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The women counter that such concerns are exaggerated -- and some of their male colleagues agree. "Women worked very well in Latin America," says "Mike," a covert paramilitary specialist. "In a lot of cases their informants are looking to unload on someone. They've got a story to tell, and they actually feel more comfortable telling a woman. They're macho, but they're also paternalistic, thinking 'maybe I can help her,' or 'I'm going to impress her, and how much more can I get for her.' That works to a woman's advantage."
With her advanced degree, law-enforcement experience and highly rated "persuasive skills," Diane finished near the top of her CIA training class. Posted to a Soviet-bloc country, she was so good at evading surveillance that headquarters gave her the sensitive job of meeting moles. She once hiked for miles across frozen fields to collect documents from a frightened communist official. "You look into the eyes of a man on a cold, snowy night, and you realize this guy has risked his life to come and give you this information," she says. The man's face had flooded with relief when he sensed that she had done her job right and no one had followed her. She was worried that the next case officer to pull the assignment would not take so much care. "I saw a lot of sloppiness and corner cutting. There were lazy officers who wouldn't have ditched the car, who wanted to get home in a hurry."
Back at the office, however, Diane was in trouble with jealous and influential colleagues who regarded her mission as a game from which they had been excluded. One day she was given an airplane ticket to Washington and ordered to report to the CIA medical staff to answer questions about an alleged drinking problem. Doctors at Langley quickly exonerated her. Their records reflected that the false charges had been levied by a supervisor. "I had been told by another woman case officer, 'Watch out for him, he'll get you,'" she says. And he eventually did. At her next two posts, in Western Europe, she was denied jobs where she could recruit informants. Without sufficient recruits, Diane's job ratings slid and she was dispatched to headquarters. "I'm just treading water," she says. "The DO lives and dies on recruitments. It's a scalp hunt."
Female officers are especially hard hit, they say, because DO managers tend to typecast male case officers as recruiters and relegate women to lower-status "handling" jobs, in which they debrief, nurture and pay previously recruited agents. The women contend that the skill of coaxing sensitive data out of skittish informants ought to be at least as valued as a knack for striking up acquaintances.
Worse, they say, officers laboring under recruit-or-perish pressure tend to sign up large numbers of marginal sources. "People go out and recruit assets that don't produce," says Lynn Larkin, who spent eight years as a CIA case officer covering Czechoslovakia and Western Europe. As an unmarried woman, Larkin says she was pressured by her station chief to stop dating a fellow American, even though he had a security clearance. She resigned in disgust 18 months ago, after a married Directorate executive invited her to lunch, announced, "I can help your career if you stick with me," and then pressed Larkin against her car with his body. The DO, says a former top CIA official, "is almost a whole generation behind in its thinking."