roosevelt put ideas live on. they cannot be bombs. thank you very much.

lizanne is an award winning and the new yorkselling author of five books, her nfiction aims to inform readers by providing a ake on important parts of history that have long overlo. she's today to talk about her latest book, the sisterhood. please give a warm welcome to liza mundy. thank you so much for that kind introduction. and thank you all so much for being. this is my first trip to savannah it is all that my and i walked around the city yesterday

and just so beautiful and i'm so thrilled to be here i think this is my first time speaking in a church and a house of worship. and i do have an overwhelming urge to a prayer of thanks and particular to thank you all for 9:00 is very bright and early. it is really thrilling to see all of you here and. i really wanted to streswoften s to be into festival like this. i want to thank the organizers r making this happen. auor don't often have a chance. get together with each other. and that is also thrilling. like you, i'm a fan so many of the other authors who are here and there are such a wide range of authors and it's really thrilling for us all to be able to get together b writing is a very solitary endeavor. you know, it can be years of feeling like sorof trudging through desert by

yourself, trying to find your way. d so come to an event like this to be in fellowship, in eaders, with people who love books, who love reading to be able to walk around savannah and and get a cup of coffeethe festival. i'm one of the authors. and people say like, oh, you're one of the authors. i mean, you don't, you don't have that experience in everyday life a lot. and so to be in fellowship with all ofimportance books and of rg is, is, is a great privilege and and and really helps keep us all going. i so you thank you for just sending these waves of energy affirmation to all of us authors who are■md the of you who were fortunate enough to be in the audience last night when jeannette walls spoke in her reallyalk, which was inspirational, i'm sure, for of you and certainly forpower of storytelling and inr

case, particularly with her memoir, the power of telling her own story, having the courage to tell her own story about her past been ashamed of for much of herhat when she put it out, when she had the courage to put it out if that, about it and created fellowshipnd■]bfitreaders, i wat that asp nonfiction, you know, having the courage to tell your own sto and. the other aspect of nonfictn that has been really one of the definingmy career is, persuading other s to have the to come and, their experiences in thease of the sisterhood, the challenge was to

persuade women who had served undercover as spies and intelligence officers for the american and tell our leading intelligence agency the central intelligence agency to talk aboutheir stories to talk about the clandestine that they had lied to our national security of lifo trust that their story would be fairly told and and that they were we're safe to put themselves my hands as an author and also before that with my book before this girls breakers during world war two. that bookn women who were in early to mid nineties, spending a lot of time lot of tuna fish and cottage and

squash and and persuading who had come to washington as very young women to work in a top secret code breaking operation who had were told that they would be shot. they told anybody what they did. she had been told after the war. thanks very much for your service, ladies. now go back to your regular lives. nybody what you did and and and ha never informed that that story had been nobody ever track them down to tell t families what they had done. thaentailed sitting in conversation with number of women and convincing them, no, it is okay to tell your story. and not only is it okay, but it is a service to all us to understand our american history thoroughly, to understand who

hasr our our democratic freedoms and our way of life, and to understanding of our collective story as aso that that was sorta to expand our understanding,esiy finding of where we come from. and i think as a country, the talked about, you know, having the courage to face up to histon life story, i think it benefits all of us as readers and citizens to fully understand and our story as as nation, as a country, to understandhistory, . and i think that we are in a wonderful time where that understanding is being expanded with every book on this topic that gets written when. i was working on code girls.

i i the book hidden figures published a little bit before my book, code girls came out. you know tells the story, extraordinary story of the black women mathematicians who who ultimately powered the space race. and i think that,her books like the 1619 project and so many others now we'rement, tg of literature and this newfound of publishers to publish these stories, often collective stories of service and achievement, to really help us understand where we've come from and where we're going so. so i again, i loved listening to her talk last night, thinking out again, the power of storytelling when someone is telling their individual story. as a memoirist and and wn fo those of us nonfiction writers who are fortunate enough to be entrusted is which is a responsibility that i take very

se when i'm writing my books and one of the things t is that the people in your book are real and and still with us, fortunately and haf published te sisterhood i've i've had occasion to the podium and panels with some of the women in my and i'm just always very relieved they're still talking to me after the book is published because none of them had the ability to review. i do fact check my work, but they don't have the ability to review the book or, comment on, you know, on■í what. i've written as the author and nor did i e cia. have the right or ability tol to and am surprised and relieved that there that i will be speaking at the cia during mh specifically onnt

