She was a CIA spy. Now she’s a lawyer battling her old agency. This is her story.
Abigail Jones /
The Washington Post
Long before the Me Too movement entered the national consciousness, Janine Brookner was on a one-woman crusade to expose abuses taking place behind government walls. She knew about sexual harassment — because, she says, she had experienced it herself in her quarter-century working as a spy in the CIA’s clandestine service. She says she was sexually harassed by around a dozen men, including three married division chiefs. Reporting those incidents would have been “career suicide,” she explains, so at the time, she stayed silent. But when, at the height of her career, the agency ironically charged her with having sexually harassed some of her male employees, among other allegations, she fought back — and prevailed.