// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
The Feminist Was a Spy
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Gloria Steinem’s new book, My Life on the Road, recounts her life’s journeys and travels. Early reviews and profiles reveal incredible detail of Steinem’s barrier-breaking feminist role, liberal politics, romances, proclivities and style.
What is often missed, or mischaracterized, however, is the work she did as a CIA agent: Steinem was a spook.
CIA agents are tight-lipped, but Steinem spoke openly about her relationship to The Agency in the 1950s and ’60s after a magazine revealed her employment by a CIA front organization, the Independent Research Service.
While popularly pilloried because of her paymaster, Steinem defended the CIA relationship, saying: “In my experience The Agency was completely different from its image; it was liberal, nonviolent and honorable.”
Less cloak-and-dagger and more a young, energetic, global representative for American values and freedom, Steinem leveraged her underwriting to attend international youth festivals organized and otherwise ideologically dominated by America’s adversaries.
Long before the formalized concept of soft power, Steinem personified and promoted abroad the vigor and progressive nature of the U.S. youth movement.
Strange as it may seem, Steinem’s personal views and CIA political goals aligned. Her brand of social revolution, promoted by American tax dollars, was meant to counter Soviet-sponsored revolutionary messaging. Public funds were intended to slow the Soviet scourge while showing America’s alternative democratic face.
Drone-launched bombs carry a less-subtle American message to today’s targets. Given global challenges and threats, the CIA is put into a more difficult and militarized role than in the past. The Agency’s own overreach and mistakes have created a new vulnerability, further exacerbated by the publishing of Edward Snowden’s stolen files.