Year: 2013

Tasneem Raja revisits the early days of women in the CIA:

A few years ago, four veteran CIA officers, with more than a 100 years of collective experience over four decades, were asked to speak frankly about serving in the agency as women. The taped conversations, used for internal review by the CIA, reveal encounters with male attitudes from the officers’ early years that aren’t surprising—it was indeed a Mad Men world, albeit with security clearances. The transcripts, part of a trove of recently declassified CIA documents, also contain wry, Peggy Olson-esque recollections in which being a woman proved an asset—and hardly in the “femme fatale” vein of intelligence gathering.

Carla, who joined the agency in 1965 and was Deputy Chief of the Africa Division by the time she retired in 2004, recalled a time when male higher-ups in the agency warned that women would be ineffective for recruiting agents and gathering intel abroad. She recounted a successful assignment debunking that notion:

I never actually had to pitch the guy. I [played] sort of the “Dumb Dora” personality, and “Golly” “Gee!” and “Wow!” He would tell me, “I just love talking to you because you’re not very bright.” And I would just sit like this [makes an innocent expression]. The recruitment ended because he told me about a plot to go bomb the embassy in [redacted] and we arrested him and his gang of merry men as they crossed the border. He just told me everything and I got tons of intel out of him because I was just a woman who wasn’t very bright.

An internal survey from 1953 dubbed “The Petticoat Panel” shows that while women accounted for 40 percent of the agency’s employees at the time—better than the overall US workforce then, which was 30 percent female—only one-fifth of those women were above the midlevel GS-7 on the government’s salary grade, which went to GS-18. Meanwhile, 70 percent of men in the CIA were higher than G-7, and 10 percent topped GS-14, a grade no women had reached at the time. …

Yet, while men made up the lion’s share of highly paid roles in the agency, women accounted for 60 percent of the agency’s jobs in statistical analysis. Linda McCarthy, a CIA historian and former agency analyst, says that’s unsurprising: “During World War II, when it came to numbers, the war department went after women,” she told Mother Jones. “Same with maps and codework: They specifically wanted to find women for that kind of work. They were simply better at it.” McCarthy said the prevailing notion in the agency at the time ascribed women’s aptitude for stats, geography, and code breaking to maternal instinct. “They figured, you have to be patient to raise children, and you have to be patient to make maps by hand, so it must all be connected.”

For more on this subject, a reader recommends Sisterhood of Spies: The Women of the OSS, a book about a World War II intelligence agency called the Office of Strategic Services.

(This CIA device, designed to look like a makeup contact, features a code that’s revealed by tilting the mirror at the correct angle. Photo: The Central Intelligence Agency)

A recent study (pdf) finds that segregation by income is growing:

Drum comments:

This is yet another sign of the collapse of the American middle class, and it’s a bad omen for the American political system. We increasingly lack a shared culture or shared experiences, and that makes democracy a tough act to pull off. The well-off have less and less interaction with the poor outside of the market economy, and less and less empathy for how they live their lives. For too many of us, the “general welfare” these days is just an academic abstraction, not a lived experience.

Mark R. Rank’s findings complicate Drum’s argument:

Put simply, poverty is a mainstream event experienced by a majority of Americans. For most of us, the question is not whether we will experience poverty, but when.

But while poverty strikes a majority of the population, the average time most people spend in poverty is relatively short. The standard image of the poor has been that of an entrenched underclass, impoverished for years at a time. While this captures a small and important slice of poverty, it is also a highly misleading picture of its more widespread and dynamic nature. The typical pattern is for an individual to experience poverty for a year or two, get above the poverty line for an extended period of time, and then perhaps encounter another spell at some later point. …

Just as poverty is widely dispersed with respect to time, it is also widely dispersed with respect to place. Only approximately 10 percent of those in poverty live in extremely poor urban neighborhoods. Households in poverty can be found throughout a variety of urban and suburban landscapes, as well as in small towns and communities across rural America. This dispersion of poverty has been increasing over the past 20 years, particularly within suburban areas.

Steve McCurry’s portrait of Sharbat Gula, the “Afghan Girl”, electrified the cover of National Geographic in June 1985. He recently spoke to The Economist about the indelible image:

Why did you think Sharbat Gula, the “Afghan Girl”, was so special? Did you have any idea that the photograph would become so iconic?