women's day. it's nice that they us a day and a monthnd so is you know it's affirming also towt the story of these women's service and these women's challenges is being is being heard within the institution as well. so i like to i know there's nothing more exciting on a on a saturday at 9 a.m. to be treated to apresentation. and i assure you that that it will not be a lot of graphs and nytle words you can't that you can't r enables me to share some of the images my book that i that i truly love matos at were shared with me of women spies who had who had done this clandestine for four decades and with me so pir training that that really very rarely getet seen in public. but i always like to start this sle because, you know, when you think a spy when you think ofeoneho works undercover,

exciting intelgencrk know, you always think i think of a or often think of a white with, you know, hair that be varying shades of brown he, you know, sort of generally looks alike with withknow, maybt he's wearing there might be some slight but when we of a spy we think of somebody who's often a in casinos and on ski slopes always carries a looking. and and when we said that so that when we think of a a man in intelligence james bond generally the person that we think of andr a woman in intelligence, the person that we thinkf i thk most often is, of course, miss moneypenny, either in her prior incarnations or her recent incarnation. theskyfall is our modern miss

courageous incredibly smart, a gre support for james, but who generally her time behind a desk keeping james's schedule straight you know communicating back with headquarters on his behalf in the case of the earlier miss moneypenny, you know sitting in his lap flirting with them. but general lee doing sort of the support work and the paperwork work needed to help, you know, spy understand his next mission and and his schedulee's at headquarters and and serving as sort of an administrative support person. so i think that that idea of the division of labor in intelligence gathering work is has been ingrained in our consciousness now for for many. somind, i would invite you to try and guess this debutante ball that took place there are debutantes and theirnd

escorts from all different in in and they are they are there you know the women are they are to sortebut in the american women who are they're there to represent the united states and so one member of this crowd in 1966 was being avi reca fluent in chinese, spanish, french. very, very in french. had grown up overseas as the child of americanlement the marshall plan after world at a time when america was the prtive of democracy and freedom around the world so had grown up in foreign settings very very comfortable with life frieso this person being avidly recruiting upon graduate from brownork not only for the central intelligence agency but for one of the top up top job

waat thetrgeagency which at thes now was really the leading spy agency and intelligence gathering agency in the world and at the cia. then, as now, the top position bla name because are oftenost exciting jobs are given very sort of bland and mysterious names. the meca officer to be a case officer at the cia really is to be a spy. it's like the fighter pilot job. it is the most prestigious job. your job is to live overseas undercover to yourself, to secrecy and a life of clandestine covert intelligence gathering to serve in locations the world with a covert job, with a corporation or the u.s. state department. so you have a day job're doing,a secret night job where it is your job to pry the secrets

that. other countries don't want the united states to know out of people who are natives of that country, foreign nationals who live in that country, persuading e pele to commit treason to to to tell what they know to pass secrets or documents to to you as a case officer so that they be passed to the intelligence community and the prhe uted states. it is a job for which people are knowtheir their ability to move unseen andithroughout the o their ability to mate to presso get people t trees and through all sorts of mnst's a very small, very elite of intelligence officers. and so it's a very toughry elitt after job. if you're the kind of person who's capable of living in that moral gray zone, living a lie,

order serve american intelligence gathering and american national security. so if you look at this picture and think, well, whoht been recruiting? well, i mean, there are a lot of guys tuxedos, right? so it couldis guy, youte guys cr know, like james bond, arm. certainly looks the part. or it could be this, a sort of t more back there in the shadows, not quite as noticeable that that be a good candidate. but in fact the person who was being recruited avidly by the cia was a young woman named lis manifold, the daughter of an americant had grown up in france. she spoke french she spoke french moretly glish, but she hd up along the way man world with her parents as they served sta department. her dad was a diplomat. she was being avidly by the u.s. state department, which would love persuade her to

