http://lifestyle.msn.com/your-life/bigger-picture/article.aspx?cp-documentid=29018948&GT1=32060

These women jump out of airplanes, drive like the devil and lie to almost everyone they meet. And the CIA wants more of them. As the agency works to recruit more female operatives, ex-spies explain what life is really like undercover.

After driving for two hours through the rainy streets of Skopje, Macedonia, and jumping a little every time headlights appeared in her rearview mirror, Lindsay Moran was satisfied that she wasn’t being followed by the secret police. She made a few more left turns, which gave her a good look behind her, then steered around the back of a shopping center, where her headlights picked up the man she was looking for. She stopped and he climbed in, reeking of cigarettes. “Dobro vece,” Moran said, wishing the man a good evening in Serbian. “You have information on Radovan Karadzic?” Yes, a 32-year-old from Silver Spring, Maryland, was looking for the famed Bosnian Serb war criminal. And why not? Moran was a spy for the Central Intelligence Agency.

More women are finding themselves in similar situations as the face of the CIA grows increasingly young and female. Originally the very definition of an old boys’ network—recruiting rich white men straight out of the Ivy League—the agency has been making a big push to diversify. Women are taking top offices: Director Leon Panetta recently named V. Sue Bromley to associate deputy director, his third in command. And the second in command of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence—which oversees all the country’s spy agencies, including the CIA—is a woman, Stephanie O’Sullivan. And last year the world learned that women work at every level in the CIA when seven spies were killed in a suicide bombing at a base in Afghanistan—including Jennifer Lynne Matthews, 45, the chief of the base, and Elizabeth Hanson, a 30-year-old analyst from Illinois. The CIA won’t comment on how many women work in its clandestine service, but Moran, now 41, says that nearly half of her training class was female. “One of the agency’s biggest secrets,” she says, “is that the best spies are women.”