Eloise Page rose through the male-dominated CIA to become its first woman to head a major overseas station and anticipated the Sputnik launch that shocked America.
, few careers proved more remarkable — and unlikely — than that of a Southern blue blood named Eloise Randolph Page. Page anticipated the launch of Sputnik when just about everyone else was taken by surprise. She was the top female officer in the CIA’s clandestine service in the 1960s and 70s and the first woman to head a major overseas station.
According to an internal CIA study declassified in 2013, Page’s office had compiled “dozens” of reports about Soviet plans to put a satellite in space, sourced from her “high-level contacts” in the scientific community. By May 1957, the agency well knew a launch was to occur, and roughly when. “It was to be between September 20th and October 4th,” Page later stated in an interview. “We had everything else there was to know about it. We had the angle of launch, we had the date.
“She was in a position like J. Edgar Hoover to make or break a person,” said an operations officer, Mike Kalogeropoulos. “She knew where the bodies were buried. She knew the real story about everything. Nobody touched her.” Men at headquarters had been pressing Page for years to go overseas, she told him. She had no real desire to serve in an overseas capacity and was able to put them off, saying she had to care for her aged mother. When her mother died, however, the pressure intensified. “They said, ‘You have to go, or we’ll cashier you,’” Kalogeropoulos remembered her saying — meaning that they would find a way to ease her out altogether.
Even as the Greeks embraced Page, some of the men in Athens Station chafed under her leadership. So they ran an operation against her, working with allies back in Langley. As a ploy, Page was summoned to headquarters to sit on a panel. During her absence, an emissary from Langley paid a visit to Athens Station. The emissary called the station’s officers in, one by one, and solicited criticism of her, assuring them he himself would replace her as chief.
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