but he said the deerfield itself was a melancholy place. me and wonder why. okay, thanks, jim please join me in thanking again. jameslizanne is an award winnind

the new york times best selling author of five books, her narrative nonfiction aims to inform readers by providing a compelling take on important parts of history that have long overlooked. she's today to talk about her latest book, the sisterhood. please give a warm savannah welcome to liza mundy.

thank you so much for that kind introduction. and thank you all so much for being. this is my first trip to savannah it is all that my and i walked around the city yesterday and just so beautiful and i'm so thrilled to be here i think this is my first time speaking in a church and a house of worship. and i do have an overwhelming urge to a prayer of thanks and particular to thank you all for showing up this morning. 9:00 is very bright and early. it is really thrilling to see all of you here and. i really wanted to stress how often charming it is for authors to be invited to a festival like this. i want to thank the organizers and all of the sponsors for making this happen. author don't often have a chance. get together with each other. and that is also thrilling.

like you, i'm a fan. so many of the other authors who are here and there are such a wide range of authors and it's really thrilling for us all to be able to get together because writing is a very solitary endeavor. you know, it can be years of feeling like you're sort of trudging through desert by yourself, trying to find your way. and so come to an event like this to be in fellowship, in true fellowship with readers, with people who love books, who love reading to be able to walk around savannah and and get a cup of coffee and, say, oh, i'm here with the festival. i'm one of the authors. and people say like, oh, you're one of the authors. i mean, you don't, you don't have that experience in everyday life a lot. and so to be in fellowship with all of you reaffirming the importance books and of reading is, is, is a great privilege and and and really helps keep us all going. i so you thank you for just sending these waves of energy and affirmation to all of us authors who are here and those

of you who were fortunate enough to be in the audience last night when jeannette walls spoke in her really extraordinary talk, which was inspirational, i'm sure, for of you and certainly for me, she talked about the power of storytelling and in her case, particularly with her memoir, the power of telling her own story, having the courage to tell her own story about her past and her upbringing that she had been ashamed of for much of her life, and realizing that when she put it out, when she had the courage to put it out in that it it took away all of that, that shame and reluctance to talk about it and created fellowship and with all of her readers, i was thinking about that aspect of nonfiction, you know, having the courage to tell your own story and. the other aspect of nonfiction that has been really one of the defining experiences of my

career is, persuading other people tell their stories to have the to come forward and talk about their life and, their experiences in the case of the sisterhood, the challenge was to persuade women who had served undercover as spies and intelligence officers for the american and tell our leading intelligence agency the central intelligence agency to talk about their stories to talk about the clandestine that they had lied their enormous service to our national security and our democracy and way of life to trust that their story would be fairly told and and that they were we're safe to put themselves in in my hands as an author and also before that with my book before this girls

telling the story of women code breakers during world war two. that book entailed tracking down women who were in early to mid nineties, spending a lot of time in assisted facilities, eating a lot of tuna fish and cottage and butternut squash and and persuading who had come to washington as very young women to work in a top secret code breaking operation who had arrived in washington and were told that they would be shot. they told anybody what they did. she had been told after the war. thanks very much for your service, ladies. now go back to your regular lives. never tell anybody what you did and and and had never informed that that story had been declassified in the mid nineties. nobody ever track them down to tell them that it would finally be okay to tell their families what they had done. and so that entailed sitting in

conversation with number of women and convincing them, no, it is okay to tell your story. and not only is it okay, but it is a service to all us to understand our american history thoroughly, to understand who has served our our our democratic freedoms and our way of life, and to expose our understanding of our collective story as a nation. so that that was sort of a delicate task that involved very, sincerely expressing my desire, tell their story again to expand our understanding, finding of where we come from. and i think as a country, the way that jeanette jeanette was talked about, you know, having the courage to face up to your own personal history your own life story, i think it benefits all of us as readers and citizens to fully understand and

