by Liza Mundy (Crown
by Liza Mundy (Crown 2023)
On May 18, I volunteered as an “Author Escort” at the Gaithersburg Book Festival. After an author finished their presentation in the Frederick Douglass adult nonfiction pavilion, it fell to me to escort them to the book signing line. One of the four authors who had their presentations during my shift was journalist Liza Mundy, who talked about her new book, The Sisterhood. I listened, fascinated, to the presentation, and I later purchased the book (rare for me, a devoted library patron).
In The Sisterhood, while Mundy focuses on female employees and the difficulties that they faced if they wanted to do operations (as opposed to analysts and reports officers), the scope of the book is really much larger than just the women. Mundy presents a history of the CIA, starting with World War 2 and the intelligence failure which resulted in Pearl Harbor, continuing through the Cold War and finishing up with the war against terror. In every phase of its history, women did valuable work, whether they were acknowledged or not (mostly, they were not). Mundy makes sure the reader knows that the people responsible for tracking Osama bin Laden were in large part women. (Similarly, women brought down double agent Aldrich Ames.) Mundy’s point is that women tend to have the patience and the attention to detail that intelligence work requires.
Mundy goes all the way back to Harriet Tubman and Kate Warne, 19th century spies, and includes a multitude of female CIA employees, but Heidi August, Cindy Storer, and Lisa Manfull Harper get the most pages; their names are not familiar to us because their work was done under cover and their contributions never publicly acknowledged (similar for male spies, although some men made a habit of taking credit for the women’s successes). Their stories and those of other women who work in intelligence were a fascinating read.
My only complaint is the constant use of abbreviations and acronyms (NESA, OTA, DI and DO, SOOs, PDB and lots more). That’s U.S. government culture, but I would have appreciated a reference list of those in the front or back of the book to refer to, because the index was not always helpful. I ended up making my own list on the inside of the back cover, but it would have been nice if the publisher had done that work,
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