September / October 2002 - Crime

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Spies like us: Famous women spies tell all
City of lost daughters: An international community continues to search

Spies like us: Famous women spies tell all
by Meisha Rosenberg

Although you aren�t likely to find Darragh�s story in most history books, she and other women spies may have changed the outcome of history as much as any of the male heroes, leaders and soldiers that are more likely to be covered in a history class. While some women, like Darragh, were able to become spies because of their supposed na�vet�, other women found that their social skills formed their strength to spy. During the Civil War, socialite Rose O�Neal Greenhow orchestrated a large network of spies from Washington and was instrumental in the Confederate victory at the Battle of Bull Run.

Whether innate or learned, women�s social skills - reading people, manipulating social situations, concocting sartorial disguise, and acting - have suited them to spying. Even nurturing is important.
�[Spying employs] the same qualities [women] bring to mothering. You have to have an infinite amount of patience when you�re hatching a good covert operation,� says Linda McCarthy, guest curator of a recent exhibit on women spies at the National Women�s History Museum in Washington, D.C. called �Clandestine Women: The Untold Stories of Women in Espionage.� The exhibit runs through December 2002.

Yet far beyond using stereotypical feminine methods, women spies have wielded guns, hauled supplies, and broken codes. And as U.S. agencies turn once again to human intelligence to increase national security after Sept. 11, the value of this work - and women�s pivotal role - is coming to light. �Women have contributed to the overall national security of the United States since the beginning, before this country was even a country,� says McCarthy.

McCarthy�s favorite female spy is Virginia Hall, who she says broke barriers and �did all the right things for all the right reasons at all the right times.� Like most women of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which was the CIA�s predecessor, Hall came from a wealthy family. During World War II, Hall was refused a job at the U.S. Foreign Service because she was female and had an artificial leg (she became known as the �limping lady�). Undeterred, Hall went on to work in the French underground and the OSS from France. Hall coordinated aid drops and provided radio intelligence on German troops. In 1945, she became the first female civilian to receive the army�s Distinguished Service Cross.

The life of a spy is not easy. McCarthy says of both women and men spies, �[They] burn the candles at both ends. Their marriages suffer, and family life isn�t the greatest in many respects.� But operatives are people like anyone else, and the ability to appear ordinary is crucial. �You want somebody who blends in, both to the cultural locale, wherever that is, and even in a stateside operational capacity. You�ve got people living in suburbia, they�re going to soccer games on Saturday, and they go to church and synagogue....And then they report back to the CIA.� McCarthy emphasizes that spying is part of life. �We all do it! It�s the idea of �Hey, the neighbors got a new Lexus, how did they afford that?� That�s human, in the most basic form.�

While the number of women spies today is classified information, McCarthy says, �When the CIA started, it was primarily a white male bastion. In this day and age, anybody who comes to the table bringing particular talents would be welcome.� Language skills are particularly valued, as is some work experience and travel abroad. While the code of secrecy remains, the D.C. exhibit gives us hope that a record of each era of history will unfurl in time, and we will learn more about these brave, invisible women. NG

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City of Lost Daughters
By Sarah Thompson

Monday, May 3, 1993

A woman�s body is found near a canal. Her mouth is open, covered by a towel. There is evidence of violent blows to her face and abdomen. Her shorts and underwear are pulled down around her knees. She has black hair and cinnamon-brown skin. Strangled to death the day before and left in an empty lot near the edge of town, she has never been identified.

This event alone would be a shocking occurrence in any town, but the scene has repeated itself almost 300 times in the past nine years in the same city - Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico, which is just across the U.S.-Mexico border from El Paso, Texas. In this city of about 1.5 million people, nearly 300 women have been killed in a similar manner since 1993. The majority of women killed have been factory workers, often en route to or from work. In the early 1990s, many U.S. and Mexican factories moved operations to the border city of Ciudad Juarez in order to take advantage of low wages and easy trade made possible by NAFTA. Mexican families flocked to Ciudad Juarez to find jobs; factory demand was high for women - who will work for lower wages and are less likely to know and demand their rights. Factory salaries are so low (around $3 a day) that women often work double shifts to earn a living wage, necessitating that they travel late at night or early in the morning.

