中情局女特工不像美剧描述的那样

Good Riddance, Carrie Mathison

中情局女特工不像美剧描述的那样

WASHINGTON — The co-creator of “Homeland” on Showtime revealed recently that when the new season starts, Claire Danes' Carrie Mathison will no longer work at the CIA.

华盛顿—Showtime剧集《国土安全》(Homeland)的联合剧创近日透露，在新的一季开始时，克莱尔·达内什(Claire Danes)扮演的凯莉·马西森(Carrie Mathison)将不再为中央情报局(CIA)工作。

Her real-life counterparts can't wait for her to clean out her desk.

现实生活中的CIA女员工已经等不及她打包走人了。

The CIA sisterhood is fed up with the flock of fictional CIA women in movies and on TV who guzzle alcohol as they bed hop and drone drop, acting crazed and emotional, sleeping with terrorists and seducing assets.

影视作品中各种虚构的CIA女性狂饮滥交，用无人机投炸弹，表现得既疯狂又情绪化，还与恐怖分子上床，引诱有情报价值的人物。真正的CIA女性成员受够了这种形象。

“The problem is that they portray most women in such a one-dimensional way; whatever the character flaw is, that's all they are,” said Gina Bennett, a slender, thoughtful mother of five who has been an analyst in the Counterterrorism Center over the course of 25 years and who first began sounding the alarm about Osama bin Laden back in 1993.

“问题是，它们以这种单一化的方式描绘大多数女性;无论角色的缺陷是什么，那就是她唯一的特质，”吉娜·贝内特(Gina Bennett)说。她身材苗条，有五个孩子，是位体贴周到的母亲。贝内特在反恐中心担任分析师已逾25年，就是她于1993年率先拉响了对奥萨马·本· 拉登(Osama bin Laden)的警报。

“It can leave a very distinct understanding of women at the agency — how we function, how we relate to men, how we engage in national security — that is pretty off,” Bennett said. She was sitting in a conference room at Langley decorated with photos of a memorial for the seven CIA officers — including Bennett's close friend Jennifer Matthews — who were blown up in 2009 by a Jordanian double agent in Khost, Afghanistan.

“关于CIA女性员工——我们如何运作，我们与男性的关系，我们怎么处理国家安全问题——它们会给大家留下截然不同的印象，很离谱，”贝内特说。她坐在CIA兰利总部的一间会议室里，那里挂着七位CIA探员的纪念照片——其中包括贝内特的密友珍妮弗·马修斯(Jennifer Matthews)。2009年时，马修斯在阿富汗霍斯特遭到了一名约旦双重间谍的炸弹袭击。

Agreed Sandra Grimes, a perky 69-year-old blonde who helped unmask her CIA colleague Aldrich Ames as a double agent for the Russians after noticing that he had traded up from a battered Volvo to a Jaguar: “I wish they wouldn't use centerfold models in tight clothes. We don't look that way. And we don't act that way.”

现年69岁的桑德拉·格兰姆斯(Sandra Grimes)赞同这个说法。这位精力充沛的金发女士曾协助揭露了CIA同事奥尔德里奇·艾姆斯(Aldrich Ames)的俄罗斯双重间谍身份，因为她发现此人把座驾从破旧的沃尔沃换成了捷豹。格兰姆斯说：“我希望他们不要用杂志插页中那种穿紧身服的模特。我们不像那样打扮，也不像那样行事。”

Indeed, when I ask Bennett if she is wearing a Tory Burch dress, she replies, “I couldn't afford anything like that. It's probably Burlington Coat Factory.”

事实上，当我问贝内特是否穿汤丽柏琦(Tory Burch)品牌的服装时，她回答：“我可买不起这样的东西。我穿的大概是伯灵顿制衣厂(Burlington Coat Factory)的衣服。”

I talked to several current and former women at the CIA at the request of the usually close-lipped agency, which wants to show a stable side missing from portrayals like the one in the new NBC drama “State of Affairs.” In the premiere, Katherine Heigl's CIA analyst gets wasted on shots, picks up a stranger and upbraids her shrink for being “judge-y” — all before briefing the woman president. The women I spoke with agreed that the “honey pot” image of CIA women using sex to get secrets, as Carrie did in “Homeland,” was Hollywood sensationalism.

