No Backup: My Life as a Female FBI Special Agent

In her thirteen years as special agent for the FBI, Rosemary Dew worked undercover against criminals, spies, and terrorists, earning eight commendations for her service. Despite her achievements, for her entire tenure she remained the subject of severe discrimination and even sexual harassment that the bureau seemed to condone rather than condemn. In elegant and deeply felt prose, Dew argues that this climate of corruption and duplicity not only taints the experience of the FBI’s few female agents but also leads directly to some of the bureau’s most harmful failures, such as the remarkable intelligence breakdown that allowed spy Robert Hanssen to operate undetected for more than two decades. Narrated by one of the most successful— and one of the only—women in the bureau’s history, No Backup is a startling look at the destructive and discriminatory culture that dominates one of America’s most powerful agencies, as well as an impassioned plea to an organization that must reform itself.