A thoughtful reader, Orlando Jackson, suggests that in criticizing affirmative action at the CIA, I am trying to have it two ways. On the one hand, he writes, “you and critics, want the CIA to ‘connect the dots’ via a better enabled HUMINT [human intelligence]. Yet, on the other hand, you critique them when they work towards this end” by bringing in people who speak Farsi, Urdu, and Arabic, and you dismiss the value of recruiting “non-white agents to operate in the predominately non-white world of al-Qaeda.”
These would be valid points if Mr. Orlando were accurately capturing what is going on. But as best we can tell, the CIA’s affirmative-action program has never been tailored toward bringing in operatives who speak the languages and/or otherwise resemble al-Qaeda terrorists. Rather, it has been oriented toward the politically-correct goal of creating a workforce that more closely resembles America (or the EEOC’s version of America)–in other words, bringing in more Hispanics, blacks, women, the disabled, and Pacific Islanders.
This is not idle speculation on my part. I wrote about it in detail back in 2005 in What Became of the CIA. Here is a relevant excerpt:
By 1995, under John Deutch, Clinton’s second director, the effort to remake the agency in the name of “diversity” had intensified markedly. Deutch began his tenure by advancing a “strategic diversity plan” and installing a forty-year-old Pentagon official, Nora Slatkin, in the agency’s executive-director slot to carry it out. Slatkin soon formed a Human Resources Oversight Council (HROC) aimed “at improving the agency’s efforts to hire and provide career development for women, minorities, the deaf, and people with disabilities.” The need for such measures, according to HROC, was clear from its own study of shortfalls in “recruiting, hiring, and advancement”:
[M]inorities in the agency’s workforce — particularly Hispanics and Asian-Pacific employees — remain underrepresented when compared with Civilian Labor Force (CLF) guidelines determined by the 1990 census. Hispanic employees in FY 1995 accounted for 2.3 percent of the agency workforce; CLF guidelines indicate Hispanics nationwide account for 8.1 percent of the nation’s workforce. Asian-Pacific employees comprised only 1.7 percent of the agency’s workforce; CLF guidelines indicate Asian-Pacific minorities comprise 2.8 percent of the nation’s workforce.
To reduce these statistical discrepancies, Slatkin declared “a goal that one out of every three officers hired in fiscal years 1995-97 be of Hispanic or Asian-Pacific origin.” She moved no less aggressively to alter the ethnic and sexual complexion of the CIA’s higher levels. In just six months, she was able to report, “42 percent of officers selected for senior assignments ha[d] been women or minorities”. . . .
By 1999, the agency’s top leaders were actively engaged in the campaign for greater diversity, or, in plain English, quotas. Clinton’s third director, George Tenet, issued a major statement deploring the fact that “[m]inorities, women, and people with disabilities still are underrepresented in the agency’s mid-level and senior officer positions,” and asserting his determination to end this state of affairs. It was, he said, incumbent on “supervisors and managers” at all levels to understand that diversity is “one of the most powerful tools we have to help make the world a safer place,” and he declared that they would be held accountable for “ensuring that this agency and community are inclusive institutions.”
By all means, let’s have a CIA whose composition more closely resembles that of our adversaries. But unless things have changed radically since George Tenet resigned, that is not what affirmative action in the intelligence world is all about.