The Killing Continues

From 1993 to 1994, 14 women were found murdered, all matching the profile of the first victim: young and attractive with long, dark hair, strangled to death and left in the desert just outside the city. Despite the apparent pattern, the police treated these first cases like separate homicides, not tracking them together or assigning a special investigator. In late 1994, a group of murdered women�s bodies were found in a remote field, again with the same profile. At this point, after two years of serial-style killings, the Chihuahua state government appointed a special taskforce to investigate the murders. In 1995, Abdel Sharif, a U.S. factory manager in Ciudad Juarez, was arrested and jailed in connection with the murders. In spite of this, the murders continued, and a year later, police arrested a gang of men known as the Rebels. Investigators charged Sharif with masterminding the murders and communicating with the Rebels from his jail cell. They theorized that by paying the Rebels to murder women, Sharif thought he could show that he wasn�t the serial killer. The members of the Rebels were arrested and jailed, but the murders still continued. Sharif has been held and questioned in connection with several of these murders, and he was found guilty of one in 1999. That conviction was thrown out on appeal when the alleged victim's description didn't fit the body produced as evidence. Sharif remains in custody today pending further appeals.
In 1999, Nancy, a 14-year-old factory worker, was beaten, sexually assaulted and left for dead on the way home from work by the driver of her factory shuttle bus. She survived, and her testimony led to the arrests of a gang of drivers. Prosecutors concluded that this was another gang working for Sharif. After moving Sharif to a high-security prison with no outside contact, Governor Patricio Martinez announced, "There will not be another murder� the crimes have been completely resolved."

Eight months later, seven more bodies were found together in a cotton field outside the city. The police accused two more bus drivers of these crimes. Accusations of torture by police officers, conflicting witness testimonies, and the murder of the attorney representing one of the drivers cast serious doubt on the arrests. As a result, the men were released.

Today, the murders continue. In May and June 2002, a total of 14 more women were found murdered in Ciudad Juarez. Alarmingly, the murders are spreading to the rest of the state of Chihuahua. In areas where there had previously been no murders of this style, seven similar murders have been discovered this year.

Inefficiency, Incompetence, Indifference

In April 2002, the UN Commission on Human Rights released a statement on Ciudad Juarez. Dato'Param Coomaraswamy, the UN investigator on the case, chastised the Mexican government for the "inefficiency, incompetence, indifference, insensibility and negligence with which the police have conducted their investigations."
At the morgues, police investigators did not conduct DNA testing on the corpses - testing that might have identified those that were decomposed beyond possible visual identification. Out of 275 homicides in the past nine years (as of April 15, 2002), 70 women still have not been identified. This number may be higher, as indicated by recent DNA testing by federal officials that has shown many of the Chihuahua police identifications to be wrong. The Chihuahua police often did not investigate where or how the women had been killed. No documentation exists for many of the cases, exacerbating the serious lack of continuity in the police investigations - in four years, the taskforce assigned to the murders has rotated through seven leaders, four State Attorneys, and seven Assistant State Attorneys.

The Chihuahua government has repeatedly promised to take action against the homicides but has rarely followed through. In 1998, the government hired Robert Ressler, an ex-FBI agent, to investigate. He concluded that there was at least one serial killer and identified several areas from which many women had been abducted. Many of the murdered women were last seen alive in the areas identified by Ressler, yet authorities did not act on his findings.

Police continue to dismiss families who report a missing woman. A mother of one of the disappeared workers said that the police "didn�t do anything to search for [my daughter, Sagrario]. They told us that maybe she�d gone off with her boyfriend. But�he was with us." Often, the woman is found dead weeks later; and the police blame her for wearing a short skirt and going out dancing. Elfego Bencomo, the current Assistant State Attorney in charge of the investigations, feels that the border has a bad image "because of its bad luck," and just needs a positive marketing campaign to turn things around. Many members of anti-violence groups in Ciudad Juarez believe that Sharif is nothing but a scapegoat for a disorganized police force. An Egyptian national, he migrated to the United States and worked in Florida, where he was convicted of sexual assault before moving to Mexico. His foreign status and inability to speak Spanish well made him an easy target for police. A growing number of people within these anti-violence groups also believe that bribes to government officials allow the factories to continue operating with no security changes. Speaking out about the climate created by the lack of police and government concern, Astrid Gonzalez Davila, a founder of the Citizens Committee Against Violence, says, "Juarez is the ideal place to kill a woman, because you're certain to get away with it".

Demanding Justice

There are many Mexican organizations that protest violence and demand police and government action in Ciudad Juarez. On June 11, 2002, representatives from Amnesty International, the Mexican Commission of the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights, and All Voices Against Silence, along with other organizations and members of the artistic community, gathered in Mexico City to draw attention to a national and international campaign. They denounced the homicides, and hoped to mobilize Mexican society to demand that the state and federal government comply with the UN recommendations and uphold promises they seem to have forgotten. The conference was a major success - not only because of the great number of attendees, but also because of the first-ever coverage on major television networks and front-page coverage in major Mexican newspapers. The murders of women in Ciudad Juarez continue, but the organizations protesting the violence and lack of justice are gaining attention within Mexico and the international community. As the world�s focus on the situation increases, the Mexican government, police and Juarez factories will have little choice but to work together to stop the violence in Ciudad Juarez and the surrounding cities. NG


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