The Women Who Built the CIA

Holt, Nathalia.  Wise Gals: The Spies Who Built the CIA and Changed the Future of Espionage.   

       New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2022.  ISBN: 9780593328484  

How much do you know about the early years of the Central Inelegance Agency?  How much have you read about its predecessors - the  Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the Central Intelligence Group (CIG)?   If the answer to either question is not much, Wise Gals will help fill in gaps in your knowledge.

 

Nathalia Holt in Wise Gals opens with a coterie of women - Addy Hawkins, Liz Sudmeier, Mary Hutchison, Jane Burrell, and Eloise Page -  working with others on the Petticoat Commission in November 1953.  This commission was compiling facts and data regarding the inequities in job titles and especially pay between women and men at the CIA.  After this opening, Wise Gals digs into a changing cast of women who were initially part of the OSS during World War II and stayed on to deal with the new reality of the developing Cold War.  There were double agents who they need to bring in, new contacts to develop, and leads to follow.  Holt divided the book into five sections subdivided into chapters.  Each chapter is titled with an operation name, date, and then the name of the "wise gal" who is the main focus of the chapter.    Operations ranged from 1940's Ukrainian dissidents to Iraq Revolution in 1950's to Sputnik to the specs for MIG-19 to U-2/Gary Powers fiasco to the Bay of Pigs disaster in 1960's.  

 

The women Holt writes about in Wise Gals have all died so their stories can be told while those "wise gals" still surviving will get their time to shine when they are gone.  It is amazing who is known from the CIA versus who actually did the work of making the CIA as functional as it is.  Read Wise Gals and celebrate their triumphs and mourn their losses!