Spy moms - the women of the CIA

The hidden history of American spycraft. By Abigail Jones

“My first son was my 1993 World Trade Centre bombing baby,” says Gina Bennett, a veteran CIA analyst who has spent her career tracking down the perpetrators behind some of the worst international crises in recent memory.

Bennett, a divorced mother of five, can match the birth date of each child by the bad guys she was pursuing at the time. She calls her second son her “Khobar Towers baby” (born shortly after the 1996 bombing of a military housing complex in Saudi Arabia); her third child, a daughter, her “African embassy bombing baby” (she arrived a few weeks before the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania); and her fourth, another son, her “9/11 baby.”