The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at the CIA

It took me about a month to read, and luckily Jeananne wasn't available to meet when we had originally planned to discuss this, because I was only halfway through at the time!

The Sisterhood was not the kind of book I could sit down and immerse myself in for very long. It was very interesting, and I enjoyed the reading experience, but it was NOT an easy read for me. There's so many names and jobs and time periods and countries going through turmoil that the women were working in, and some of the big names kept being referred back to, and it was challenging to keep up even though I think Mundy did a good job of attempting to differentiate the main players she focused on.

I also get that you gotta market a book in order to get buyers for it, but other than a few groups of women that remained close over the course of their lives through their work and after leaving the CIA, I never got a sense that the women were very all-in on “Women in CIA!” They just were working for their own individual reasons, and they all had their own experiences in it (some better than others), and some saw other women as competition and did everything to keep them down while others saw that rising tides lift all boats.

Also I knew, I KNEW even then, in 2001, as a freshman in high school, that it made ZERO sense to fight the Iraq War. Personal vindication lies here - the female analysts doing counterterrorism told people again and again that there was going to be an attack from al-Qaeda, that Afghanistan was where bin Laden was, and the Powers That Be also wanted to take out Saddam Hussein and so kept asking said analysts to run again and again scenarios in which it might make sense to attack there ... and of course there wasn't but you can't prove a negative. These last few sections were a) really strong, and b) really hard to revisit because I was aware of a lot of what was happening in the world, whereas I had a lot more remove from the earlier parts of the book (during the 1960s, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, etc.).

If Mundy's goal was to introduce people to women doing excellent work in their chosen fields, she succeeded. The Sisterhood didn't make me see the CIA or other intelligence agencies in a better light - I've got some feelings about why it's legal to do illegal things if it's in the name of catching bad guys - but I never got the sense that that was what Mundy wanted to do.

If you're interested in women doing cool shit while the Man tries to keep them down and also get into their skirts, this one's for you.