Hall. There's now the movie A Call to Spy, and then there is the great book, A Woman of No Importance. So people are starting to understand her role, but it is important to talk about her because because she was so successful at what she did. So she worked with the Office of Strategic Services, obviously the precursor to the CIA, and she was behind enemy lines in occupied France, of course, working against the Nazis. Now, she had some major roles. First off, she built entire resistance networks. I mean, think of just how difficult something like that is. She then coordinated sabotage operations, I mean, against the Nazis. She facilitated weapons and different arms drops. She got the tools into the hands of the people that needed them. She evaded capture again and again. She did all this with a prosthetic leg.

Now, the Gustavo knew her by name. They actually referred to her as the most dangerous of all Allied spies. Think of what you had to have done for not just the enemy, but for an intelligence organization to make that professional assessment about you and your work. She often, though, things in the retelling of her story are usually missing key elements. One is that she was a master at Tradecraft. She didn't use things like bravado to get things done. She was patient. She was very smart to keep things compartmented. Everything was built on trusted networks. She understood that intelligence was about people, not the theatrics of these operations. The movies sometimes show an intelligence operation, like this sprint, and things are going as fast as they possibly Virginia really looked at things as this long, steady race, right? You keep your pace. And that made her slow. It made her disciplined. And over time, as you can imagine, it made her lethal, and that was the issue the enemy had with her. After the war, though, her contributions were pretty minimized, and she was literally given a desk job. Promotions that she went up for, failed to be passed.

Not because she failed at her job, she was one of the best in the world, but it's because her image didn't fit the narrative of what intelligence was at the time. Virginia Hall is a reminder that you can go to the field and get all the accolades in the world and be the best on the ground. But when you're back at headquarters, when you're back in DC, the The institution doesn't always translate that forward in the way they should. And it is a constant problem. And it even still happens today. And this is why the government loses good people, right? A rock star is not going to stay. If their talent isn't respected. Now, the next person we're going to roll into is that time long before computers or long before the normal signals phone collection, email collection that we know have occurred. This was Elizabeth Smith-Friedman. So she was a crypto analyst. She broke encrypted communications. So these were by smugglers. I mean, this is going to show the age, run runners, different syndicates, Nazi agents, and foreign intelligence operatives. In this case, all of these individuals were operating right here on US soil.

She was protecting the homeland. This work helped dismantle massive espionage rings. And think about it, you didn't even have to take a shot. Think of how many people were saved in the way this was done. So if espionage works like a locked room, for example, she didn't come up and kick the door down. She figured out a way to pick the lock and just walk straight in. I mean, it's brilliant, and it's something that's done all the time today, but we take for granted that there are people who started this process for us. What's striking is how little recognition she gets. Her husband was also a cryptologist, and a lot of her work get raps under him, and he gets the credit for things she really accomplished in the field. And a lot of the things she learned the tradecraft she developed, became institutionalized, and people are putting it into practice today and don't even know the roots of where these lessons came from, in the skill developed from. So when you think of modern Siget, we have pattern recognition. She did that. We have traffic analysis. She did that. We have behavior Cerebral decoding.

She did that. And this is a key foundation of the entire discipline. Elizabeth is something that intelligence agencies really still struggle with today. When you have this brilliant technical mind, that often disappears. Others really get credit for the type of work because obviously a daisy down, and someone at the end of the operation gets the credit when really, breaking the comms was the key piece of the puzzle. Next, we have the famous Nour Inyat Khan. She was actually a British Special Operations Executive, right under the SOE at the time, like Virginia Hall was in the OSS, and she was a wireless operator also inserted behind enemy lines in France. Really, what the wireless operator was is the person that kept all the communications going for the entire resistance network. Think of how valuable this person is. If you cut the signal to that network, the resistance essentially falls apart because there's no way to plan, communicate, set operations, even to know who to trust. Well, the unfortunate thing that happened in her case is her network became compromised, and she knew it. This is where things get really complicated. She stayed anyway and kept operating the network because obviously what was compromised was her.

She then knew, Hey, the risk of capture is on me. The risk of interrogation is on me, the risk of execution is on me. The risk of execution is on me. She wasn't reckless. She understood that the network would not be able to do their jobs if this silence occurred. So she went forward anyway. When you think about this, nor made a conscious decision to keep broadcasting, knowing she was going to buy time for others, but also knowing she was going to increase the risk of her own capture. Unfortunately, she was captured and executed. Now, in present day, she's really treated like a martyr. But there's so much more to this that isn't understood. We're missing the framework of her dedication and her professionalism. She understood the massive consequences of her decisions the risk, but also the duty to keep this rolling for others. Intelligence work is sometimes this difficult game where you get to the end and you're only choice is the best of the worst options. Norc presents those moments that many people have been faced with. She She had to choose between staying alive and completing the mission. They were no longer aligned.