CIA通常口风颇紧，但是应它之邀，我与几名现任和前任CIA女性员工进行了交谈。CIA希望能展现出稳健的一面，因为在NBC新剧《国事家事》 (State of Affairs)这样的作品中，缺乏对这一面的表现。这部剧开场时，凯瑟琳·海格尔(Katherine Heigl)扮演的CIA分析师酩酊大醉，勾搭陌生人，并责备心理医生对她的举止“说三道四”——然后她向女总统进行了汇报。与我交谈的女性一致认为，把 CIA女员工描绘成这种“色诱”他人以换取秘密消息的形象，就像《国土安全》中的凯莉那样，这是好莱坞哗众取宠的手段。

“Let's not kid ourselves,” said a retired covert officer named Meredith, one of the first women to spy in hot spots around the globe. “For me, working in the Middle East, there's a lot of attraction for Middle Eastern men for Western women. I don't mean necessarily sexually, although they may be thinking that. But curiosity, if nothing else. And we certainly have played that.” With sex, she said, “you need to remove that off the table very quickly and clearly. Sometimes it's `Get your hands off my knee or I'm going to break it,' or you put as many people into the room as you can.”

“我们别自欺欺人了，”一位名为梅雷迪斯(Meredith)的退休秘密探员说。她是首批在全球热点地区从事间谍活动的女性之一。“我的经验是，在中东工作时，当地的男性的确对西方女性非常着迷。倒不一定关乎性方面，尽管他们可能会那么想，但起码是出于好奇。我们当然也会利用这一点。”涉及到性的时候，她说，“就需要非常迅速而利落地排除这一点。有时候说一句‘把手从我的膝盖上拿开，不然我就把它打断’，或是尽可能地让房间里多一些人”。

Bennett said that women are good puzzle solvers. “Women don't think more intuitively than men, but we tend to trust our own gut less,” she said. “We are not going to put all our money in one basket.”

贝内特表示，女性在解开谜团方面表现出色。“和男性相比，女性并不会更凭直觉思考，但我们对自己直觉的信赖程度往往更低，”她说。“我们不会把所有鸡蛋都放在一个篮子里。”

Their struggle to juggle personal and professional can get intense.

她们竭力兼顾个人生活和职业生涯，有时会陷入艰难境地。

“I briefed Condoleezza Rice while in labor,” Bennett recalled. “I'd tell her about the global jihad and then I would turn away and breathe. When these two worlds clash, they clash really hard.”

“我曾在生孩子期间向康多莉扎·赖斯(Condoleezza Rice)汇报工作，”贝内特回忆道。“我给她汇报全球的圣战形势，然后再转过脸呼吸。当这两个世界相冲突时，会非常的严重。”

Meredith recounted a coup in Africa where she got stuck at an embassy while her three kids were trapped at home alone.

梅雷迪斯说起了非洲的一场政变。当时，她被困在大使馆，而三个孩子则单独困在家里。

Lyssa Asbill, 38, an analyst now working in the public affairs office, had her first date with her future husband the same day she took her first polygraph exam. She was so jumpy, she thought he would never call her again.

38岁的莉莎·阿斯比尔(Lyssa Asbill)是一名分析师，现在供职于公共事务办公室。第一次同后来的丈夫约会，恰好和她头一回参加测谎考试是同一天。她很是紧张不安，以为他再也不会给自己打电话了。

Kali Caldwell, 34, a chic analyst now working with Asbill, said she recruited her mom to help her banker husband take care of their young daughter when she flew off on assignment. She recalled getting 48 hours' notice to go give a terrorism briefing to the military brass of a nation where women are second-class citizens. “Imagine their shock when they got this huge CIA briefing from this little African-American woman,” she said.

34岁的凯莉·考德威尔(Kali Caldwell)是一名分析师，外表时尚，现在和阿斯比尔是同事。她说，当自己外出执行任务时，她就把母亲叫来帮助在银行业工作的丈夫照顾年幼的女儿。她回忆道，有一次提前48小时才得知，自己要向某国的军方高层介绍有关恐怖主义的情况，而在该国，女性是二等公民。“想象一下，从这个娇小的非裔美国女子口中听取CIA的重大情况通报，他们该是多么震惊，”她说。

For Bennett, 9/11 “lasted 10 years.” She said that when you are holed up in a windowless office for days at a time trying to unravel and stop a terrorist plot, “to turn and be present and compassionate and patient with a spouse and children is very hard and does take a toll. And I'm not brilliant at it.” Tracking the virulent march of the Islamic State, she said, “it's hard to turn around and then care, honestly, about some of the minor things that are everything in your teenager's mind.

