This winter I finally got the first season of Homeland on DVD. Almost as soon as my husband and I settled in to watch the opening sequence—Clare Danes in trench coat and headscarf that didn’t hide her blonde hair, running down a street in Baghdad, dodging traffic, gunfire, explosions, pursuers—he got up to leave.

“The episode hasn’t even begun,” I said.

“It’s just another American version of our wars,” he replied. “Put a pretty face on it and make the carnage, the history, background.”

For the next week, as I gobbled up episodes alone, my husband’s criticism remained low level noise against the fast pace, the thrum, of Danes’ CIA agent Carrie who works obsessively to keep Al Qaeda from pulling off another terror attack. Carrie is dogged, intuitive, brave, cantankerous, unpredictable and disobedient to her superiors.

As anyone who’s seen the show knows, she medicates to keep her manic side under control. She’s Al Qaeda’s and her own worst enemy, but when the agency fails to support her conclusions, they lose operatives because Carrie’s connected the dots and gotten it right.

First season done, I was having post-Homeland withdrawal when Zero Dark Thirty came out, with Jessica Chastain as Maya, another smart CIA beauty. Plus, I got the DVD of Fair Game—the biopic of politically-sabotaged, beautiful CIA agent Valerie Plame. The three CIA dramas were different, ranging from Homeland fiction to Fair Game "fact," but to give credit to my husband—who disliked Zero Dark Thirty for the same reasons he boycotted Homeland, and couldn’t watch Fair Game for more than ten minutes—they were all good PR for the Agency, and paeans to shoulder-length blonde and red-headed women as patriotic spy catchers versus the dark jihadis.

The women, dressed for work in well-tailored suits and impossible heels, coolly question middle easterners who sweat a lot before they agree to cooperate. Neither Carrie, Maya nor Valerie use physical means because the combined force of the American military and prior softening-up (in Zero Dark Thirty, much-discussed torture) lets them stay clean. Perhaps if they were shown physically participating in brutish interrogation, an element of erotic sadism might surface, confusing their cerebral talents with sex appeal.

These women don’t have to sleep with the enemy to get secrets, not like old-fashioned female spies. And, strangely, despite their exceptional looks, the agents aren’t shown being hit up for sex by male colleagues. Seems that elite CIA spies don’t inhabit the same universe with enlisted women who get raped just for being military.

Whether we’re being sold spy stories or hair color, fine-featured young women with great bodies distract as they validate us. We’re doing something right as Americans if we have babes on our side, going back to Charlie’s Angels and The Avengers, not forgetting a transitional figure, Jennifer Garner, in Alias.

Even though the blonde factor bothers me, I confess I’m still obsessed with Homeland and Carrie’s crazy brilliance. Poor Carrie. When she compulsively crosses the line and has torrid sex with the turncoat POW Nick Brody, she’s in serious trouble. Even though she gets important post-coital information from him, she can’t reveal her sources and is more than ever a pariah, a Cassandra.

Worse still, she’s punished for what she knows. When the first season ends, Carrie has not only been fired but is shown lying on a gurney, wired up, waiting for shock treatments to calm her brain waves and erase memory.

My husband, who resisted the Vietnam War draft in the 1970s, despises revisionist histories that try to make that southeast Asia war good and winnable, fabricating false memories the way the Iraq hawks are frantically trying to justify Gulf War II. When I argue for films that are fiction and say, “It’s only entertainment, relax,” he’s as likely to answer, “If you don’t mind rewritten history used as propaganda, go ahead and watch.”

So that’s where we are with Homeland before I get to see Season Two. But there is a video coming out that sounds like a compromise: in reaction toZero Dark Thirty, and probably Homeland as well, a group of female CIA agents, some of them retired and others active, agreed to be interviewed or quoted anonymously for a forthcoming documentary, Manhunt.

These women, called “the Sisterhood,” worked, and are still working, as "trackers." They’ve been following the Afghan Arabs—bin Laden and Al Qaeda—since 1993. Like the fictional agents in one respect, they’ve haunted every possible site on the computer, amassing data to make sense of the emerging threats around the world.

Unlike screenland, these women worked for years in teams. “In reality, cowboys don’t work as targeters,” reported one of the Sisters. However, there’s another similarity between reality and fiction: the Sisters in the CIA, like their fictional counterparts, have been repeatedly ignored. When the Sisters gave early warnings about bin Laden and Al Qaeda to Bill Clinton, and later to Bush II, no one in power listened.

From the photos I’ve seen online, the Sisters appear to be as unglamorous as their work, which will be a relief, a hiatus, before the next anguished beauty runs from gunfire and explosions in Baghdad or Cairo to deliver our nation from harm.