our story as as nation, as a country, to understand our history, who has served it. and i think that we are in a wonderful time where that understanding is being expanded with every book on this topic that gets written when. i was working on code girls. i i the book hidden figures published a little bit before my book, code girls came out. you know tells the story, extraordinary story of the black women mathematicians who who ultimately powered the space race. and i think that book and other books like the 1619 project and so many others now we're at this wonderful moment, this flowering of literature and this newfound willingness of publishers to publish these stories, often collective stories of service and achievement, to really help us understand where we've come from and where we're going so. so i again, i loved listening to her talk last night, thinking about again, the power of

storytelling when someone is telling their individual story. as a memoirist and and when for those of us nonfiction writers who are fortunate enough to be entrusted with the stories of others, which is which is a responsibility that i take very seriously when i'm writing my books and one of the things about being a nonfiction writer is that the people in your book are real and and still with us, fortunately and have after since this book has been published the sisterhood i've i've had occasion to the podium and panels with some of the women in my and i'm just always very relieved they're still talking to me after the book is published because none of them had the ability to review. i do fact check my work, but they don't have the ability to review the book or, comment on, you know, on what. i've written as the author and nor did i ever work for the cia. and so the the that agency did not have the right or ability to

to review and advance what i wrote and am surprised and relieved that there that i will be speaking at the cia during women's history month specifically on international women's day. it's nice that they us a day and a month and and so is you know it's affirming also to know that the story of these women's service and these women's challenges is being is being heard within the institution as well. and being honored. so i like to i know there's nothing more exciting on a on a saturday at 9 a.m. to be treated to a good powerpoint presentation. and i assure you that that it will not be a lot of graphs and and and tiny little words you can't that you can't read just enables me to share some of the images my book that i that i truly love many photos that were

shared with me of women spies who had who had done this clandestine for four decades and with me some photos of their training that that really very rarely get get seen in public. but i always like to start this slide because, you know, when you think a spy when you think of someone who works undercover, exciting intelligence work, you know, you always think i think of a or often think of a white male with, you know, hair that be varying shades of brown he, you know, sort of generally looks alike with with small you know, maybe the of tuxedo that he's wearing there might be some slight but when we of a spy we think of somebody who's often a tuxedo who spends a lot of time in casinos and on ski slopes always carries a weapon and very good looking. and and when we said that so that when we think of a a man in intelligence james bond

generally the person that we think of and when think of a woman in intelligence, the person that we think of i think most often is, of course, miss moneypenny, either in herrior incarnations or her recent incarnation. the actress naomi harris in skyfall is our modern miss moneypenny. you know, courageous incredibly smart, a great support for james, but who generally her time behind a desk keeping james's schedule straight you know communicating back with headquarters on his behalf in the case of the earlier miss moneypenny, you know sitting in his lap flirting with them. but general lee doing sort of the support work and the paperwork work needed to help, you know, spy understand his next mission and and his schedule back when he's at headquarters and and serving as sort of an administrative support person. so i think that that idea of the division of labor in

intelligence gathering work is has been ingrained in our consciousness now for for many. so with that in mind, i would invite you to try and guess this is an photo of an actual debutante ball that took place inin brussels, belgium and there areutantes and their escorts from all different in in and they are they are there you know the women are they are to sort of make their debut in the american women who are they're there to represent the united states and so one member of this crowd in 1966 was being avid. lee recruited by the cia, a graduate, brown university, fluent in chinese, spanish, french. very, very in french. had grown up overseas as the child of american diplomat working to implement the marshall plan after world war two. at a time when america was the leading, you know, representative of democracy and

freedom around the world so had grown up in in foreign settings very very comfortable with life in foreign countries so this person being avidly recruiting upon graduate from brown to work not only for the central intelligence agency but to train for one of the top up top job agency which at the ti a asence now was really the leading spy agnd intelligence gathering agency in the world and at the cia. then, as now, the top position is has the bland name because are often the most exciting jobs are given very sort of bland and mysterious names. the name is case officer to be a case officer at the cia really is to be a spy. it's like the fighter pilot job. it is the most prestigious job. your job is to live overseas undercover to yourself, to secrecy and a life of clandestine covert intelligence

