• The women describe falling into Kafkaesque nightmares of CIA investigations, abusive polygraph tests, and secret review boards. As a result of harsh disciplinary action, they claim, the CIA is driving out some of its most talented female officers, including fluent speakers of Arabic and Chinese.

• The women in the case include some of the CIA’s most experienced, most decorated female case officers, who ran afoul of the agency’s feared Security Center. “You have two organizations,” says a veteran case officer. “There’s the organization I worked in and thrived in, but there’s a dark underbelly that nobody knows about unless you have a run-in with it.”

• CIA officials counter that the women in the current case had serious disciplinary and security problems, and they insist that the agency has made rapid progress in promoting women. The CIA’s espionage branch -- the National Clandestine Service -- is now 39 percent female, including more than a fifth of its case officers or spies. The CIA’s senior intelligence service grew from 14 percent in 1996 to 25 percent in 2006, agency officials tell U.S. News.

• The women’s complaints stem from a long macho tradition at the CIA, say agency veterans, in which male officers had affairs at safe houses, frequented prostitutes, and staged sex shows -- with few consequences. “Everybody was having an affair with everyone else,” says one veteran spy. In 1995, the CIA settled an earlier class action suit on sex discrimination by paying out nearly $1 million to over 400 women.

• CIA officials are pushing to have the case thrown out of the EEOC and classify key elements of the proceedings. By summer this year, an EEOC judge will decide if the case will be certified as a class action.