follow in her father's footsteps. but she knew that she had grown environments.or she was very comfortable walking the streets of foreign countries.■a her, her parents, their service in vietnam. she was comfortable inll s of settings. she was fluent in so many languages. she was very at working a cocktail party, working a diplomatic function, playing a part. her parents had often sort of trotted her and her brother out at diplomatic gathering and said united america is the represente of dcy and freedom around world you all even as cifou fall on your bike, you mustn't cry. you must show everybody that ourageous americans are brave. so she had been raised with this sense of public service and a true belief in american exceptionalism. being competed for by the state department and, the central intelligence agency, she knew

that her that her true and strengths would lend themselves to an intelligence work on ral intelligence agency. beg courted to do this work and the reason that i am so xd go back to world war two and to the fact that our shocking lack of any kind of intellie gathering ability was for all the world to acountry to see. on december 7th, 1941, when we were attacked at harbor by the japanese, had no idea that that thousands of american servicemen. and that was the eventf th launched america into this global war for which we were unprepared in in many ways, and particularly with regard to our ability to know what the enemy was planning to do t ocean where

german wolf packs the■rines waiting to try to sink the convoys that were now being sent to europe andn the pacific where young men were now shipping out fight on aircraft ihcarriers and destroyers in the pacific and to try to retake back much of the territory that was captured when the japanese invaded pearl harbor, as well as other islands and landmass was in the pacific ocean. it was a terrifying time for the american public. that war in 1941. there was absolutely no guarantee that the allies going to prevail in that conflict. and all of a sudden, we have had we had hundreds of thousands of the time when we needed to build our ability to gather intelligence and to understand what was what was going to happen in the war. and so that was a light bulb moment that went on over military commanders, diplomats had. well, if the young men are signing up to fight, who is going to build our codebreaking? who's going to build our espionage?

women. let's call in these women. these who have been to to college, these women who are teaching school. ain them to be code breakers, let's see if we can train them officers. let's what the ladies can. and world war two was this we don't often think of it this way, b i we today would call inclusion, not only with women, but with the navajo code talkers in the pacific, with the tuskegee where was understood that we needed all every citizen who was willing and capable step up and serve the war effort to do so and so citizens wh motivation yu know, who had been discriminated agains ame[n life, did that they stepped up to show that black could fly■q planes, u know, that women could learn how to break codes and program so of the stem technology that came out of the and that women could could conduct spy craft so it was this terrible

moment, you know, of tragedy around the world but it was this marvelous moment in which women were for in a way that they befe in american history. and this was personally interesting to me, i grew up southwesternke jeanette wells. i thought of last night when she was talking aboutou anything she would read any words on any .and was that kind of kid, too. you know, that book as a kid, you would go to slumber parties and. you would li loos what's the reading in this house and and and i remember i would read anything at my parents hous mom, god, mom, i'm reading this really terestg ok exorcist. and i was like 13 and she oh, you're reading the exorcist, huh? and so that wasy it she was she was great. you know, she's great. i was like 12 or 13. i picked up a paperback, but that was also my introduction to that. you mispronounce a worit means

that you've read it, you know that you picked it up and reading so there's no shame in mispronouncing word you've read it because you're a reade y■vo'y to utter it yet. so iyou er mispronounce a word? just remember that that there is no shame in doing s was bookishd growing up in southwestern and was looking for a book topic, lo many, many, many years and came i came across across a class of a document that that that had been released ■gri agency, which is our inheritor agency, the wartime king that on and it was about a group of southwestern virginia schoolteachers who had o case, russian codes andd war ciphers and i thought, you know, my god mean, these women sounded like my mother. they like my grandmother. how was it that these schoolteachers had and come to

■ç how they found their way to washon introduction. then i went on to talk to nsa historians to the codebreaking project that went on during the war which more than 10,000 women came to washington learn how toakodesnd ciphers. not only of russian our allies. we weren't supposed to be breang their, but we were because that go on. but also the germans and the japanese. so when i was when i was research ing that book code girls, i also knew that there had been a parallel effort to recruit women into espionage we didn't have a cia yet. we didn't any intelligence agenciwe have 18 now the space e is our most recent, buwenothingr two. and so women were there, there e recruiting posters that went around. this is a report that was written about how how the cia had to assess people to never people