gathering to serve in locations the world with a covert job, with a corporation or the u.s. state department. so you have a day job that you're doing, but you have a secret night job where it is your job to pry the secrets that. other countries don't want the united states to know out of people who are natives of that country, foreign nationals who live in that country, persuading these people to commit treason to to to tell what they know to pass secrets or documents to to you as a case officer so that they be passed to the intelligence community and the president of the united states. it is a job for which people are select it based on their you know, their their ability to move unseen and disclosed throughout the world and also their ability to manipulate it, to persuade, to pressure to to get people to commit trees and through all sorts of means it's

a very small, very elite of intelligence officers. and so it's a very tough job, a very elite and a very sought after job. if you're the kind of person who's capable of living in that moral gray zone, living a lie, all day long in order serve american intelligence gathering and american national security. so if you look at this picture and think, well, who might been recruiting? well, i mean, there are a lot of there are a lot of white guys tuxedos in this crowd. so it could be this guy, you know, lies bond, he's a beautiman on his arm. certainly looks the part. or it could be this guy, you know, a sort of a little bit more back there in the shadows, not quite as noticeable that that be a good candidate. but in fact the person who was being recruited avidly by the cia was a young woman named lisa manifold, the daughter of an american diplomat had grown up in france. she spoke french she spoke french more fluently than

english, but she had also picked up along the way mandarin. she had lived all over the world with her parents as they served the u.s. state department. her dad was a diplomat. she was being avidly courted by the u.s. state department, which would love persuade her to follow in her father's footsteps. but she knew that she had grown up in these foreign environments. she was very comfortable walking the streets of foreign countries. she had visited her, her parents, their service in vietnam. she was comfortable in all sorts of settings. she was fluent in so many languages. she was very at working a cocktail party, working a diplomatic function, playing a part. her parents had often sort of trotted her and her brother out at diplomatic gathering and said, you know, you're here to represent the united america is the representative of democracy and freedom around world you all even as children if you fall on your bike, you mustn't cry. you must show everybody that

americans, courageous americans are brave. so she had been raised with this sense of public service and a true belief in american exceptionalism. so, so she, even as she was being competed for by the state department and, the central intelligence agency, she knew that her that her true and strengths would lend themselves to an intelligence work on behalf of the central intelligence agency. and the reason that lisa was being courted to do this work and the reason that i am so interested in this story, does go back to world war two and to the fact that our shocking lack of any kind of intelligence gathering ability was for all the world to see, and all the country to see. on december 7th, 1941, when we were attacked at harbor by the japanese, had no idea that that attack coming lost thousands of american servicemen. and that was the event of that

launched america into this global war for which we were unprepared in in many ways, and particularly with regard to our ability to know what the enemy was planning to do to us both in the atlantic ocean where the german wolf packs the submarines waiting to try to sink the convoys that were now being sent to europe and in the pacific where young men were now shipping out fight on aircraft carriers and destroyers in the pacific and to try to retake back much of the territory that was captured when the japanese invaded pearl harbor, as well as other islands and landmass was in the pacific ocean. it was a terrifying time for the american public. we look and we think, well, of course we won that war in 1941. there was absolutely no guarantee that the allies going to prevail in that conflict. and all of a sudden, we have had we had hundreds of thousands of young men signing up to fight at the time when we needed to build our ability to gather intelligence and to understand what was what was going to happen in the war.

and so that was a light bulb moment that went on over military commanders, diplomats had. well, if the young men are signing up to fight, who is going to build our codebreaking? who's going to build our espionage? women. let's call in these women. these who have been to to college, these women who are teaching school. let's if we can train them to be code breakers, let's see if we can train them to espionage officers. let's what the ladies can. and world war two was this we don't often think of it this way, but it was a moment of what we today would call inclusion, not only with women, but with the navajo code talkers in the pacific, with the tuskegee airmen. it was this moment where was understood that we needed all hands on deck. we needed every citizen who was willing and capable step up and serve the war effort to do so and so citizens who might not have even had the motivation you know, who had been discriminated

against in american life, did that they stepped up to show that black could fly planes, you know, that women could learn how to break codes and program computers and designs. so of the stem technology that came out of the and that women could could could conduct spy craft so it was this terrible moment, you know, of tragedy around the world but it was this marvelous moment in which women were for in a way that they had never been competed for before in american history. and this was personally interesting to me, i grew up southwestern virginia like jeanette wells. i thought of last night when she was talking about you know that as a kid she would read anything she would read any words on any page. and i was that kind of kid, too. you know, that book as a kid, you would go to slumber parties and. you would like look what's what's the reading in this house and and and i remember i would read anything at my parents house. and one day i told my mom, god, mom, i'm reading this really

