2: 3. Learning Tradecraft on the Job: Heidi August's Rise from Clerk to Operative Liza Mundy Book: The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at the CIA Heidi August proved her competence in Africa, learning tradecraft such as making dead drops. While worki
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 19 October 2025
⏱️ 12 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
Heidi August proved her competence in Africa, learning tradecraft such as making dead drops. While working in Europe for David Whipple—an eccentric and anti-feminist mentor—she continued to develop her logistical skills, often running operations and handling people being exfiltrated from Soviet-occupied countries. Although Whipple preached against "women's lib," he recognized Heidi's capabilities. Unlike male case officers (the "fighter pilots of the CIA") who received prestigious training at "the farm," Heidi, hired as a clerk, learned her skills on the job. She eventually demonstrated the skills of a recruiter when she initiated a recruitment against Whipple's initial rejection, targeting a woman clerk from another country. She used elicitation skills to identify the target's vulnerability—a desire for revenge against her bosses—and successfully obtained critical communications technology, cementing her reputation as a capable officer.
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| 0:00.0 | Building a coffee business? |
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| 0:18.0 | Visit sumup.co.uk to learn more. |
| 0:29.8 | CBS Eye on the World. The book is the sisterhood, the secret history of women at the CIA. |
| 0:44.7 | Liza Mundy is the author. And we're following Heidi August, the adventures of much of the 70s and 80s and 90s and into the 21st century can be told from Heidi's point of view she's an all-purpose adventurous. |
| 0:56.7 | And we now go to Germany, where she's with Hans Jensen, but importantly, she goes to Stockholm where she meets David Whipple, a Dartmouth graduate who I picture has a bald head or a shaved head and unusual amounts of energy. And he also is fervently preaching |
| 1:04.6 | against something that they called women's lib in 1970s. It's all gone now, but it's ancient history. |
| 1:13.3 | And yet at the same time, he empowers Heidi as his office assistant. He trusts her. Why? |
| 1:19.7 | What is what is what is what is Heidi say about that? Well, Heidi is obviously very competent and |
| 1:27.0 | and certainly very trustworthy. |
| 1:29.5 | And she, you know, when she wanted to work for the CIA originally as a child, she'd envisioned living in Europe. |
| 1:34.9 | That's sort of the way everybody starts. |
| 1:37.1 | You know, they envision this, they'd end up in Paris or end up in Germany. |
| 1:40.6 | And obviously, her first posting was in Africa. |
| 1:43.1 | And many officers would discover that |
| 1:45.5 | Africa actually was a very, a place where you could really improve yourself. You weren't working |
| 1:51.4 | in a big bureaucracy. And she had started to learn what they call tradecraft in Libya. |
| 1:56.8 | She approved her competence. And so she was learning the streetcraft of making dead drops, |
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