to do this kind of work. the report called assen men. but they assessed women as well because uatve■ thousands of women would contribute to our early intelligence assessed differenty than men with assessing men. they would put them in imaginary situations where they were ded. they were imagine themselves as commandos who had to persuade a group ofheir colleagues to cross a raging river. in fact, it would be like a brook, you know, a stream out in northern virginia. they were to imagine that they were commandos and they were going. i had to get the whole across the raging river with a machine and, you know, evade the gestapo was how they assess the men wom. they called all of these really well-educated did really often employed high earning womend eyk of filing the memos to see how well they could create a cross-reference system of filing

memos using three by five cards, but to also see how they could put upit under estimated and underused and discriminated agai in spy service because the psychology doing the assessing already saw that that was happening that that was going to to women and they needed frustration tolerann order to service so you can see the amount of paperwork during the war that weno coend with. this was a mapmaking group of women workinfo service, as thats ouprecessor agency to the during the war. like we didn't know anything about foreign coastland soeto be invading all of these pacific islands had really it's hard to overemphasize size how parochial how much we had to learn how we had to build our collective inteigen. so these were women who were doing that work. and just to talk about one woman in particular wore is an accelerant it accelerates medicine, it accelerates

technology and it did accelerate some of these women's careers. this a woman name who was named at the time mcwilliams. she during the war she had tried join the women's army corps, the newly formed group of was too tall to be admitted into the u.s. armyshkafound way to ts as t was the former wall street lawyer who the head of mately from being a clerk was sent to china. she took a boat to china to to the far east and then a lot of scary plane rides in china was very she was very well-liked by her colleagues, male and female. ild.aker in in china named paul and then after the war after she served the intelligence agency. like so many of the women, she was told. thanks very much for your service you know, time to go

life as a you know, as a and so she did marry paul child and she traveled with him to ance where s famously had a fabulous meal. d fo could taste at a time when that was not always here in the states.ae world as julia child. graduates of the oscars. and and she's of the many things that world war two gave us, our freedom, democracy, a lot of our stem technology and computers. it gave us a lot better food than than we had experience up to today. so so the wartime service gave women a chance to sort of reboot. reboot life trajectories, you know,and have experiences that they otherwise writing sisterhood in partul havapte on world war, but i've also been always been very interested in what happened after war. what happened after war?

two women who served during war or twoom follow in footsteps. and so that is part the story thndeavored to tell with the sisterhood following, the stories of wserved our intellige gathering during world war two. some of t war we thought we were going to closeies after world war two. but lo and behold, we're now in the war. we need to ramp it up. we need to new agencies, a new the national security agency, the intelligence agency, you know, all of these agencies that we have to really build our ability to be the world leader and gathering and intelligence and analysis so that we are never again surprised as we were at pearl harbor. so what will happen after the war is that women will fight to stay included in intelligence gathering and nnate the fact that these big bureaucraticnsing created wheree

very bureaucracies competing with each other for money and prestige and the people within themre are competing for the top jobs. right. to be director of the■"f or a sn chief running berlin you know leading our intelligence gathering efforts in countries around the world at a time when an american cia station chief director america's spie given buckets of money to dispense in these countries. u the contest with communism the soviet union is a great,■f great job. so the women have to fight their environment. and and you can see allen early directors of the cia, as portraon cover of time magazine. the cia decades was given pretty freeeign to do whatever it needed to do. allen dulles oversaw a lot of

that. he was a graduate out of the ozarks, anat very powerful network for the men. the cia was a very network, awhe to mentor you, to push your careat london station chief job and the women were largehu and so over period of years, when i for book, not only interviewing women, but reading documents to support their stories, i read a number of over and over and over. there would be studies done periodically. why aren't women why aren't the women, you know, alumni of the office being given same opportunities that the man answers know studies will be conducted. and the first study that allen dulles conducted probably at the dulles, as well as some of the women who were legacies of the west, who did make the decision to stay on. it was, called the petticoat panel.ing title you know is hard to imagine i think

it might even be because there were early spies were said to carry letters and messages in their petticoats and and so it is possible that there was a sort of historical resonance it that it still was very beng and the only way in which the female panel was even permittedy aren't when they being advanced was they were told well you know this ialtion. so after report itself it has to be very closely agency for it. the top.s going to get to so it was a report that was done and then it just sort of died and nobody out about it until it became declassified. so there were a number of studies done in which incredibly stereotypical pronouncements about women were freely shared by the guys at the top, by the station. and so part of my a big part of what i was attempting to achieve in thed was to show the stereotypes afflicted women for decades in this incredibly

