A delicate glass tea set, off bounds to most everyone, sits in Paula Doyle’s living room. Gina Haspel gave it to her for her 40th birthday when the two of them were overseas. Both women came up in the CIA during the 1990s, a time when the agency’s “old-boy” culture was slowly shifting.
“As early as all the rest of us would get up, she would be in earlier,” Doyle, who served as associate deputy director of operations at CIA, says with a laugh. There weren’t many senior women on the operations side then, she says, referring to the small, tight-knit group of spies stationed around the world.
“There were lots of women around, but a lot of them were doing different kinds of work,” she says. “They were doing Washington-based work or support work.”
Haspel, the president’s pick for CIA director, spent 32 of her 33 years at the agency undercover. She has strong support from officials inside and outside the agency, with a range of top intelligence officials and national security leaders urging the Senate to confirm her. The CIA itself has also engaged in a rare push to tell Haspel’s story ahead of her hearing Wednesday, releasing details about her previously unknown past—though Democrats have slammed the agency for what they described as selective and superficial declassification.
Between assignments in D.C. and abroad, she learned Turkish and Russian, and rose to the Clandestine Service’s No. 2 spot, as Haspel remarked Wednesday in written testimony for her confirmation hearing.
“There were few senior women leading at CIA in those days, and we are stronger now because that picture is changing. I did my part-quietly and through hard work-to break down those barriers,” she said. “It is not my way to trumpet the fact that I am a woman up for the top job, but I would be remiss in not remarking on it-not least because of the outpouring of support from young women at CIA who consider it a good sign for their own prospects.”
Much has been made of the fact that, if confirmed, she would be the agency’s first female director. She would also be the rare example of a director who spent most of her career in operations. One retired senior officer said the directorate of operations has historically been both male-dominated and selective, with officers describing themselves as “fighter pilots” or members of “the world’s most exclusive club.”
“As with many other organizations, there’s unconscious bias against women in those kinds of roles,” says Carol Rollie Flynn. “There aren’t very many of us who are female. Someone who can survive that—a lot of people, men and women, wash out of those careers because they’re really hard.”
Haspel not only survived, but she served as a mentor to others. And she did so during a time of shifting expectations. Operations jobs feature rotating overseas assignments and were not the norm for women with children or families. But that has been changing slowly since the ‘90s, Doyle says. Women who were getting married or having children began coming back to work, rather than leaving or starting part-time.
“It took awhile for the organization to make that paradigm shift, and to understand that oh, no, no, we were staying,” Doyle, a mother of five, says with a laugh. “We like this work. We’re good at this work, and we’re staying.”
That shift was pushed along by a group of female clandestine officers who threatened the agency with a class action lawsuit that the agency agreed to settle in 1995, as the Los Angeles Times reported, “in a clear admission that it has discriminated systematically against its women secret agents for years.” One attorney for the women told the Times: “We found a decades-old, old-boy network in which women officers encountered great obstacles in getting promotions and assignments that would enhance their careers and move them into senior management positions.”
Haspel’s former colleagues say her success in the field is a testament to her “nose to the grindstone” mentality and her full-on devotion to the agency.
“It’s probably still true that most of the chiefs of station are male, but again, that in a way also to my way of thinking is to Gina’s credit,” Flynn says. “She succeeded in a world where not that many other women have succeeded.”
Women at the agency had their own very informal, organic network, which Doyle described aptly as the “sisterhood”—a term used also to refer to the group of female intelligence analysts who played a central role in the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
“It was a safe place to have a conversation about, I’m pregnant, should I tell anybody? Or, I think I’m going to get married, should I tell anybody? Or, I just had a miscarriage, I don’t know what to do,” Doyle says. “It’s one thing to go to a male supervisor. It’s quite another to find a woman to talk to about these things.”
Another CIA official who knew Haspel added: “It is a sisterhood in some ways, but sometimes you get very pressed on business. … When bombs are going off and other things are exploding, you kind-of balance it all,” she says. “Gina stayed very focused, she took women under her wing and mentored them.”
Steve Hall, a 30-year vet of the agency who ran Russian operations there, says that Haspel showed interest in mentoring junior officers early on.
“She was ahead of her time at least in terms of mentoring of women in the directorate of operations, and really, men as well,” he says. That included pushing women to take assignments outside of their comfort zone and supporting them after they did so, added another retired official.
As of 2013, according to an internal report, 46 percent of the CIA was female. Women made up 40 percent of clandestine operatives and 47 percent of intelligence analysts. They filled one-third of senior ranks at that time, a sharp jump from decades earlier. But the internal review concluded that there is still work to be done, especially as it relates to senior positions. “While these overall statistic show real progress,” it reads, “the leadership pipeline for women at CIA narrows above the GS-13 level for most directorates.”
Haspel has strong support inside the agency, but controversy over her involvement in the agency’s detention and interrogation program has plagued her nomination. She almost withdrew amid the uproar last week, the Washington Post reported. Haspel oversaw an agency “black site” in Thailand after 9/11 where al-Qaeda suspects were waterboarded and was later involved in the destruction of videotapes documenting interrogation sessions.
“I bet next month’s paycheck that she’s not going to get in there and say, we want to restart these programs,” says Hall. “In fact I think she’s going to be very, very circumspect because there was a lot of damage done organizationally to the agency and to the United States of America in the wake of this.”
Opponents of her nomination accuse her of personally supporting enhanced interrogation techniques. Her supporters reject that wholeheartedly and point to a declassified CIA internal memo that cleared her of wrongdoing, as well as what they characterize as her devotion to the agency itself.
“It’s interesting, all the controversy over her,” says Flynn. “It seems like anybody who knows her and anyone who has ever worked with her has really nothing but good things to say about her.”
