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In the American high school Red attended, juniors took an aptitude test to point them toward a good career fit. Red’s report indicated she should either be a dress designer or a language professor. To this day, Red was hard-pressed to explain, on a Venn Diagram, what aspects of her personality might have been shared by such oddly divergent results that the guidance counselor offered her.
But then, after reading an article about Virginia Hall, an American spy who was one of the most accomplished secret agents in the French Resistance in WWII, Red found her calling.
She would join the CIA and become a spy, too.
Virginia and Red had things in common. They were both women born to affluence with various languages under their belts. Both were well-traveled. They had both been born in Maryland, though Red’s father was from Jordan, and her mother liked to tell her that she was of royal blood.
Red couldn’t care less about her pedigree.
She looked Middle Eastern, and that was gift enough when it came to doing her present job. That and her father taught her to speak flawless Arabic alongside Russian and French.
Her Mom and America gave her English and the most rudimentary Spanish possible. And her work with the CIA had given her a smattering of regional languages.
There was a serious divergence between Red’s and Virginia’s backgrounds. Virginia shot herself (literally) in the foot, leading to her leg amputation.
Red shot herself (figuratively) in the foot. But that had to do with self-sabotage. She doubted her intellect, her skills, and her ability. She thought perhaps she was wrong to believe she could make it into the CIA, so she set her sights elsewhere. She changed her studies, thinking she might like to collect for a museum or an art gallery.
But luckily, one of her professors quietly worked for Langley, pointing out students he thought had the secret sauce.
Because this professor spotted her, the CIA knocked on Red’s door.
Red would get the opportunity to follow in Virginia’s footsteps, after all.
Virginia, too, had been discovered and recruited, though that was a much more exciting story. The person who tapped Virginia was the one and only Vera Atkins, the woman who many thought was Ian Fleming’s template for Miss Moneypenny. Atkins got Virginia involved in Churchill’s new Special Operations Executive (SOE), and she went after the Nazis in every way she could imagine.
Was Color Code equivalent to the SOE?
No. Their jobs weren’t the same.
Virginia was crisscrossing Nazi-filled France, and Red was dealing with the business end of funding terror.
But still, Virginia Hall was her inspiration.
Would Red hobble around war-torn France with a wooden leg she named Cuthbert like Virginia had?
Certainly not.
Red would give her prosthetic limb amuchbetter name.
But becoming a spy? That had excited her imagination in a way nothing had before.
Once Langley tapped on her door, Red had done her research. She didn’t go into this career blindly. She knew all about how the women went through the Farm and then were relegated to the basement to do research as “targeters.”
At the CIA, the men got the attaboys, fist bumps, promotions, pay raises, and field assignments.
Luckily, Black pulled her onto his team, and she didn’t fall into the toxic swill the other women had to swim through.
“Look, Virginia,” Red said aloud. “I made it.”
She’d done it like Virginia would, with strategic alliances. Red had teamed up with a fellow recruit at the Farm. The man who would eventually become John Grey. And when Color Code wanted Grey on their team, Grey brought her to Black’s attention.
She made the team on merit. Shedeservedto be there.
It was just a shame that her success depended on a man seeing past her XX chromosomes to understand she was value-added to the team.
Over the decade she’d worked for them, the CIA remained an old-boy, patriarchal, often misogynistic organization that had barely made cultural strides since the nineteen-fifties despite Director Haspel’s ascendance.
Just look at the women who suffered injury and illness in the field and were cast aside in ways that the men weren’t. Yes, her team had sent someone to save her. Yes, she got the medical help she needed. But what if her illness made fieldwork impossible? She would have ended up in the same straits as, say, those women who had been exposed to the Havana Syndrome shit. Many of them developed aggressive and unusual cancers.