important incredibly agency and the ways in which the personal stories that the women told me about their careers show how they they those stereotypes. you know really unfair and laugh able the stereotyperas ty were g women back in the bureaucracy. so one was that women can't run agents women can'tersuade what we call the what they call an asset or an agent, a foreign these women can't be rainmakers. can't be dealmakers. they can't make that ask to ask to commit treason in cia, the agent is not you, the spy. it's not james bond. actually it's the person who has committing, you know, who is running the real risk the person in the foreign country who is the thinking was that women just can't do that. they can't be persuasive and they won't be taken seriously. and so some of the station chiea

stationg this time, the guy in the speedo david whipple most veteran dartmouth football player wasn't the one who uttered that particular. but gives you a sense of the kind of gu wfree around the worf to run agency and to conduct operations clandestine op who, you know, harboring these prejudices and freely uttering them. surveys. another one hans photo in a secd this idea that women were very good with their research, that women were really good at, wom were really good at paperwork. and that may or maintaining a routine like like moneypenny and sort of keeping the guys, you know, straight and knowing what their mission was and what theyr

cia station chief. and you guys were sometimes somewhat in need routine. you can also see the liquor cabinet behind him, and that was a big+é■-erican spycraft also o, because you spend a lot of timed liquor was very cheap and flowed very freely at american peaks, to which the the spies had had free access. just some other stereotype a women can't work u the pressures of urgency. so one of the women you'll meet in the book heidi august was a womawhas a child at the cia had written them about aa clerkn though was a college graduate. she ended up working overseas in a number of very dangerous places handling airplane hijackings among things, women can't. let's see, women in many. oh, they they women women seldom have access to important information. and so if women spies go over,

they're going to try to get the information from other which i'e further from the truth the femaleecretaries female clerks had access to everything that was in you know, foreignid was r workinat the u.n. that was her day job. she was scoring shirleyple was a yog case officer.he u.n., w so she was working nights. this is lisa harper's training. you remember lisa harper, the debutante? i loved these photos. cia's fabd training facility in in virginia. you can see herhthere the middle. you can see her into disguise. in disguise class in the middle. and so the women over a of years would fight these■ stereotypes. oh, that women won't travel and important a really important part of the book to was was commemorating the service of wives of■f unpaid spouses both r the cia for the u.s. state

department. this one, shirley sulak, who traveled her case officer husband to moscow the women, wexpected to serve to fully serve the cia unpaid to help their with the tradecraft that e done on the streets with retrieving messages as with meeting with with assad. that's shirley was an enthusiastic and ver very intrepid and very very effective cia spouse andthat those are some of my favorite chapters in thoksee that women the course of decades would would work to disprove these these stereotypes. this was the woman who tracked dohe u.s. spy, aldrich ames who was passed ing secrets to the soviets. i identifying our soviet assets ■s idea that women'a objective or aggressive was just proved over and over. so you might say, why does any of this ttdiscriminated againsta big institution like?

this we know that that sort of went on for decades. we've seen mad men. you know, that'a of a relic ofn past. but, you know, we did a pr did . but but let it not be forgotten. there was oue back at headquarters assessing all of this intelligence that's who were writing reports. there was a group of women at the cia who as early as 1993, were very aware that, a man al were hatching a new kind of■ presentw kind of threat. after after the apparent defeat ofmuni in the soviet union. and so this woman, gina barnett, was part of a group of female analysts who had been channeled into a non prestigious kind of office where they were looking at terrorism around the world

and, writing reports and trying to get their voices heard. so and having■x=qe of the thingn discovered was if you're a spy workingeing underestimated. and is a great asset. it is exactly. you want you don't want to be a in a tuxedo, standing out in a crowd you want to be somebody a body thinks is gathering information. but if you're a cia analyst, job is to make sense of this intelligence and write it up for the president. it is not an advantage to be underestimated, ignored in a government. and that is what went on in the 1990s. so as a 1st, 2001 a day that i remember being in washington, we were by al and in day that we will never forget very pearl harbor like in thst country. and and that proved that that it does matter when when you aren't

using your brains t you aren't listening to the people who are paying to a new threat and and the the happy ending is the wrong word. but lle lesson