I knew it was a powerful image. I knew that she had a powerful presence. She was very striking. I knew all that, but I never dreamed it would be on the cover of the magazine, much less become an icon of the [Soviet] war in Afghanistan or Afghan refugees. The power of the picture has to do with her eyes and the ambiguity of her expression. There are a lot of emotions in that picture; on the one hand she seems a bit traumatised, but there’s a real sense of dignity and fortitude and perseverance. She’s a beautiful little girl, but there is also dirt on her face and her clothes are torn, yet she holds a direct gaze at the camera.

How was your reunion 17 years later?

It was extraordinary. It was astonishing that she and her husband agreed to meet with us, which was really unusual in that culture. We were thrilled that she was still alive, that she had a good life, that we were able to finally give back to her and help her. I think she was a bit bewildered by the whole thing initially. She didn’t understand that her picture has been published all over the world. But in time she learned—we provided her with a television so she could see the documentary [“Search For the Afghan Girl” (2003)].

We keep in touch with her every month—myself, National Geographic, my sister plays a very important role in maintaining this relationship and assisting her with all sorts, whether it’s medical assistance, education, housing or anything we can do. We’ve helped to buy her a home that she’s able to have ownership of. It’s been great to help her. I believe that this has made her life better.

McCurry has a new book out, Untold – The Stories Behind the Photographs, and you can follow his latest work here. Below is the documentary of McCurry and Gula’s reunion, “Search For the Afghan Girl”:

The documentary continues here. Photo used with permission.

A reader writes:

Thanks for posting on preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). I’d like to offer my perspective as both someone who enjoys thinking about the social implications of technology (graduate degree in Technology & Policy, big Kurt Vonnegut fan), and as a parent who has used this technology. I have actually pondered for many years about the morality of choosing the sex of a child, or screening for diseases, or tailoring a child’s appearance and traits. The problem of course is that there is a slippery slope at work (which the Gattaca clip you posted makes very clear), and it seemed to me that it was not our place to play god. Not being a religious man, I tended to think of this more in terms of the risks to humanity from deliberately reducing the biodiversity of the gene pool, and what that might mean for the ability of the human race to evolve in response to changes in their environment.

Enter reality.

My wife is a carrier for X-linked retinitis pigmentosa, a more or less untreatable degenerative eye disease caused by a mutation on the X chromosome. Her father and her uncle both began to lose their eyesight at age three, and were legally blind by early adulthood. When we had our son three years, ago, we knew that my wife was an obligate carrier of the mutation and that our son had a 50% chance of inheriting the disease from her.

We began taking him to an ophthalmologist to monitor his eyesight. I can hardly express how painful it was to watch our little boy discovering the world and know that there was an even chance that he would soon be losing his sight. We soon learned that there are genetic tests for the two most common mutations that cause X-linked RP, and we proceeded to have my wife, her uncle, and our son tested. I recall getting the phone call from the geneticist with the good news and how I cried with relief when we learned that our son had tested negative for the mutation. Not only had we dispatched with the sword of Damocles, we could now forego many costly visits to the ophthalmologist for ongoing monitoring.

At the same time, we were having trouble conceiving our second child. We visited a fertility clinic, and in the process heard about PGD. At that point, all of the old hypotheticals, thought experiments, and moralistic navel-gazing went out the window. For us, it was a no-brainer. Since we were undergoing IVF anyway, we were more than happy to pay the extra few thousand dollars to ensure that our child would not suffer from this disease. We did not want him to deal with what his grandfather and great-uncle had dealt with, and we did not want to go through the stressful ophthalmologist visits again.

At the same time, we knew that by default we would also have the opportunity to choose the sex of our child. This gave us more pause, especially when considering that we might have to choose between an unaffected male and a carrier female. We wanted a girl, and while a carrier female would never be affected by the disease herself, like her mother she would have a 50% chance of passing the mutation on to her children. (In the end, we were spared this choice: all of the embryos for which they could get a clear PGD result were female.)

None of this obviates the moral questions in play here. I just mean to point out that as with so many contentious issues, where you stand depends on where you sit, and what seems mildly unsettling for society in the abstract can be a godsend for an individual family.