Foreign Affairs
Does the CIA have a double standard when its spies cozy up to foreigners? Veteran female officers speak out.
With the money she won from the CIA, Brookner put herself through law school, and, since 1999, she has represented some 40 clients against the CIA. Brookner is the lead attorney in the current class action case. "Women started coming to me around 2002, complaining about double standards," she says. "I wondered how I could help them—appeals within the system just don't work."
The earlier cases pushed the CIA to change, but within limits, says Kent Harrington, a former senior official who ran the public affairs office at the time. "There clearly was plenty of movement by women, but the attitude and dominant culture didn't change that much," he says. "I don't think the system corrected itself through 1998, when I left." Agency officials insist they've made progress since then and cite personnel data to support their case: According to statistics released to U.S. News, 39 percent of the CIA's espionage branch—the National Clandestine Service—is female, including more than a fifth of its case officers or spies; the number of women in the CIA's senior intelligence service—its executive cadre—grew from 14 percent in 1996 to 25 percent in 2006; and during the same time, the number of female station chiefs—the coveted top jobs overseas—rose from 12 percent to 17 percent.
"Right thing." Diversity is a hot topic within the current CIA leadership, which has been under fire for turning away potential recruits because they have foreign relatives or spent time overseas that can't be fully vetted. On Martin Luther King Day this year, Director Michael Hayden acknowledged the importance of diversity—and equality—in the ranks. "There is no second-class officer here," he told his troops. "We ... must continue to strive for a workforce that reflects our diverse world—not only because it is the right thing to do but because it is essential to our success." Notably, the new class action complaint aims to include not only current and past female staffers but also female job applicants, who Brookner believes have been turned away at a higher rate than men. As in the 1995 case, she hopes to use the courts to force the CIA to cough up personnel data, broken down by gender. Brookner and her clients believe the statistics will show a bias in favor of men.
CIA officials believe otherwise, but they are nonetheless pushing hard to keep the case out of court. They have argued to the EEOC that the complaints are not about sex discrimination but about the agency's internal security measures, which federal judges have ruled cannot be challenged in court. They have also moved to classify key filings in the proceedings.
Lora Griffith, a 19-year veteran of the CIA, is Brookner's lead plaintiff in the case. Griffith worked at the Pentagon on counterterrorism before joining the CIA in 1987. Among her early tasks was tracking Russian shipments to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Eager to go abroad, she learned Farsi, the language of Iran, then worked on Middle Eastern targets in western Europe and South Asia.
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