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Women of the CIA: The Hidden History of American Spycraft

There are more women in the CIA than ever before, with women operating at unprecedented levels on every floor of CIA headquarters and throughout its far-flung global outposts. Yet women remain underrepresented in executive-level jobs and the clandestine service. Spencer Platt/Getty “My first son was my 1993 World Trade Center bombing baby,” says Gina Bennett, […]

There are more women in the CIA than ever before, with women operating at unprecedented levels on every floor of CIA headquarters and throughout its far-flung global outposts. Yet women remain underrepresented in executive-level jobs and the clandestine service. Spencer Platt/Getty

“My first son was my 1993 World Trade Center bombing baby,” says Gina Bennett, a veteran CIA analyst who has spent her career tracking down the perpetrators behind some of the worst international crises in recent memory. Bennett, a divorced mother of five, can match the birthdate of each child by the bad guys she was pursuing at the time. She calls her second son her “Khobar Towers baby” (born shortly after the 1996 bombing of a military housing complex in Saudi Arabia); her third child, a daughter, her “African embassy bombing baby” (she arrived a few weeks before the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania); and her fourth, another son, her “9/11 baby.”

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Bennett was in the early stages of her pregnancy during that attack, and despite all of her morning sickness, “most people didn’t know I was pregnant,” she says. Her fifth child, a girl, was her “Fallujah baby.”

Read More- Newsweek

Image courtesy of Newsweek

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