After 9-11, women were involved in setting up the earliest "black sites,” and participated in the controversial interrogations themselves. Whatever the intangibles, even two years before 9-11, all the staffers in "Alec Station" except Scheuer were female. The women sifted through communications intercepts, interrogation reports, snippets from human spies, and satellite images, trying to make their analysis “operational” – meaning good enough to find their target and strike him. Nathalie Bardou / APĭetail and more detail, said Bakos, was a big part of the Zarqawi team’s day. “We see risks differently, longer term."Ĭarol Rollie-Flynn, former executive director of the agency's Counter Terrorism Center, said she thinks “the real strengths of these women were their intense dedication and incredible attention to detail." On May 5, 2011, four days after the raid that killed him, Pakistanis walk by the compound where al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was caught and killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
"We're aggressive in the protection of our children,” said Bakos. Nada Bakos, the head of the targeting team that killed Zarqawi, said her team was "three quarters women," and their relentless focus on taking down Zarqawi and other al Qaeda leaders may have been influenced by a distinctly female view of security.Īfter 9-11, she said, the women working for her seemed to have vowed, "You're not going to do that to me again."
So why are the women of the war on terror so driven, and so valuable as analysts? Michael Scheuer, who ran “Alec Station,” told Newsweek last year that, “If I could have put out a sign on the door that said ‘No men need apply,’ I would have done it.” In a speech this January, former CIA Director Michael Hayden said an "incredible band of sisters” led the search for Osama. Some of Moore’s male colleagues are more effusive. “But I can say,” said Moore, “that if those individuals hadn't been working the issue, I am not confident we would've been successful.” They were critical to the first capture of a major al Qaeda target, Abu Zubaydah helped find and kill Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq ran "black sites," the secret CIA prisons used to interrogate terror suspects and in the case of two senior analysts, died in an attack by al Qaeda on a CIA compound in Afghanistan.įran Moore, then and now the CIA’s director of intelligence, its fourth-ranking official, said she doesn’t know if there was “something explicit” about their gender that sparked the female al Qaeda hunters. Women made up the majority of analysts – at one point all the analysts - in “Alec Station,” the unit charged with finding Bin Laden, managed the ramp-up at the CIA's Counter Terrorism Center after 9-11, and participated in the interrogation, and the waterboarding, of al Qaeda suspects.
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