Bin Laden CIA women: A new documentary, “Manhunt,” partially focuses on a team of women who worked for the CIA tasked with tracking down terror leader Osama bin Laden.
The documentary includes interviews by the Sisterhood, as it was called, who were assigned to finding bin Laden. The team consisted mostly of women.
In the documentary, retired CIA agents Nada Bakos, Cindy Storer and Barbara Sude talk about their role in the hunt.
Speaking with PBS, Storer said it was difficult trying to determine whether al-Qaeda even existed years ago.
“If you’re working on a state -- a country -- you already know the wiring diagrams, you know how the state is organized,” she said. “But with a group like this, you had to figure out if they even existed.”
“They said we were obsessed crusaders, overly emotional,” Storer said in the film, according to Yahoo News, speaking about when she was criticized for “spending too much time working on bin Laden.”
She added: “We were borderline obsessed, but I thought it was for a good reason.”
Bakos told PBS that the women felt an increased sense of responsibility when two planes slammed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, killing 3,000 people.
“That sense of responsibility is not lost on the people who do that job to have to point out that maybe there were some issues leading up to 9/11 or points missed. Certainly the people doing the work understood exactly what had happened,” she said.
Bakos also elaborated on why there were numerous women on the analyst team.
“Those were my predecessors, the original Qaeda analysts, and the team was predominantly female,” she said, according to Time magazine.
She added: “It wasn’t viewed as a great place to be, or the right account to have. A lot of these women were passionate about the subject matter and understood the intensity and the urgency of it early on and stayed with it. A lot of them are still there.”
