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THE WOMEN WHO SAW 9/11 COMING

Many of the CIA analysts who spotted the earliest signs of al-Qaeda’s rise were
female. They had trouble getting their warnings heard.

By Liza Mundy

Illustration by Joan Wong. Source: Getty.
November 18, 2023
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One day toward the end of the 20th century, John Rizzo, a career lawyer at the
Central Intelligence Agency, found himself chatting with Jack Downing—a former
Marine and stalwart Cold Warrior who had been brought out of retirement to
oversee the clandestine service.

The two men were talking about an analyst named Michael Scheuer, the cerebral
but polarizing leader of a team focused on a terrorist group called al-Qaeda.
Skeptical that Scheuer was up to the job, Downing brought up a perceived
weakness of his staff. “The only people who work for him are girls,” he scoffed.



It was a small moment, but one Rizzo never forgot. “I remember him saying
girls,” Rizzo told me in an interview before his death in 2021. Ironically,
Downing, who also died in 2021, was seen as relatively supportive of women at
the CIA.

Back in 2018, I met with a group of CIA historians to talk about women’s roles
and experiences at the agency. The historians pointed to the striking number of
women engaged in several key missions, chief among them the tracking of Osama
bin Laden and al-Qaeda, both before and after the 9/11 attacks; Scheuer’s team
of “girls” played a key part. Over three years of book research, I interviewed
more than one hundred female officers at the agency, including at least a half
dozen who were involved in the bin Laden effort—some of whom had not spoken
previously about their work, or not extensively—as well as many of their male
colleagues. What became clear in these conversations was that many of the women
who charted al-Qaeda’s rise felt that their work was undervalued or ignored and
that their gender was part of the equation.

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