Betty Villemarette dies; helped win benefits for ex-CIA spouses

Housewives had Betty Friedan. CIA wives had Betty Villemarette.

For almost two decades, Mrs. Villemarette served the agency in what she called "the traditional partnership role of 'two employees for the price of one,' " accompanying her husband, a CIA officer, on his secret and dangerous assignments around the world. One night in Ethiopia, when a trigger-happy guard who was supposed to be protecting the Villemarettes shot out the windows of their house, she marched outside in her robe and took away his gun.

When the marriage fell apart in the early 1970s under the stresses of CIA life, Mrs. Villemarette learned that she was not entitled to a share of her ex-husband's pension and that many other women, as well as some men, were in the same financial straits. On their behalf, Mrs. Villemarette waged and won a quiet decade-long battle to secure benefits for former CIA spouses. And from inside the CIA, where the former Potomac resident pursued her own career after her divorce, she built the first real family-support system, transforming the culture of the clandestine agency.

"Betty Villemarette was, for half a century, a tireless advocate for Agency employees and families," CIA Director Leon Panetta said in a statement. "Her hard work and dedication did much to improve the quality of life for our officers and their loved ones."

Once a supporting character in her husband's career, Mrs. Villemarette had become a celebrity within the CIA by the time of her death, at age 88, on Feb. 23 in Los Angeles after a stroke. When she received the agency's prestigious Trailblazer Award in 2007, CIA women waited in line to thank the white-haired woman in a wheelchair.

"The former spouse who was left without a means of support . . . wouldn't have made it if it were not for Betty," said Ann Doyle, a Bethesda resident who was married to a CIA officer and after her divorce worked for the agency.

Stephanie Glakas-Tenet, the wife of former CIA director George J. Tenet, wrote to Mrs. Villemarette in 2007 that without her, "thousands upon thousands of agency families would not have been protected." Glakas-Tenet is one of several directors' wives who served on the Family Advisory Board, a committee that was created through Mrs. Villemarette's efforts and which conveys families' concerns to top CIA officials.

Mrs. Villemarette led CIA divorcees in a campaign similar to one that won pension rights in 1980 for former spouses of State Department employees. Some were destitute, a situation made more maddening to them when their former husbands remarried and women who had not endured the hardships of overseas CIA postings began collecting benefits for life. But they never went public.

"None of them ever spilled any secrets," Doyle said. "They were very loyal to the agency and the country, in spite of being badly treated by the system."

Mrs. Villemarette was one of several women who testified before congressional intelligence committees in closed hearings on the matter. Those efforts resulted in the passage of a series of laws in the 1980s that entitled former agency spouses to shares of lifetime benefits, survivor benefits and health insurance.

"Everyone who worked on those things was very brave because the CIA is such a tight club," said former congresswoman Pat Schroeder (D-Colo.), who was a key player in the effort to rewrite pension laws. "If you were working internally on the side of what I thought was justice and equity, you got incredible heat."

No one got more heat than Mrs. Villemarette, said Barbara Colby, who was married to William E. Colby when he was CIA director in the 1970s and testified at the hearings. (The Colbys, both of whom supported the legislation, later divorced.)