Women CIA spies

Female CIA operatives are featured 
in the Corey Pearson- CIA Spmaster series

 

Women make up a good deal of the CIA’s personnel. A couple years ago, stats showed that, across the entire Intelligence Community, 61% of intelligence professionals were men compared and 39% were women.

     Over the years, the CIA has substantially increased the number of women in its ranks; nearly half of its workforce is now women, and many are clandestine field operatives.

     Valerie Plame is my favorite female CIA operative. She was fresh out of college, in her early 20’s, when she became the youngest recruit in the CIA’s 1985 class. One of her classmates, who was age 36 at the time, told me at an Association of Former Intelligence Officer’s (AFIO) luncheon that Plame scored highest of all in using the Russian AK-47 assault rifle.

     Another outstanding female CIA operative was Amaryllis Fox. The Agency targeted her for employment while she was studying international security at Georgetown University. It was impressed by her intellect and the fact that she gathered years of data on every known domestic and international terrorist attack, and developed an algorithm that pulled out heretofore unnoticed patterns to identify terrorist safe havens.

     Fox first became a CIA analyst at age 21, but soon became a field agent assigned to work in foreign countries. Due to her earlier algorithm development, she instinctively was able to locate potential terrorist hiding places, making her a skilled counter-terrorism operative.

     Lastly, you may appreciate this issue of “Spy Agency Happenings!”; it’s all about female spies! 

Robert Morton is a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO) and enjoys writing about the U.S. Intelligence Community. He authors the Corey Pearson- CIA Spymaster series. Check out his latest spy thriller: MISSION OF VENGEANCE.