interesting book called the exorcist. and i was like 13 and she said, oh, you're reading the exorcist, huh? and so that was my it. she was she was great. you know, she's great. i was like 12 or 13. i picked up a paperback, but that was also my introduction to that. you mispronounce a word it means that you've read it, you know that you picked it up and reading so there's no shame in mispronouncing word you've read it because you're a reader, you just haven't had the opportunity to utter it yet. so if you ever mispronounce a word? just remember that that there is no shame in doing so. so i was a bookish kid and growing up in southwestern and when i was looking for a book topic, lo many, many, many years later and came i came across across a class of a document that that that had been released by the nsa, the national security agency, which is our inheritor agency, the wartime codebreaking that on and it was about a group of southwestern virginia schoolteachers who had

been recruited during world war two to come to washington and in their case, russian codes and ciphers and i thought, you know, my god mean, these women sounded like my mother. they like my grandmother. how was it that these schoolteachers had and come to washington during the war and how they found their way to washington. and that was my introduction. then i went on to talk to nsa historians to the codebreaking project that went on during the war in which more than 10,000 women came to washington learn how to break the codes and ciphers. not only of russian our allies. we weren't supposed to be breaking their, but we were because that go on. but also the germans and the japanese. so when i was when i was research ing that book code girls, i also knew that there had been a parallel effort to recruit women into espionage we didn't have a cia yet. we didn't any intelligence agencies. we have 18 now the space force is our most recent, but we had

nothing like that in world war two. and so women were recruited. the spy effort there, there were recruiting posters that went around. this is a report that was written about how how the cia had to learn how to assess people to do work. you know, they had never people to do this kind of work. the report called assessment of men. but they assessed women as well because ultimately several thousands of women would contribute to our early intelligence gathering efforts. and they assessed differently than men with assessing men. they would put them in imaginary situations where they were commanded. they were imagine themselves as commandos who had to persuade a group of their colleagues to cross a raging river. in fact, it would be like a brook, you know, a stream out in northern virginia. they were to imagine that they were commandos and they were going. i had to get the whole across the raging river with a machine and, you know, evade the gestapo was how they assess the men to for leadership with the women.

they called all of these really well-educated did really often employed high earning women and and they they gave them a task of filing the memos to to see how well they could create a oss-reference system of filing memos using three by five cards, but to also see how they could put up with being under estimated and underused and discriminated against in spy service because the psychology doing the assessing already saw that that was happening that that was going to to women and they needed to have a particular kind of frustration tolerance in order to make it in the spy service so you can see the amount of paperwork during the war that women had to contend with. this was a mapmaking group of women working for the office of ragic service, as that was our predecessor agency to the during the war. like we didn't know anything about foreign coastland so we were going to be we were to be invading all of these pacific islands had really it's hard to

overemphasize size how parochial we were as a in the 1940s and how much we had to learn how we had to build our collective intelligence. so these were women who were doing that work. and just to talk about one woman in particular wore is an accelerant it accelerates medicine, it accelerates technology and it did accelerate some of these women's careers. this a woman name who was named at the time mcwilliams. she a graduate of smith college. she during the war she had tried join the women's army corps, the newly formed group of wacs she was too tall to be admitted into the u.s. army and and so she found way to the work for the ss as the clerk to wild bill donovan who was the former wall street lawyer who the head of the ss but ultimately from being a clerk was sent to china. she took a boat to china to to the far east and then a lot of scary plane rides in china was very jolly. she was very well-liked by her

colleagues, male and female. she met a state department mapmaker in in china named paul child. and then after the war after she served the intelligence agency. like so many of the women, she was told. thanks very much for your service you know, time to go back to your regularly scheduled life as a you know, as a housewife and and get married. and so she did marry paul child and she traveled with him to france where she famously had a fabulous meal. learn just how good food could taste at a time when that was not always here in the states. and and she became known to the world as julia child. so she's one of the most famous graduates of the oscars. and and she's of the many things that world war two gave us, our freedom, democracy, a lot of our stem technology and computers. it gave us a lot better food than than we had experience up to today. so so the wartime service gave women a chance to sort of reboot. reboot life trajectories, you know, to meet people and have

