First female CIA contender emerges from the shadows

THE CIA wants you to know that Gina Haspel helped Mother Teresa when the famous missionary sought US help to find food for starving people in the 1980s.

What they would prefer you didn’t is that in 2002 Ms Haspel was in Thailand overseeing the brutal interrogation of a top al-Qaeda suspect, which involved waterboarding and other torture techniques.

Between those two facts, not much is known about Ms Haspel, 61, (right) who spent nearly all of a 33-year CIA career in the shadows.

She now faces intense public scrutiny as President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the spy agency.

If confirmed, she will be the CIA’s first female director, responsible for keeping Mr Trump briefed on the world’s danger spots and for murky espionage and paramilitary operations around the world.

After a lifetime spent in the clandestine service, almost nothing was known about Ms Haspel, even what she looked like, until a sketchy official biography and a few photographs were released last month.

The CIA said she is the daughter of a former member of the US Air Force and was raised on military bases with her four younger siblings.

She joined the spy agency in 1985.