the drift of the second and third novels is toward white protagonists

Tenar, OK, but Arren isn't white, IIRC.

Tepper and later LeGuin have already been mentioned as writing horribly agenda-driven genders.

I actually quite like Tepper, even her most blatantly gender-based books. I don't know why.

I actually quite like Tepper

Me, too. I don't know if I'll ever re-read "Gate to Women's Country" again, but the series of Grass, Raising the Stones, and Sideshow have some interesting things to say about cultural evolution and religion. In Grass, at least, the sexism is inherent in the religious structure she set up, and when Marjorie starts questioning that, she starts to blossom. And there are male characters who respect Marjorie for who she is.

I particularly like Grass -- it's really one of the more original worlds I've seen. And A Plague of Angels had, I thought, some interesting ideas about language and the way it's used -- oh, and I kind of enjoyed the puzzle of The Family Tree. But yeah, Gate to Women's Country, Gibbon's Decline and Fall... not so much.

Le Guin has explicitly said that she worte the later Earthsea books as a riposte to the (unconsciously) massively sexist original trilogy.

She achieved her aim, in that they're at least as consciously sexist in favor of women as the earlier ones were unconsciously in favor of men. I think my ego's resilient enough to have liked them if only they had also turned out to be actually as good as the first three.

But Le Guin isn't alone in writing what I think of as a genius work of art early on only to revisit it with diminishingly good results later. In almost every instance of a great fantasy or sci-fi series I've read, each additional book lowers the bar. (Brust and Zelazny are the only notable exceptions I can think of, and even with them it's more a case of me not liking the first book so much and then really falling for the second. Quality still plummets in books 6, 7, 8, ∞...)

but Arren isn't white, IIRC.

Yes, he is. Anyway, quite a bit paler than Ged and almost everybody else from the islands. It's a point in the first chapters, that the royal family he comes from is atypically pale (a visual marker of how they're specialer than ordinary folks).

I haven't read the EArthsea books since I was a kid, but I don't remember Ged being black. My monochromatic upbringing probably didn't even register it (I didn't even meet a black person until about 4th grade, and my memories of him are "Huh, he looks different from me, oh, well"), or I was reading too fast and missing details.

Ged's not black, as in African; he's red-brown, as in Polynesian islander. The bad guys who come raid his island as the first action in the narrative are pointedly white.

Of course, the British edition of the series I first read has a white, strawberry-blond, blue-eyed Ged with lightning surging from his fingertips a la Emperor Palpatine on the cover. The only way they could've gotten it more wrong would have been making him a woman wearing a ton of makeup.

I like early Tepper as well, but very gender-biased. And I thought the religion in Grass was pretty much Mormonism (as in several of her other books).

The only Tepper I've read was The Family Tree, and even though the blatant anti-male viewpoint was highly annoying (I got sick of it in my feminist lit class, especially when reading James Tiptree, Jr.), the twist of the story is entertaining enough to counteract it. The whole "Nature/Women good, Humanity/Man BAD!!" was tiring, though.

Can anybody recommend good books about espionage tradecraft? Not cryptanalysis, but the stuff about how to set up dead drops, how not to be seen, &c.

No, I'm not becoming a spy or a leaker. Just 'satiable curiosity.