She could not do both. And she chose the mission. Let's now fast forward to Cold War America. Here we have Zahn Vertoufoy. She was a counterintelligence officer in the CIA, and she played a central role in identifying Identifying Aldrich Ames. As most people know, that didn't happen easily. It didn't happen quickly. It didn't happen, unfortunately, when he first started making compromises to the organization. He was caught because analysts like Zone trusted patterns. One of her colleagues later put it, She didn't chase personalities. She followed the data. That mindset really defined her approach. When you think of counterintelligence, it's more like you're diagnosing a disease. So you're not looking for some dramatic symptom. You're looking for all these subtle changes to figure out what could be wrong with this person. Now, when she tracked down Ames, she did it through concrete behavioral and financial anomalies. I want to walk through some of the key ones so you understand. First off, he suddenly started living well beyond his means, right? So beyond the salary he was getting from the CIA. That was his only job, technically. So he bought a new house. He was buying expensive items.

None of these things fell into the budget of a normal CIA officer. He then had travel patterns, timings, and even associates and connections that had really nothing to do with his account at the CIA. He also repeatedly made bad operational decisions that resulted in compromises of assets, It affected field operations. Again and again and again, he wasn't blamed or held accountable in any way for this. It was Zahn and her colleagues that started looking at these statistical spikes of when we had Soviet asset deaths or captures, and they were able to correlate them to information that only Ames knew and Ames had access to. She noticed these inconsistencies that others dismissed, and then she had to push a lot. The institution was really resisting the fact that this could be an internal problem. Her persistence compiling file after file, overlaying financial records on it, network access logs, and then the operational failures that you could tie to aims eventually convinced leadership of Oh, this problem is internal. The analysis really cracked open the case, and obviously the perseverance helped. Now, counterterrorism successes are rare early celebrated because it forces an organization to realize all along that they had an internal failure.

This is a very complicated space to work in, as you can imagine. And that's why Zahn really remains this unknown, which is crazy because so many people know what Ames did. Her work is a direct ancestor of today's current Insider Threat programs, different behavioral analytics we use to look for threats against us, and then the risk framework of when you realize there's a problem, you can't wait too long to find these issues in your organization, because in this case, unfortunately, it led to a lot of people dying. So she reminds us that sometimes the most important threats come from within, and that's difficult to think of the person next to you causing this. Seeing that and understanding that at times really does take someone with intellectual courage, and that's what we had in this case. Now, Ames was ultimately arrested on February 21st, 1994. He was convicted of espionage and tax evasion. He got life in prison without the possibility of parole. Just This year, on January fifth, he actually died in custody. He was in the federal correction institution in Cumberland, Maryland. Beyond the damage to institutions, especially damage to the CIA's intelligence collection, his actions led to the arrest and execution of intelligence officers who trusted the United States to protect them, and most importantly, to protect their identities.

Not all intelligence officers their names in the history books. Heck, some are still at it today, right? They might be 30 years into a very successful career. You have never heard of them. A lot of this gets forgotten, really starting In the 1990s, we had all of these very effective women working against terrorists. They really came forward after the embassy bombings, and they ended up mapping out these entire East African terrorist networks and really going hard at the enemy. In several cases, these women were much better positioned than men to do this role. They could see different things when they were doing case handling about motivation and deception. They could interact with different family members, facilitators, and then female members of these networks that their male counterparts had zero access to. In detaining debriefing operations, lots of times they'd pair up a female debriefer and a female analyst. It wasn't exactly as a tactic, it was capability. They were there to evaluate inconsistencies. They were testing the different narratives that were coming out, and they were tracking the shifts in behavior over time from these detainees. They weren't looking for one single item said during a session.

It was, what did we learn over time from this? A really great example is the information that led to the capture of Osama bin Laden that came from detaining to briefings. It was the fact that one detainee talked about the courier, Ahmed Al-Kouadi, saying how important and valuable he was, and Osama bin Laden wouldn't be without him. And then the other detainees would always downplay them. Some acted like they didn't know him. Some would say, Oh, he's not important at all, or he doesn't really do anything with the organization, or he's no longer with the organization. And there were people that had to make the assessment, Well, who's telling the truth? Who's lying? And should we go down this pathway? Is there a They're there. Another thing that gets forgotten is we had these female cultural support teams embedded with special operations in Afghanistan. This wasn't something symbolic like, Oh, we need women on the mission. They really were there filling intelligence gaps. I mean, think about it. When you have half the population of a country completely inaccessible, why would you not take advantage of that for intelligence collection? And they did this masterfully.