experiences that they otherwise wouldn't. but then writing sisterhood in particular i have chapters on world war, but i've also been always been very interested in what happened after war. what happened after the war? two women who served during war or two women who wanted to follow in footsteps. and so that is part the story that i endeavored to tell with the sisterhood following, the stories of the women who had served our intelligence gathering during world war two. some of the women who stayed on after the war we thought we were going to close down our intelligence agencies after world war two. but lo and behold, we're now in the cold war. we need to ramp it up. we need to new agencies, a new the national security agency, the intelligence agency, you know, all of these agencies that we have to really build our ability to be the world leader and gathering and intelligence and analysis so that we are never again surprised as we were

at pearl harbor. so what will happen after the war is that women will fight to stay included in intelligence gathering and national, despite the fact that these big bureaucratic institutions now being created where they are very bureaucracies competing with each other for money and prestige and the people within them are are competing for the top jobs. right. to be director of the cia or to be a division chief or a station chief running berlin station. london station. you know leading our intelligence gathering efforts in countries around the world at a time when an american cia station chief director america's spies given buckets of money to dispense in these countries. you know for the contest with communism the soviet union is a great, great job. so the women have to fight their way to prevail in this environment.

and and you can see allen dulles, one of the most famous early directors of the cia, as portrayed on the cover of time magane. the cia decades was given pretty free reign to do whatever it needed to do. allen dulles oversaw a lot of that. he was a graduate out of the ozarks, and that was a very powerful network for the men. the cia was a very network, a place where you needed someone to mentor you, to push your career, to get you. that london station chief job and the women were largely shut out those networks. and so over period of years, when i was doing my research for book, not only interviewing women, but reading documents to support their stories, i read a number of over the years, over and over and over. there would be studies done periodically. why aren't women advancing the cia? why aren't the women, you know, alumni of the office being given same opportunities that the man answers know studies will be conducted. and the first study that allen dulles conducted probably at the

behest his sister, eleanor dulles, as well as some of the women who were legacies of the west, who did make the decision to stay on. it was, called the petticoat panel. like a bit belittling title you know is hard to imagine i think it might even be because there were early spies were said to carry letters and messages in their petticoats and and so it is possible that there was a sort of historical resonance it that it still was very belittling and the only way in which the female panel was even permitted to the study about why aren't when they being advanced was they were told well you know this is all top secret classified information. so after report itself it has to be very closely held and closely held us like agency for it. nobody is going to get to read, okay, except like the people at the top. so it was a report that was done and then it just sort of died and nobody out about it until it became declassified. so there were a number of studies done in which incredibly stereotypical pronouncements

about women were freely shared by the guys at the top, by the station. and so part of my a big part of what i was attempting to achieve in the sisterhood was to show the stereotypes afflicted women for decades in this incredibly important incredibly agency and the ways in which the personal stories that the women told me about their careers show how they they those stereotypes. you know really unfair and laugh able the stereotypes were even as they were very at keeping women back in the bureaucracy. so one was that women can't run agents women can't persuade what we call the what they call an asset or an agent, a foreign national to spill these women can't be rainmakers. they can't be dealmakers. they can't make that ask to ask to commit treason in cia, the agent is not you, the spy. it's not james bond.

actually it's the person who has committing, you know, who is running the real risk the person in the foreign country who is passing secrets. the thinking was that women just can't do that. they can't be persuasive and they won't be taken seriously. and so some of the i just wanted to share some of the photos of the station chiefs, the cia station chief during this time, the guy in the speedo david whipple most veteran dartmouth football player wasn't the one who uttered that particular. but gives you a sense of the kind of guys who just had such free around the world to sort of to run agency and to conduct operations clandestine operations here who were who, you know, harboring these prejudices and freely uttering them. people conducting periodic surveys. another one hans jensen and you'll see his photo in a second this idea that women were very good with their research, that

