Spy’s Suit Paints Drinking, Womanizing at CIA : Government: A senior espionage chief says the behavior has been ignored. Agency is negotiating a settlement now in a larger gender bias case.

A federal lawsuit filed by one of the CIA’s senior female spies portrays the agency as rife with womanizing and drinking and says that this conduct has been ignored for years by internal investigators.

The charges are contained in previously confidential court filings made public Tuesday by the career spy, who has been protected by her pseudonym, “Jane Doe Thompson.”

The Thompson complaint partly surfaced in July when a federal judge in Alexandria, Va., allowed some legal motions to be made public but kept the lawsuit itself under wraps. However, the court now has made public a 140-page amended complaint filed by Thompson’s attorney, former Justice Department official Victoria Toensing, which paints a bleak picture for women employees of the CIA.

“Drinking and sexual prowess by agency males in high positions are well known, often countenanced and, if addressed at all, engender medical, not disciplinary, treatment,” the brief contends.

“There has not been a station to which plaintiff has been assigned where senior male officers did not drink and womanize and create an adverse work environment for women.”

The Thompson lawsuit, which claims unfair treatment based on her gender, was filed earlier this year, and, because of her senior status, it has helped prod the agency to begin negotiating an administrative settlement in a larger case. That case is a class-action discrimination complaint brought in 1991 by women employed in the CIA’s operations directorate, the division that handles foreign espionage and covert actions, in which Thompson also works.

The new court papers allege that “plaintiff is aware of two current married directorate of operations division chiefs who have had affairs with subordinates; one was in fact found in flagrante delicto on his couch in his office.”

The suit also charges that a former high-ranking official “announced openly at an agency meeting that he had been drunk the evening before while meeting with foreign liaison officials and could not recall whether he had revealed to these officials highly sensitive information. . . . “

In addition, at a party at her home overseas, Thompson stated that “a drunken division chief tripped over a cocktail table while grabbing for a female guest,” while another official was regularly “too hung over to come to work in the mornings.”

CIA officials have declined to comment on the merits of Thompson’s allegations on grounds that the complaint is in the hands of agency lawyers.

According to the complaint, none of the unnamed CIA officials who engaged in womanizing or heavy social drinking were ever subjected to an inquiry by the agency’s inspector general, although Thompson offered to provide their names to investigators.

The court papers said that Thompson was chief of a CIA station in the Caribbean in 1989 when her troubles began after she reported a male deputy “for beating his wife to the point of strangulation.” It was soon after, she said, that she “became the target of an inspector general investigation initiated by the male deputy” and several other employees she had disciplined for other reasons.

Overall, women now hold about 12% of the CIA’s senior operations, analysis and administrative posts, which is up from only 6% five years ago, according to the agency’s figures.