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

Bestseller Holt (Rise of the Rocket Girls) profiles a quintet of pioneering female intelligence agents in this entertaining history. Drawing on diaries, scrapbooks, memos, letters, and recently declassified documents, Holt tracks Adelaide Hawkins, Mary Hutchison, Eloise Page, Elizabeth Sudmeier, and Jane Burrell from their WWII service and recruitment by the newly formed CIA through the early decades of the Cold War. Based in Munich, language expert Hutchison built a network of Ukrainian spies to try to penetrate Soviet intelligence; Sudmeier, who grew up on a reservation in South Dakota and “could pass for multiple ethnicities,” gathered information on Soviet influence in the Middle East; Hawkins, a divorced mom with three children, stayed stateside, where she helped design and implement new covert communications systems. Throughout, Holt highlights the sexism and misogyny these women endured (their efforts to organize for equal pay and recognition was derisively nicknamed the “Petticoat Panel”), weaves in intriguing details about microdot cameras and other spy tools, and draws colorful sketches of people and events including “Wild Bill” Donovan and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Though the story’s multiple threads get unwieldy at times, this is a revealing and vibrant look at the critical contributions women have made to the CIA. Photos. (Sept.)