In Search of Enemies - A CIA Story - John Stockwell

[62] IN SEARCH OF ENEMIES
normally sit in the passageways along with the secretaries .. Section
chiefs usually have windows and get to park in the south parking lot.
Deputy branch chiefs rate individual offices, branch chiefs add carpets
and drapes, and division chiefs have large stuffed leather chairs
and a sofa, and park in reserved slots near the main entrance. It was
good to have a desk, but right. then I needed something else even
more-information.
There was no way I could go on answering these cables when I
didn't know the players. Who was NIFIZZLE/1? IAMOLDY /1?
GPSWISH? It would take hours for me to dig answers out of the files,
once I learned where the files were. Clearly there would be no time
for reading-in today. The most effective short-cut would be the desk
officer, if she was any good.
I turned into the Angola office of Hom and Central, where the
desk officer, Brenda MacElhinney, was laying out her lunch offrench
fries and a hamburger.
Brenda MacElhinney was very good. She produced confident,
detailed answers to every question I could think to ask. MacElhinney
had been on the Angola desk for a year and had recently returned
from Angola where she had reopened the Luanda station.
She was typical of a number of CIA women. She had come into
the agency eight years before with a solid academic background from
the University of Arizona. Although she had had no problem getting
into the Deputy Directorate of Operations, she wasn't given any
encouragement for a field assignment and was instead stuck in one
of the headquarters staffs, where her abilities were temporarily stymied.
After two years of this she took leave without pay from the
agency to resume work on her doctorate. She came back onboard in
the hopes that she would be given a real chance in operations, in
Africa Division. However, her efforts to get an overseas assignment
were again frustrated. She was told, candidly, by the division chief
that there were already too many women case officers in Africa
Division, none of them remarkably effective. Not even the Equal
Employment Office could help her get an assignment which would
have been routine for a male with comparable qualifications. She
eventually abandoned the fight, rationalizing that, even if it meant
she was already plateaued at the GS 12 level with little chance of
advancement, she had no better offers outside the agency, and she
could not afford to go back to school. The mission to Luanda had