Eloise Page had a master’s degree in political science from George Washington University, but when she started her career at the CIA’s predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), in 1942, it was as a secretary.
Page worked for OSS head ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, and in her secretarial role she came to learn everything about him and other key players at the agency.
“I had the goods on him, and I played it for all it was worth,” she’s quoted as saying in “The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at the CIA” (Crown).
The new book by author Liza Mundy depicts how women in intelligence have had to endure rampant sexism and misogyny for decades — and how some cunning gals, like Page, used it to their advantage.
As former agent Jonna Mendez explained to Mundy: “You could come in with a master’s degree in French, and they would put you into the typing pool … [And] the first job was to get out of the typing pool.”
But, Mundy writes, “Secretaries did much more than type … They drafted correspondence and took calls from bosses’ colleagues, wives, children, mistresses, enemies, and friends.
“They knew who was angry with whom and who was undermining whom and who was having sex at lunchtime with a woman not his wife. One former secretary recalled that she paid all her boss’s bills, ‘wrote his mother a letter every week,’ and knew how much he spent on therapy sessions.”
While Page was initially relegated to a traditional female role despite her high level of education, she used the access to information she had as secretary to manipulate colleagues for her own advancement.
She memorized files on most people at the agency and, crucially, she also had pictures. “Meaning: incriminating photos,” writes Mundy.
But Page also played the men at their own game. After the CIA was established in 1947, Page went on to become the highest ranking female officer in the clandestine operations service.
“Apart from knowing secrets, the key to her advancement was making herself unpleasant,” writes Mundy. A fellow agent, Lee Coyle, tells Mundy: “She scared some of these men to death. They were afraid to go into her office.”
In the world of espionage, sex was a key weapon in any agent’s armory and married women, unlike male agents, weren’t as predisposed to infidelity, a trait which gave them leverage against targets but also fellow officers prone to wandering.
Tracy Barnes, one of the early architects of the CIA’s clandestine operations, once said that men join the CIA because “they crave constant danger and for the sex” — a hunger that didn’t always serve them in the field.
Other agents, like Lisa Manful, used traditional feminine traits, such as empathy and emotional intelligence, to win over sources and get information.
For those women who could withstand the rampant sexism at the CIA, there were opportunities.
Jonna Mendez, for instance, enrolled on many training programs, even though it wasn’t really the done thing for women.
She took courses in defensive driving, escape and evasion and shooting.
On a photography training course, meanwhile, she found herself hanging out of aircraft with a long lens 35mm camera just to master new spying techniques.
It was an unorthodox approach but one that saw her became the real-life version of Q in the James Bond novels, developing spy gadgets like tiny cameras and hidden microphones and teaching officers how to use them.
“They just didn’t think a woman could run an operation,” says Mendez in the book. “They didn’t think a woman could start an operation.”