So they weren't bypassing some defenses. They just went to doors that a lot of people didn't realize existed. They didn't even consider, what do the women know? What do the women have access to within these families? And we get to know some women because of successes. So Maya is a really great example. Maya from Zero Dark Thirty, she led the hunt for Osama bin Laden, but she is still classified. She is not up publicly. There's a lot of misconception and lies that she's a composite of multiple analysts and targetters, and that's just not true. There is one Maya. And the thing is, she It really is known because of her persistence, her analytic vigor. She went against narratives within the CIA, the main narrative being Osama bin Laden was hiding in Shittral, Pakistan. And she came forward with this location more in the settled areas, maybe in a Hassan Abad or Abad Abad. And a lot of people push back hard on her assessment because it was different, right? She was the outlier, but her persistence paid off. And now we all know who she is, at least the movie version of her. Then we have situations where something bad happens, and that's when we get to learn about these rock stars.

A great example is Shannon Kent. She wasn't CIA. She was a Navy information warfare officer, and then she was assigned to special operations, and unfortunately, got killed by ISIS in Syria back in 2019. But her work sat at this intersection of intelligence, cyber warfare, and targeting. She was there supporting counterterrorism missions alongside the US and coalition partners. And like many women operating in intelligence roles, her contributions were operational. They were decisive, but they were largely invisible till, unfortunately, her death pushed them into the spotlight. Then we have another case that offers the example of the cost of exposure. There's a reason these women need to stay under cover. So this is Shannon Spann. If you don't know her, she is the wife of Johnny Mike Spann, the first CIA officer killed post-9/11 during our operations in Afghanistan. He was killed in Khali Jangi. Well, after his death, the press put out that she was a case officer working at the CIA, completely blowing her cover. So think about it. She now can no longer do that job because to do that job, you need to be anonymous. And she was not anonymous. She was on the news, the front page of the Watchation Post.

So She had to go take another role in the CIA, not because she wasn't effective or there was something wrong with her skills, but because she couldn't stay hidden in the shadows like she would have needed to to run source recruitment methods. These women underscore a baseline or a truth. That intelligence work is like this giant ecosystem. Some women are CIA case officers, others are analysts, others are military intelligence officers. We have information warfare officers. We have different operational enablers. And many work in the shadows with CIA or special operations units. They're all in different lanes But these women have the same risk, the same stakes, and they're really put in situations where they have to keep the same level of silence regarding these operations. Many of these women remain unnamed for a reason. Operational security doesn't end when the mission ends, especially when the networks persist. Ideologies regenerate. We're talking about terrorism. Well, the targets they work, their son is now run those organizations. They would still be at risk. Maya would be at risk from Bin Laden sons who probably will end up being a lot more powerful than Bin Laden. That is something that matters.

But the lessons they brought us really remain relevant, and we have to talk about them. Their impact disrupted so many plots, plots that the public aren't even aware of. They rolled up facilitation pipelines. They corrected analytic assumptions. We got a lot wrong over the years, and there had to be someone who stuck their neck out and said, Hey, we have this wrong. In a lot of cases, that was women. And a lot of the tradecraft they ended up learning, they pushed it forward, and it's now taught in classified spaces. It was Alex Station at the CIA who really started the profession of targeting, but targeting did not exist. It wasn't a discipline. It wasn't a training course. It was a lot of these women who got together to make it an established training program at the CIA. So now you can be hired as a targetter, go through the course just like you go through their analytic course or the course for case officer. So they didn't just do the job. They put together a system where they can train hundreds of other people to come in and do this job effectively. A lot of these successes get ignored, but they're valuable.

So People aren't invisible in these cases because they're marginal. It's because they're actually effective, and I really hope that's clear today. Now, this isn't just a history lesson. When we talk about modern intelligence, it still struggles with some of the same issues we went over today. It's this undervaluing of human intelligence, this over prioritizing of technology, and confusing what actually is effectiveness? What is success? What's going to last 10, 20, 30 years? Women in intelligence were never recruited because they are harmless. They were recruited because they are effective at what they do. Understanding their contributions matters, especially now when there are so many narratives out there about threat actors, counterintelligence, intelligence, intelligence capabilities, and everything's being oversimplified for public consumption. But with that public consumption, as you can imagine, so much misinformation comes with it. Everyone wants to make CIA the bad guy, and they're forgetting the work that was done behind the scenes. If we don't understand how that all comes together, that really does become a blind spot, and we forget this majorly effective tool we have at our disposal. Invisible assets are invisible by design. They don't seek recognition, they don't need to applaud, and they rarely get credit for the work that they do.

But intelligence history and modern security does not exist without these amazing assets that came before all of us. This has been The Watch floor. I'm Sarah Adams, and let me leave you with this. The people you hear the least about are usually the ones who mattered the most. Thanks for being here..

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