women were really good at, women were really good at paperwork. and that may or maintaining a routine like like moneypenny and sort of keeping the guys, you know, straight and knowing wt their mission was and what they needed to do. so this is hans jensen, another cia station chief. and you can see that these guys were sometimes somewhat in need of somebody to maintain their routine. you can also see the liquor cabinet behind him, and that was a big part. american spycraft also overseas, because you spend a lot of time in lonely outpost things and liquor was very cheap and flowed very freely at american peaks, to which the the spies had had free access. just some other stereotype a women can't work under the pressures of urgency. so one of the women you'll meet in the book heidi august was a woman who as a child at the cia had written them about a job they hired her as a clerk even though was a college graduate. she ended up working overseas in a number of very dangerous

places handling airplane hijackings among things, women can't. let's see, women in many. oh, they they women women seldom have access to important information. and so if women spies go over, they're going to try to get the information from other women. women don't actually know anything which is couldn't be further from the truth the female secretaries female clerks had access to everything that was in you know, foreign offices. and so one of the things, heidi august did was women in other countries you can see her working at the u.n. that was her day job. she was scoring shirley temple black, who was who was making a presentation to the u.n., was a young case officer. so she was working nights. this is lisa harper's training. you remember lisa harper, the debutante? i loved these photos. training at the farm, which is the cia's fabled, fabled training facility in in virginia. you can see her right there in the middle. you can see her into disguis in disguise class in the middle.

and so the women over a of years would fight these stereotypes. oh, that women won't travel and important a really important part of the book to was was commemorating the service of wives of unpaid spouses both for the cia for the u.s. state depament. this oirley sulak, who traveled her case officer husband to moscow the women, were expected to serve to fully serve the cia unpaid to help their with the tradecraft that has to be done on the streets with retrieving messages as with meeting with with assad. that's shirley was an enthusiastic and very very intrepid and very very effective cia spouse and so that those are some of my favorite chapters in the book so you can see that women the course of decades would would work to disprove these these stereotypes. this was the woman who tracked down the u.s. spy, aldrichmes who was passed ing secrets to

the soviets. i identifying our soviet assets who were then executed by the kgb. so the idea that women aren't a objective or aggressive was just proved over and over. so you might say, why does any of this matter if women are being discriminated against at a big institution like? this we know that that sort of went on for decades. we've seen mad men. you know, that's a that's that's sort of a relic of our american past. but, you know, we did a pretty good job. cia did pretty good job. but but let it not be forgotten. there was a group of women analysts who were back at headquarters assessing all of this intelligence that's who were writing reports. there was a group of women at the cia who as early as 1993, were very aware that, a man named bin laden and a group al qaida were were were were hatching a new kind of plot. america were presenting a new kind of threat. after the collapse of the soviet union, after the apparent defeat of communism in the soviet

union. and so this woman, gina barnett, was part of a group of female analysts who had been channeled into a non prestigious kind of office where they were looking at terrorism around the world and, writing reports and trying to get their voices heard. so and having doing it because one of the things that women discovered was if you're a spy working overseas is being underestimated. and is a great asset. it is exactly. you want you don't want to be a in a tuxedo, standing out in a crowd you want to be somebody a housewife who nobody thinks is gathering information. but if you're a cia analyst, job is to make sense of this intelligence and write it up for the president. it is not an advantage to be underestimated, ignored in a government bureaucracy. and that is what went on in the 1990s. so as a result on september 1st, 2001 a day that i remember being

in washington, we were by al qaida. and in a day that we will never forget very pearl harbor like in the history of our country. and and that proved that that it does matter when when you aren't using your brains to the fullest, when you aren't listening to the people who are paying to a new threat and and the the happy ending is the wrong word. but i will say that the lesson was learned after that terrible disaster after and the institution does recognize and does understand that it was a group of women who were trying to call attention to threat. so almost ten years later, during the hunt for bin laden, it was a group of analysts and female targets. those are three of the key members of the team. were mothers of young children. and that is also what the institution had to learn to do

was include mothers, include parents, include people with children in, the in the ranks of analysts and that and for many many years women who did serve in these intelligence gathering capacities were expected to not marry and to not have children. there was a belief that you could not be dedicated to your work if you also had a family life. and so the other lesson that the institution had to learn was that it's important, again, to use all of your skills and talents to listen to them. so when the decision had to be made, are we going to attack this compound in abbottabad where we think bin laden is hiding to, you know, achieve justice to stop to stop power of this terrorist group? it was a group of largely women who used data gathering skills that they had been developing over decades to pinpoint where he was located. and this time they were listened to. so at the end, i endeavor to tell story as well so we can understand we forgot the importance of inclusion a while.

