The women that I interviewed who encountered so many barriers and so much sexism and so much

discrimination, you know, they said you might wonder why we put up with it and they said because

first of all, the work was really fun and it was really important. And we felt, you know, Lisa

Harper in particular, she said, I had instances where I got information that I felt nobody else could

have gotten. I knew that it found its way to the president and I knew that I contributed to

American national security at a very important time. Hey everybody, welcome back to another edition

of the Monews podcast. We have a special interview today with Lisa Mundi. She's the author of a

new book called The Secret History of Women at the CIA. You might be familiar with her previous work

including code breakers. This dives into the fascinating history into the origins of the

intelligence surface and the role that women have played through the decades in combating the

Soviets, combating terrorism, all the major threats the U.S. has faced and the challenges these

women had to face internally to be taken seriously and be given senior roles. Many of us are only

familiar with the CIA and intelligence community through TV shows and we actually talk about that

in this interview about Jessica Chastain and Claire Danes' Carrie Matheson and Carrie Russell

in the Americans and how close to reality these Hollywood depictions are, you might be surprised

at the answer based on her interviews with people inside the CIA. Among the things I think you'll

find most interesting is the role women played in the war on terrorism, recognizing the terrorism

issue a decade before 9-11 and how it fell on deaf ears internally in the intelligence community.

We also talk about the hunt for bin Laden afterwards and the role women played there. One more thing,

Liza Mundi is married to Bill Nye, the science guy and we actually talk about how her last book

led them to meet and then ultimately get married. And so stay tuned for that anecdote.

All right, before we get started here, just to mention that we'd love for you to consider becoming

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