Few, if any, government organizations have a greater mission need for diversity than the CIA. The CIA officers who secretly watched Osama bin Laden’s compound from a nearby residence avoided detection and accomplished their mission because they looked and acted just like other residents of Abbottabad. The CIA benefits immensely from America’s ability to center citizens from many different ethnic, religious, and cultural origins in a unified cause.
As one allied foreign intelligence officer once put it to me, the CIA’s impressive resources and workforce allow it “to get where it needs to be.” In a nod to the general belief of allies that CIA headquarters is too risk-averse and bureaucratized, the officer added, “If Langley allows it.”
Still, prizing diversity as an end in and of itself is also a mistake. Western intelligence services have found, for example, that recruiting Chinese spies, or “agents,” is extremely difficult unless the officer making the recruiting attempt appears to be from a non-Chinese ethnic group. That’s because would-be agents are petrified of China’s vast counterintelligence apparatus. They worry that an Australian, American, or Briton who looks, acts, and sounds like them isn’t actually a Western spy but a Ministry of State Security officer pretending to be a Western spy. On the flip side, an ethnic Chinese CIA officer is more likely to be able to infiltrate a lab in Wuhan successfully than a white guy from Wisconsin.
The key point is that whether a CIA applicant for his or her first job or a senior job is a man or a woman, or transgender, or black, or white, or Asian, or homosexual, or disabled shouldn’t come first. What should come first is the ability to recruit diverse talent and then retain and promote the most talented people into the jobs they are best suited for. Unfortunately, the Biden administration and the Democratic Left’s fixation with identity politics has infiltrated the CIA in recent years.
At the same time, however, the CIA has chosen to go with the DEI flag.
This became publicly evident with a recruiting video released by the CIA three years ago in which an agency lawyer described how she was “a cisgender millennial. … I am intersectional.” The video was widely derided as embarrassing and unprofessional within the CIA and on Capitol Hill. But it is just the tip of the iceberg. As reported by Just the News, the CIA’s head DEI officer has been outspoken about his work to prioritize DEI in agency hiring practices. Jerry Laurienti told a human resources conference, “I can tell you in the last two years of [promotion] panels, we’ve lifted people up and we’ve pushed people down based on those meetings.”
While Laurienti is well regarded inside and outside the CIA as a top Latin America analyst, his words reflect the agency’s fixation on DEI. And while it is crucial that CIA leaders support and uplift their subordinates, some active and former employees warn that time is being wasted on DEI courses that are seen as “tick-a-box” requirements to get promoted but are unrelated to leadership and skills training. They believe DEI conformity is being put before skills in workforce development. Minority officers share this concern. It has led talented and long-serving officers to seek external roles in frustration at DEI politics bleeding into internal operational and analytic cultures.
Again, this does not mean that a focus on boosting diversity is bad for the CIA. On the contrary, the agency should be recruiting more first-generation Americans or citizens with family links to countries of counterintelligence concern. While recruiting these people adds to the complexity, duration, and marginal risk of background check efficacy, it adds greatly to the CIA’s ability to secure more varied experience and innovation in thinking.
Instead, even with the CIA’s DEI focus, applicants whose life choices make for easier background checks remain prized by recruiters. The Mormon community’s focus on moral character, diligence, and strong family units explains why Mormons are so heavily represented at the CIA, for example. But Mormons probably couldn’t have watched that compound in Abbottabad or got drunk with a Russian GRU officer.
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This is no small concern. Ideological conformity is supposed to be anathema to intelligence tradecraft. The vast majority of CIA personnel are loyal and highly talented public servants trying to protect their fellow citizens and American peace and prosperity. They die to do so. They are not, as President-elect Donald Trump presumes, deep-state demons out to get him.
But prizing diversity is not the same thing as prizing a DEI agenda. The former interest supports workforce and mission excellence, and the latter supports enforced groupthink and unfair treatment.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