we have we learned that message. so thanks very much. fascinating. oh i hate i hate to stop her at this point it was so interesting but we do want to have some questions and there are just a few minutes. so if you do have a question, come down to the microphone and we will get at a few in the next couple of minutes minutes. i'll try to keep my answers short short. hello thank you so much for speaking with us. so i am a current graduate student, i'm an aspiring journalist and i'm really interested kind of in exactly what you're doing, which is the nexus of journalism in security and gender so i'm curious how you arrived at that intersect of those topics. well, i think as i i stumbled upon this the story of these women who came from my neck of woods, you know, at a period in

history where where you just wouldn't have expected that. and and the fact that their story hadn't been, you know, particularly with the codebreaking, but also with espionage, that you think of all the number of the books have been written about spycraft and about war, two codebreaking movies like the imitation game, their story had just been written out history. and so my my reaction was, you know, who wouldn't want to tell that story and and it just, you know, caught in my imagination not not imagination just just really committed to the power of telling that women's stories to see them got recognition for their to see some of them go both with the code girls and with the cia women at cia to see them go on their own book tours, you know, to be celebrated their communities, to have their work recognized and to really change their understanding of themselves and their contribution to our history is very meaningful work. so carry it on.

what are some of your favorite? what are some of your favorite fictional portrayals of women in espionage? it's cia, osama say. and also i'm a proud sisters. great. and i'm so proud today of. thank you. thank you so much. yeah. favorite shows. well, i'll just share one anecdote about that when i was meeting with the cia public affairs to try to enlist their cooperation in making people available to me for the book they called in some of these target or some of these women analysts. it was very intimidating conversation, but one of the things they said was, well, we want we want the to understand that this work is not at all like homeland. you know, like if you watch homeland and you see carrie mathison. mathison, this sort of tortured analyst who lives this wild life. you know, it's not like that. we're just people, you know, we're working mothers and and and so i was like, you know, you'll say anything sort of at that moment, like, yeah, i'm sure it's not at all like homeland and and and i'll be sure, you know if it to to to make clear but when i was interviewing these women case officers who had worked as spies

overseas, describing their surreal nature of their lives, it is such a real work. one of them one of them said to me, she said it. just like home. and thanks for bringing these great stories to life. i'm curious in all these women, was there a pattern and how they felt about not being able to share with family, friends and with prospective employers the stories of what they were capable of? i mean, were they angry or were they resigned? i mean well, what are the things that they get tested now is the ability to do their work without credit for it. i think it's important it's hard to assess how people feel it, although i must say that i think there are people who sign up with the cia for spy life because they want to write a memoir afterwards, you know, because they want to describe. i do think that's true. and others have said it not the majority but you know, if you if you've worked as a spy, you can write a memoir after you've been. but it has to be reviewed by the cia and they will redact a lot of information that was not true for me. my book did not have be read by the cia and and so i, i think

you know particularly for the women the women codebreakers, you know, it was so it had been very frustrating for them not to get to talk about their war service and their contribution to the war. and i think for the people more recently who served as well, it is frustrating not to be able to correct the record. one of the things that was very traumatic for the cia after 911 was being told you failed you failed you failed being told by congress having reports come out. how did why didn't you know why, didn't you know, being blamed and feel a sense of failure, the sense of the collective sense of failure was enormous but the women analysts who been calling attention, you know were called in and warned, okay, the congress is going to come out with this report, going to be we're going to be accused of not connecting not connecting the dots, not being persuasive, not being compelling, being able to get your story out there. when they had been trying to do that for years. and that was a source of enormous frustration. and i think it was important and

