The Feminist Was a Spy
The CPD Blog post is framed as a forum for scholars and practitioners in public diplomacy, with opinions belonging to authors and not necessarily CPD. It notes that Gloria Steinem's new book, My Life on the Road, recounts her life's journeys and travels, and that early reviews and profiles reveal detail about her barrier-breaking feminist role, liberal politics, romances, proclivities, and style.
What is often missed or mischaracterized, the piece argues, is Steinem's work as a CIA agent. Though CIA agents are typically tight-lipped, Steinem spoke openly about her relationship with The Agency in the 1950s and '60s after a magazine revealed her employment by a CIA front organization, the Independent Research Service. While she was popularly pilloried because of her paymaster, Steinem defended the CIA relationship, saying: "In my experience The Agency was completely different from its image; it was liberal, nonviolent and honorable."
The piece characterizes her work as less cloak-and-dagger and more that of a young, energetic, global representative for American values and freedom: she leveraged her underwriting to attend international youth festivals organized and otherwise ideologically dominated by America's adversaries. Long before the formalized concept of soft power, Steinem personified and promoted abroad the vigor and progressive nature of the U.S. youth movement. Strange as it may seem, her personal views and CIA political goals aligned: her brand of social revolution, promoted by American tax dollars, was meant to counter Soviet-sponsored revolutionary messaging. Public funds were intended to slow the Soviet scourge while showing America's alternative democratic face.
The article contrasts that with today's CIA, saying drone-launched bombs carry a less-subtle American message and that global challenges and threats have put the CIA into a more difficult and militarized role than in the past. It argues the Agency's own overreach and mistakes have created a new vulnerability, exacerbated by the publishing of Edward Snowden's stolen files. It acknowledges Steinem's 1960s characterization may have been idealistic and self-serving but says today's Agency is still necessary and wildly different, pointing to the 6,700-page U.S. Senate torture report as a place to start understanding how different.
The piece adds that Agency problems do not end with enhanced interrogation techniques, spying on Sen. Dianne Feinstein's Intelligence Committee computers, or former CIA Director David Petraeus's personal mistakes and failed WMD analyses. Alongside evidence of misdeeds, it says popular entertainment such as Homeland reveals the moral complexity and actionable ambiguity of intelligence operations and analysis, before the excerpt cuts off at "It is no wonder that."