Women take over the world of espionage by assault Avril Haines as Biden’s ID marks a new era

With the announcement that Avril Haines will be the next director of national intelligence in the Biden administration, along with CIA Director Gina Haspel and two women in the Mossad high command, the future of the rise of women in intelligence has already arrived. . Haines is not a spy by training. But she spent several years as deputy director of the CIA and deputy director of national security during the term of President Barack Obama after handling a series of complex security problems in other positions. When Haines was appointed deputy director of the CIA in 2013, she was the only woman to reach that high of a rank. Haspel subsequently became deputy director and then director of the CIA in 2018. The Jerusalem Post At Mossad, sources close to director Yossi Cohen have told the Post that they are excited that the spy agency is run by a woman. to such prominence now?

Some of this is natural evolution, and the fact that these agencies are professional, results-focused organizations. Just as women have gained prominence to greater authority roles in both the United States and Israel throughout the long arc of history, it was inevitable that this would happen. in intelligence. Another piece is the specific processes within the particular agencies. Decades ago, there were women in both agencies and women in some managerial roles, but the overall percentage was less the same than today. For example, the Mossad is currently almost half women, and some recent public recruitment drives specifically targeted women.
The more an agency is made up of women from scratch and the more there is in the overall defense system, the more difficult it becomes not to nominate female candidates at the top. In the past, it might have been easier to overlook a candidate when all of her competitors were male. In the US, some of that probably ties in with President-elect Joe Biden’s mantra of forming a government that “looks like America.” When you’re done, you may have a vice president, defense secretary, intelligence director, Treasury secretary, and UN ambassador. In the Mossad it certainly helps that not only Cohen, but his predecessor, Tamir Pardo, and other former Mossad bosses support the trend.
And, of course, credit should go to specific candidates and the top recent feats of the women themselves. Haines went from being an actor on international law issues at the State Department to becoming a major force in shaping policy on counterterrorism and drone strikes during the Obama When John Brennan, Obama’s top adviser on aircraft strikes Unmanned, he took over the CIA, eventually taking Haines with him to be his number 2.
He had already rubbed shoulders with senior CIA officials during discussions about the selection rules. That put her in a more powerful position when she had to carry out a restructuring of the agency, especially in the tech and cyber spheres. Next, Haines is known for multiple run-ins with the aftermath of post-9/11 US policies that they allowed it. In 2015, she was assigned to bridge a variety of differences between the CIA and a special task force of the United States Senate led by Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein. Topics included how much of the Bush-era torture he had to reveal as well. as problems in cooperation between the parties.
When Haspel was nominated as head of the CIA, Haines was one of the most prominent voices on the Democratic side of the spectrum to support her nomination, despite Haspel’s involvement in the approval of at least one waterboarding incident some 15 years earlier. They have polished her credentials as tough enough for work among the intelligence types, but also forced her to make public pronouncements over the past year professing her liberal values ​​to avoid opposition from some Democrats who characterize her as insufficiently progressive. -was officials of the attacks for being insufficiently progressive. They have pointed out that she was a major force in getting more detainees transferred from indefinite detention at Guantanamo, increasing the number of Syrian refugees allowed into the United States and reducing the volume of drone strikes. it is not particularly clear what his position will be on issues related to Israel. In general, however, he mixes progressivism with pragmatism, something for which Biden is generally pro-Israeli. Haspel has kept an extremely low profile as CIA director to try to avoid the ire of President Donald Trump. Still, in his few public comments, he has projected a serious and no-nonsense aura. Speaking to Congress and some appearances at universities, he tried to emphasize the scope of the threat from Iran. When asked by a congressman in January 2019 if Iran was complying with the 2015 nuclear deal, he only said that it was after noting that it was beginning to take action to likely violate the deal in the near future (which it turned out to be right about) . Haspel was also reportedly a force in lobbying to assassinate the leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force Qasem Soleimani in January. was battleship, and that she was the key player for Israel. The identities of the two main women in the Mossad high command are classified. But they are known to head the Human Resources Division and the Training Division. Additionally, some relatively recent exploits by Mossad agents have made headlines. A key surveillance spy in Israel’s seizure of Iran’s secret nuclear files in Tehran was a woman. Women were also among the people Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave special awards regarding the operation, according to the Mossad book by Michael Bar-Zohar and Nissim Mishal, one of the two officers who surveyed the site on the night of the mission was a woman. . She was an engineering graduate who spoke Farsi, used state-of-the-art electronic equipment to obtain crucial photos, and had surveyed the site several times. In the same book, it is revealed that several women participated in the Vienna operation to uncover Syria’s nuclear secrets in 2007. Among the activities carried out by the spies was tricking Syria’s chief of atomic energy into handing over the key to his hotel room so that it could be copied and taken away from the hotel while other agents accessed his room and his computer. The book claims that an agent murdered an Iranian nuclear scientist in Tehran in 2010. Two agents on a motorcycle planted a bomb in Majid Shahriari’s vehicle, which killed him. The officer who placed the explosive device in the car was a woman. With top-notch candidates and stories accompanying the new trend, it seems that women reaching the top of the intelligence world was almost inevitable.