meaningful for the women to be able to tell their story, their their several chapters in the book that tell that story of their attempts to get this this new message heard that was very frustrating and hard for them to lose. welcome to savannah. thank you for writing this book. i think we can i can speak for everyone here. it's really exciting to have a new history brought out where a forgotten and overlooked are centered and their stories are really meaningful. i have a question about it. i mean, bigger crises. so everyone that you feature is obviously a proud patriot has done amazing public service. the cia is flawed bureaucracy. like so many americans, bureaucracies like tell us. about that, if you can. i mean, one of the more extraordinary parts of the book i remember is that, you know, people bought into the bureaucracy. they bought into the bureaucratic values, even though they were treated shabbily. so of all the cia failures in

intelligence over the last 50 years, like, can you can you inform us a little bit more about the opinions of of your characters, your people, and what they feel like after the service? oh, after service, yeah. yeah. no, it's certainly a bureaucracy in general are flawed institutions can be hard to navigate for anybody and in terms of their life after, their service. i think i think that that it is still a very meaningful career for the people are very much so for the people engage in that kind of work and they do have to sort of just accommodate themselves to the of not always being able to tell story. so and i think, you know, one of the, one of the positive aspects of that is we do have a number of you know, particularly for the women we do have a number of women serving in high office now in washington and also serving in congress. abigail spanberger, a congresswoman, virginia, several

members of congress who are now on intelligence committees and national security committees and who have a real background, this kind of work and, a real knowledge ability and a real credibility to be able to speak this domain. you know, you have for however managed to survive the bureaucracy to survive the frustrations and the flaws and to prevail. and for example, abby, abigail was very open with me. i interviewed her for this book and talking about the continued frustrations of the work. she said she was working overseas as a case officer that during that kind of fighter pilot work, you know, the tip of spear and meeting with assets and long, you know, long routes to get to a clandestine. she had one child while she was doing she found that pregnancy was was a great way hide the fact that you're wearing a big money belt that you're carrying around like tens of thousands dollars to pay this person. and so she found that pregnancy was an unexpected advantage. you can and also she said she

was meeting with assets as a pregnant as a mother. she she that it conveyed to them this person you're trying to protect and keep safe that she was also who wanted safety who wanted security who wanted safety for her children and safety for her country and safety for that asset. she was working. so she found her gender and even her motherhood and pregnancy to be an asset in that situation. but when she had her second child, a supervisor, her. well, don't you think it's time for you to be a reports officer now that's the mismatch penny job that's the person who at the desk and receives report from the case officer. so kind of frustration even as recently as she served was present and she talks about it openly now but that that part of her curriculum vitae her resume is now is now part of what i think gives her credibility in really one of the most masculine of congress, you know, intelligence and national

security are still very important and very prestigious committees sit on. so it a it takes a strong person to withstand the frustrations your break up of a bureaucracy and big institution. and that's true of men and women and sorts of people. but there are, you know, specific frustrations that that come with the job that do seem to still exist. yeah. a question to short, please. we are running, as i remember, ron was secretary. sit on meetings with him when he was hiring people and he'd say, boy, that guy was great. and the secretary of saying something something we sometimes make fun of women's intuition but george blake was here about four years ago in his book betrayal in berlin, and he talked about how president eisenhower saw how poor our intelligence service was and needed to build it up. and why did we not learn that lesson after world war two, especially? why did we have to, was for. yeah, well, there was a great of

the intelligence agencies after war two and so i think we did learn that lesson but with you know with the expansion of intelligence community and bureaucracies comes lot of competition and a lot of competing for the top jobs and what that's what people in these bureaucracy had to contend with. i grew up hearing a lot about my father's experience in world war two, and only after my mother's passing did i hear her name associated with code. i'm looking for it tip on where to begin. summary search. yes. and i get that. i get that question at every talk. i mean, it's amazing few degrees of separation there are between us and the people the women who served during world war two. and it's always so wonderful to see adult children of of particularly women who served who were so proud of their mothers service and curious about it. so if you go to my website site which is liza mundy dot com, i have a tab that that provides

information about how you can research your mother's wartime service. believe it or not, personnel from world war two are public and anybody can request them. they don't all exist. but the ones that exist can be very enlightening so if you go to my website, i wish you well on your journey because it yield some really fascinating information thank you.