The Ghosts of Langley by John Prados

Author:John Prados
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620970898
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2017-09-14T04:00:00+00:00

6

THE SHERIFFS

THE CIA HAD LONG HAD A PROBLEM WITH WOMEN. FROM THE BEGINNING, agency folk considered spying man’s work. Women were not viewed quite the same as homosexuals, but they needed to fight for acceptance. The agency encouraged spooks to wed within its family because those unions joined people already vetted. Beyond that, women at the CIA labored at a disadvantage. What jobs should be open to them and how rapidly they might rise were questions seldom asked. The agency frequently hired wives of officers as clerical workers, especially when the husband was headed overseas. That practice simplified tasking and security in the stations. Throughout the CIA, any women often worked as clericals, or later sometimes as reports officers (in the DO) or analysts (in the DI).

Naturally women noticed, and of course they were restive. Men noticed too. Years later, a senior officer reflecting on the clandestine service culture of the 1950s remembered, “There were plenty of women in the dank, sloping halls of the temporary buildings below the Lincoln Memorial and later in Langley, but almost all were in the clerical category . . . the DO had some of the best-educated women in the country doing its filing and typing.” That impression, published by a thirty-five-year DO veteran in the early 1990s, had its roots in the very first days of the Central Intelligence Agency.

In basic courses, women junior officer trainees (JOTs) were excluded from the explosives, weapons, sabotage, and parachute segments, leaving them unqualified for command functions. This continued to be the situation in May 1953, when the Great White Case Officer himself appeared at the JOT course for his soon-to-be-standard keynote speech. After reciting his great failure to enlist Vladimir Lenin before the Russian Revolution, Allen Dulles opened the floor to questions. Many could have been expected—on the CIA’s role in the U.S. government, whether the agency would still be needed if the Soviet Union had a change of heart, on the need for a paramilitary capability, or on the danger of politicization in intelligence analysis. But several female JOTs put Dulles to the test. Did he think women were given sufficient recognition? Why were members of the fairer sex hired at lower grade levels than men? Was he going to do something about it? “I think women have a very high place in this work,” the recently promoted CIA chieftain replied, “and if there is discrimination, we’re going to see that it’s stopped.” Director Dulles promised he would put the agency’s inspector general on the matter.

GLASS-CEILING DILEMMAS

Here the action illustrated another kind of role for CIA lawyers. The inspector general (IG), like a camp counselor, had a responsibility to keep the action within bounds. This applied to all aspects of spy work. One result of Dulles’s encounter with the women trainees was formation of a task force of agency women. That group itself illustrated the depth of the problem. Agency officers were ranked from GS (General Service)-1 to GS-18; the top ranks—equivalent to Army colonels and above—started at GS-15.

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