From a Wall Street Journal story by Nathalia Holt headlined “The Women Who Helped to Build the CIA”:

From the agency’s start, its female staff broke ground in espionage, but they had to fight for decades against the disdain and discrimination of their male colleagues.

Elizabeth Sudmeier loitered outside a cafe in Baghdad one day in early 1954, taking care not to draw attention to herself. It was not easy for a young American woman in the Middle East to blend in, but Sudmeier, her colleagues would later attest, was practiced in making herself disappear in any setting.