Wise Gals: The Spies Who Built the CIA and Changed the Future of Espionage

by Nathalia Holt

What she could not tell her family, of course, was that the people she would be meeting were spies and that her presence in Germany was the continuation of an operation she had initiated years earlier. She was a field officer in the clandestine service of the CIA, also called the directorate of operations and sometimes referred to as the “department of dirty tricks.”

These new operations would not be planned inside Washington. The CIA headquarters was moving to a massive, 258-acre complex across the Potomac River in McLean, Virginia. Thirty acres of the property was purchased from two pioneers of the women’s labor movement: Florence Thorne and Margaret Scattergood, who had purchased the land along with a spacious colonial house in 1933. When the CIA approached with an offer to buy the property, the two women agreed with one contingency: that they be allowed to live out the rest of their lives in the house. Caring little for the home, the CIA agreed, and the two women spent the next forty years living among their nosy neighbors.

The espionage operation, which had once seemed so flimsy, riddled as it was with vanishing double agents, was now producing some of the most reliable intelligence on the inner workings of Soviet biological research.

After Mary’s involvement in the Bay of Pigs operation, it was perhaps understandable that she would want to stay in Germany. The CIA she had joined years earlier was not the same agency that existed now. The Bay of Pigs had irreparably changed both the personnel and the perception of her employer, but it had not stripped the CIA of its controversial actions. Despite the headaches paramilitary operations were causing the CIA, and the angst to come, the espionage work that Mary offered was still perceived by some at the agency as second-class.

The problem with the cargo manifests, at least as far as Addy could see, were the blank spaces. There was no palm oil listed, nor tractors, plows, or seeders. Ships kept arriving in Havana, but what they carried was mysteriously left off the shipping documents. Addy’s group was not intimately involved in the direction of the Cuban operations, but expertise in covert communications was critical to the CIA’s planning. Addy was working closely with the NSA’s signal intelligence team to gather intelligence inside Cuba. She did not like what she was seeing or hearing.

In the small town of Mariel, just west of Havana, Addy and the NSA were covertly listening in as ships were secretly unloaded. They heard whispers of Soviet tanks but could find no evidence of them. Unloading the ships was done in the dead of night, with black canvas stretched across the area, flights grounded, and a well-armed security detail. Sheets of metal were placed around the weaponry to deflect infrared photography, while tractors and harvesters were parked on the top deck to avert suspicion. Addy could guess what serious weaponry was being hidden from their prying eyes, but she could not confirm it. In the space of one month in 1962, Addy noted fifty-seven deliveries from the Soviet Union to Cuba transported with shipping manifests she was certain were fabricated or missing information. They had to get a better look.

Arguably the most important task at the CIA in the late 1960s was gathering intelligence on nuclear weaponry. No other work would impact more lives or promote peace more effectively. “Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable,” President Kennedy once said in a speech to the United Nations. “Every man, woman, and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.”

Today, roughly half of all CIA officers are women, working in locations spread out across the globe. They lead lives that the trailblazers of the agency could have only dreamed of, obtaining coveted field positions despite the “hazards” the male CIA administrators of 1953 once warned of: partners, marriages, and children. “Although it took decades for full fruition,” reads a 2003 agency report, “the seeds of today’s diversity were first nurtured by this 1953 panel.”