![]() The agency compares much better against the government and private sector intelligence community, according to the 2012 report. However, the CIA’s gender-inclusiveness is not representative of a larger trend in the field of security. “Even in Moscow, our female case officers were the only members of our CIA station that did not receive surveillance because the soviets did not use women.” “I thought it was an advantage to be a woman in many countries… They did not imagine I was involved,” Mendez said. Joana Hiestand Mendez, former chief of disguise in the CIA’s Office of Technical Service, spent years working as a clandestine photographer overseas. “I am not scary looking and men would think ‘oh it’s my lucky day’ rather than ‘my cover is blowing up’.” “It takes a special skill set, but the very first step is meeting these people,” she said. Like Sisco, Melissa Mahle, who was involved in many key CIA operations, including those related to al-Qaida terrorists, being a woman meant that she could easily establish relationships with suspects and targets. Also, for the first time since its creation in 1947, the agency is now led by a woman, Gina Haspel, and so are its three top directorates – operations, analysis and science and technology. For security reasons, the agency does not release information on its workforce composition, but according to a 2012 report by the CIA Director’s Advisory Group, women accounted for nearly half of the overall staff at that time. ”Īlthough the CIA has historically been dominated by men, the agency has progressively become more gender-inclusive. I had nothing to hide – they knew I was there to interrogate them – but the fact that I could be sympathetic, that I could really listen to them, came across as so genuine that they thought they could put their guard down. “The amount of trust I was able to gain from my detainees was amazing,” she said. Sisco, who has now retired from the CIA, attributes at least some of her success to being a woman. WASHINGTON – When Lena Sisco graduated from Brown University with an archeology master’s degree, she would have never predicted she would become the CIA’s lead interrogator for many high-value detainees in prisons across the world, from Afghanistan to Cuba.
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