Do women make better spies?
Bin Laden movie, Homeland series showcase heroines’ savvy
Just as television audiences on both sides of the Atlantic are gripped by the denouement of Homeland, and the fate of Carrie Mathison, the maverick CIA officer portrayed by Claire Danes, a strikingly similar tale emerges from the bowels of the agency’s headquarters in realworld Virginia.
An undercover female Middle East specialist who played an integral role in the decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden is said to have clashed sharply with colleagues after she — like Carrie in her pursuit of a fictional terrorist mastermind — was proved right: in her case, about the location of the al-Qaida chief.
The agent’s identity is now the subject of intense interest since she is the model for Maya, the lead character in director Kathryn Bigelow’s new Hollywood take on the mission, Zero Dark Thirty.
While others in the CIA had wavered, the real-life Maya repeatedly declared that she was “100 per cent” certain that bin Laden was hiding at the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where he was eventually killed last year.
We know that Maya is in her thirties, but the little we know about her beyond that is limited to the account of the bin Laden raid by Matt Bissonette, one of the Navy SEALs involved, in his book No Easy Day. He strikes a remarkably patronizing and misogynistic tone about a woman whose dogged work helped snare the world’s most wanted man.
To some degree, the fact that both Homeland and Zero Dark Thirty focus on women reflects a change in the way we in the West perceive what we once called the “war on terror.”
Tamir Pardo, the director of Israel’s formidable Mossad agency, has reported finding that women are better suited than men to several aspects of intelligence work — particularly at “suppressing their ego in order to attain the goal.”
“Women have a distinct advantage in secret warfare because of their ability to multitask,” Pardo said earlier this year. “Women are gifted at deciphering situations. Contrary to stereotypes, you see that women’s abilities are superior to men in terms of understanding the territory, reading situations, spatial awareness. When they’re good, they’re very good.”
Nonetheless, women — who comprise about 40 per cent of senior CIA staff — apparently continue to face predictable challenges to their career progress and to their ability to earn the respect of colleagues. o