The Sisterhood: The Secret History Of Women At The CIA

The New York Times bestselling author of Code Girls reveals the untold story of how women at the CIA ushered in the modern intelligence age, a sweeping story of a "sisterhood" of women spies spanning three generations who broke the glass ceiling, helped transform spycraft, and tracked down Osama Bin Laden. When the CIA was created in 1947 it was a male-dominated workplace that needed women to type memos, send messages, manipulate expense accounts, and keep secrets. Over the years despite discrimination-even because of it-these clerks and secretaries rose to become some of the shrewdest, toughest operatives in the CIA moving unnoticed on the streets of Bonn, Geneva, and Moscow and stealing secrets under the noses of the KGB. In the final years of the twentieth century, it was a close-knit network of female CIA analysts who warned about the rising threat of Al Qaeda and they showed that painstaking data analysis would be crucial to the post-9/11 national security landscape-an effort that culminated spectacularly in the CIA's successful efforts to track down Osama Bin Laden and, later, Ayman al-Zawahiri. The author has spoken with key players who have never before gone on the record, including active CIA employees and we are expecting a stellar publicity lineup.