Women spies: our secret weapon
To some degree, the fact that both Homeland and Zero Dark Thirty focus on women reflects a change in the way we in the West perceive what we once called the “War on Terror”. For as long as fury and moral certainty drove our revenge against those who flew planes into our skyscrapers and blew themselves up on our Underground trains, audiences sympathised with Jack Bauer, the gung-ho protagonist of 24 and hero of David Cameron and Senator John McCain. Yet more than a decade on – after all the faulty intelligence, catastrophic military planning and disclosures of torture – Carrie and Maya seem on one level to be apt symbols for our conflicted, war-weary age. But while fictionalised representations of women working on the front lines of anti-terrorism may capture the popular imagination, their cooler-headed real-life equivalents appear to be showing their male colleagues how it should be done.
According to Peter Bergen, the author and global security expert, “the prominent role that women played in the hunt for bin Laden was reflective of the largest cultural shift at the CIA in the past two decades”. Tamir Pardo, the director of Israel’s formidable Mossad agency, has reported finding that women are better-suited than men to several aspects of intelligence work – particularly at “suppressing their ego in order to attain the goal”.
“Women have a distinct advantage in secret warfare because of their ability to multitask,” Mr Pardo said earlier this year. “Women are gifted at deciphering situations. Contrary to stereotypes, you see that women’s abilities are superior to men in terms of understanding the territory, reading situations, spatial awareness. When they’re good, they’re very good.”
None the less, women – who comprise about 40 per cent of senior CIA staff – apparently continue to face predictable challenges to their career progress and to their ability to earn the respect of colleagues. “For decades, the message has been drummed into the public mind that female CIA officers must rely on their looks and clever ways with a weapon to be successful,” Valerie Plame, the CIA agent outed by aides to George W. Bush during a dispute over the Iraq war, has claimed. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked by seemingly reasonable people whether I had to sleep with sources to get the intelligence.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/9740019/Women-spies-our-secret-weapon.html
