Breaking Boundaries: The CIA Sisterhood Redefining the Spying Game

Author Liza Mundy’s ‘The Sisterhood’ follows the female officers who rewrote the rules of spycraft, orchestrated a Swiss heist, and chased down the shadow of bin Laden.

Heidi August’s first CIA apartment was lavish for a 22-year-old clerk. It was one of the perks of working at Tripoli station in north Africa - a giant apartment and a secret office just steps from the Mediterranean. Heidi had barely settled in when there was another surprise: gunfire.

It was September 1, 1969, and from her balcony Heidi could see armed men dragging staff out of Libya’s state-run TV station. “Holy crap,” she thought.

Heidi suspected she was one of the few people in the US government who knew a coup was underway so she alerted the top brass and headed out to the Wheelus Air Base on the outskirts of Tripoli to burn classified CIA documents. It was frightening and exhilarating, Heidi recalls in Liza Mundy’s The Sisterhood (2023), a history of the CIA’s female operatives.

Even President Nixon was surprised by the coup. The CIA hadn’t predicted Libya’s pro-American king would be toppled by Moammar Gadhafi, an Air Force officer and son of a Bedouin goat herder. The epic intelligence failure was a game-changer. For the next 40 years, Gadhafi would be blamed for terrorist attacks including the 1988 Pan Am bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland that killed 270 people, including 190 Americans.
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Bonn, not Bond‍

Heidi moved from Tripoli to Bonn, Germany, a city draped in Cold War intrigue and the setting of John le Carré’s A Small Town in Germany. She dreamed about working as a CIA agent handler, setting up meetings in safe houses and running foreign spies. Instead, Heidi worked as a secretary. Women may have been demanding equal rights in the late ‘60s and early 70s, but the CIA wasn’t ready to burn its bra.

Heidi wasn’t the only frustrated female at the Agency. The CIA ranks were filled with educated women who spoke multiple languages and finished at the top of their class in university.

Like Heidi, they smashed into the glass ceiling early on and had two stark options: marry and quit, or marry a colleague and take a back seat to their husband’s CIA career.

“For a female CIA officer who wanted to date or marry, the obvious option - often, the only real option - was to marry a colleague. Then, as now, the CIA became Exhibit A for what sociologists call ‘endogamy’, the formal term for marriage within a clan,” Mundy writes in The Sisterhood.‍

Heidi chose the road less traveled. She practiced spy tradecraft at night, transferred to the CIA’s station in Düsseldorf, then moved to Helsinki, Finland where her job was to coddle the station’s spymaster and take care of details. Heidi was biding her time, learning about finance and the logistics of running a CIA station.
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The Killing Fields‍

When Heidi was asked to work in Cambodia in 1974, she arrived on the eve of the four-month siege of Phnom Penh. The CIA office was lined with sandbags and during intense bombing embassy officials would take cover. Heidi was among the last to leave the besieged capital. Having earned her chops, Heidi returned to an edgy assignment handling an asset with access to North Koreans. Finally, there was a crack in the glass ceiling.

Heidi was sent to the Farm - the CIA’s legendary training camp for officers - and she formulated an ingenious plan. The CIA’s male case officers generally recruited male spies to steal secrets for the US. Their recruitment was based on four key motivators known as MICE: Money, Ideology, Compromise, and Ego. Heidi believed she could recruit female spies based on an entirely different motivation: Revenge.

Working women were fed up with being underpaid and disrespected. Many also had access to top-secret files and encyrption machines used to relay sensitive communications. They were ideally positioned to spy for the US, Heidi told her boss. “It’s your career,” he said. If Heidi wanted to waste her time, “That’s your problem.”

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The Bump

Heidi's breakthrough arrived with a whisper, carried by a cable from Paris alerting Geneva station to the name of a foreign woman with access to an ‘artifact’ the CIA had coveted for years. The potential recruit worked for an African government with an office in Geneva. She played squash. That was about all the CIA knew.

The Farm teaches officers ‘the bump’, however. Heidi concocted a seemingly random encounter while keeping her CIA role undercover. She signed up for squash lessons at a Geneva club and scanned the tournament roster. She found the female target’s name and, before long, they were chatting in the locker room and arranging a friendly squash game.

The target soon confided that she was fed up being treated as a servant at work - expected to make tea and clean up after men who wouldn’t pay her overtime. The target was ‘royally pissed off’ and ripe for CIA recruitment. Heidi lent a sympathetic ear, always with the endgame in mind: Heidi wanted her target to steal the encryption key to the African country’s coded communications system. 

“To surrender your communications system is to bare your national soul: plans, intentions, negotiations, alliances, troop movements,” Mundy writes in The Sisterhood.
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The pitch

After months of trust-building, Heidi revealed her CIA affiliation and made the pitch: Heidi wanted her asset to steal a slender piece of technology that held the key to the country’s encryption machine, allowing the US to break its classified codes.

The CIA would manufacture a sports bag with a secret compartment so the woman could bring the bag to work over the weekend, slip the encryption key into the compartment, and carry the bag to a CIA rendezvous point where the key would be copied. The woman would then return to the office after her 'workout' and replace the key. The target was wary but fascinated.

The ‘simple’ plan was a year in the making, with Langley HQ fine-tuning it with what CIA officers called the ‘3,000-mile screwdriver from Washington’. A CIA polygrapher even flew to Geneva to test the target. He’d never polygraphed a female asset before. “Well,” Heidi said. “Welcome to the world.”

The heist was a success.

The push back‍

Heidi August is one of many CIA officers who've spoken openly about their struggle to be taken seriously at work but times have changed since the Cold War - or have they?

Liza Mundy said readers would be forgiven for thinking women now practically run the CIA: “This shift in perception is one part real progress, one part Hollywood fiction.”

In Mundy’s eyes, the ‘Real Progress’ file includes the appointment of Gina Haspel, the first female director to run the CIA from 2018 to 2021. It also includes Jeanne Vertefeuille and her team who exposed CIA traitor Aldrich Ames; SPYEX consultant Gina Bennett, who in 1993 wrote one of many reports that foreshadowed the danger of Osama bin Laden; Molly Chambers, an operations officer who helped find Nigerian schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram; and Holly Bond, who joined the CIA when it finally began admitting gay, lesbian and LGBTQ+ officers.

‍The spymaster‍

As for Heidi August, the 22-year-old Libyan clerk who rose to become one of the first female CIA station chiefs, the lioness finally retired.

Not long ago, Heidi was at a large gathering and noticed George Tenet was also a guest. She’d irritated the former CIA director many years earlier when Heidi predicted Iraq would become another Beirut.

Heidi figured Tenet wouldn’t remember her, so she introduced herself. In fact, what he said was: “You were right.”