对贝内特而言，9·11“持续了10年”。她说，当你在一段时间里，连续好多天躲在一间没有窗户的办公室里，试图揭露并阻止一场恐怖阴谋时，“转过身陪在配偶和孩子身边，对他们富有同情心和耐心，是非常困难的一件事情，并且的确会产生严重的负面影响。我在这上面做得不好。”她还说，追踪伊斯兰国 (Islamic State)无恶不作的发展历程时，“老实说，很难转过身来再关心装满十几岁孩子脑袋里的那种小事。”

“I deal with people who are trying to kill lots of people in horrendous, painful ways. So I have a wall; it's really tall. Unfortunately, though, what happens with time is you can't click it on or off. You just block the sensation of feeling.

“和我打交道的人，都试图以骇人、痛苦的方式杀害很多人。所以我筑起了一堵墙，一堵真的很高的墙。但不幸的是，随着时间的推移，我不能自由地竖起或推倒这堵墙。我完全封锁了对感觉的感知。”

“I'm no longer married because of my wall. So I have five kids whose parents aren't together because I constructed that wall over time and didn't know how to get through it.”

“因为那堵墙我离婚了。所以我五个孩子的父母不在一起，原因就是我随着时间的推移筑起了那道墙，并且不知道如何穿过它。”

Carrie Mathison is so strung out that she contemplates drowning her baby daughter. But Caldwell said that when she was in the counterterrorism unit, looking at graphic images of children being killed, she would decompress on the way home by calling her mom and stopping to shop or eat sushi.

凯莉·马西森的弦绷得如此紧，以至于考虑过溺死出生不久的女儿。但考德威尔说自己还在反恐部门时，看到孩子被杀害的画面后，她会在回家的路上给自己减压，方式是给母亲打电话，并停下来逛街或吃寿司。

There has been progress made since the macho days when women were labeled “a bad investment” because they could get pregnant. There's a day care center at Langley now and flex time and the agency recently recruited at a Miami LGBT conference. Bennett said CIA moms might look forward to overseas trips — “I took to calling Kabul `spa-bul,”' she said, but there was criticism.

女性曾因为可能会怀孕而被贴上“垃圾投资”的标签。自那个大男子主义时代以来，情况已经有所改善。兰利现在有一个日托中心，实行弹性工作时间。前不久，该机构还在迈阿密的一场LGBT会议上举行了招聘。贝内特说，CIA的母亲们可能期待出国。“我喜欢把喀布尔叫‘水疗布尔’，”她说。但人们也能听到批评之声。

“The truth is, when a man takes an overseas assignment and leaves his family, including his children, it's seen as more normal than when a woman does that same thing,” Caldwell said.

“事实是，当一个男人接受海外任务，离开家人和孩子时，会被认为比一个女人这么做更正常一些，”考德威尔说。

Matthews was excoriated by her uncle, who had done covert work for the agency, for leaving her three young kids in Virginia with her husband to be chief of the CIA base in Khost. It is a sore point for the Band of Sisters, as the women who hunted Osama were called, that in “Zero Dark Thirty,” Matthews' character acted giddy. As in life, she baked a birthday cake for the Jordanian, who turned out to have explosives strapped to his body. Her friends say it was a distorted picture.

因为离开弗吉尼亚州三个年幼的孩子和丈夫而去担任CIA在霍斯特的基地负责人，马修斯遭到了曾在CIA从事秘密工作的叔父的严厉责备。追捕本拉登的女性被称作娘子军(Band of Sisters)，令她们感到痛心的是，在影片《猎杀本·拉登》(Zero Dark Thirty)中，马修斯那个角色行为轻佻。但在生活中，马修斯真的为那个约旦人烤了一个生日蛋糕，结果那人最后却在自己身上绑上了炸药。她的朋友说，事实被扭曲了。

Bennett, who bonded with Matthews when they were both pregnant and throwing up in the bathroom together, said the Band of Sisters had a favorite crime fighter: Elastigirl from “The Incredibles.”

在两人都处于怀孕阶段，并一起在洗手间呕吐时，贝内特和马修斯建立起了亲密的关系。她说，娘子军最喜欢的打击犯罪的斗士是《超人总动员》(The Incredibles)里的“弹力女超人”(Elastigirl)。