Diversity Gone Mad at CIA
(Phillip Giraldi) You can’t have it both ways. Either the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is composed of a group of mad psychopaths who are controlling most of the world or it is a bit of a kabuki performance consisting of poseurs playing bizarre, stylized characters that seek to provide amusement for an audience prepared to watch an unrealistic display. To be sure what occurs at CIA stays in Las Vegas, to borrow a metaphor, as it is able to classify all of its failures to make them go away. And on the bright side it does serve a purpose for its bosses in the White House, enabling the government to hide behind “intelligence community (IC) assessments” when it is preparing to do something really stupid.
A recent bit of much derided apparent foolishness on the part of the IC appears to be driven by the “social justice warrior team” currently in place in Washington. President Joe Biden made a point of indicating that there is a dangerous new enemy in town in addition to those naughty foreigners in Russia, China, North Korea, Venezuela, Iran and Syria. He said in a televised address to both houses of Congress subsequent to the Derek Chauvin verdict that “…we won’t ignore what our own intelligence agencies have determined – the most lethal terrorist threat to the homeland today is from white supremacist terrorism.”
The statement is ridiculous and if the IC is indeed behind it, the entire community should be disbanded to save the taxpayer some money. To be sure, there have been a number of multiple killings by white males, but to assert that the perpetrators identify or are organized as “white supremacists” is a stretch. And those deaths are far outnumbered by the killings and woundings by black males, which the media and chattering class have basically ignored, not to mention the looting, arson and robberies based on the George Floyd factor which have rocked the country over the past year.
Be that as it may, the purge of “dissidents” in both the military and the intelligence agencies is continuing and it’s producing some exceptional comedy as the new woke culture develops under the aegis of a protective Democratic Party. Not surprisingly, some conservatives, including Tucker Carlson, have been shocked by the latest series of CIA recruitment ads, which, quite frankly, have to be seen to be believed. One might even be tempted to suggest that they are an actual Kremlin disinformation conspiracy which will leave America defenseless because everyone is laughing so hard.
Several of the new CIA recruitment ads, marketed under the headline “Humans of CIA,” can be watched on You Tube, here and here. If you are watching them you will need to pause the recording and refer to a newspeak dictionary to understand what the hell they are talking about. One of the young women to appear in the ads is a Hispanic, a “woman of color” and the “daughter of immigrants,” who declares “I am a walking declaration….educated, qualified and competent.” She nevertheless admits that she has been “diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder” and is also “cisgender.” She explains how she is actually “…intersectional, but my existence is not a box-checking exercise.” If you can get through that even though you fail to understand how that relates to national security, she then expresses having had some concerns about working at CIA prior to taking the job because she feared having to confront and refuse “to internalize misguided, patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be.” She does not describe her job at the Agency, though she may be a lawyer, but one has to hope that it involves working in the small shop on the ground floor that sells magazines, newspapers and CIA souvenir items.
In one of the other YouTubes a CIA librarian talks about how pleased he is to be able to talk about being gay at work, and how positive the atmosphere at the Agency is for homosexuals. Yet another video is of a blind woman who might also be gay who found that her working for the Agency has been a rewarding experience because CIA is “caring and inclusive.”
In yet another clip a black woman analyst explains how important it was that an “ally” at the agency “stood up for her.” She really likes her job at CIA because there are now employees working there who are “holding CIA accountable for the diversity and inclusion that it champions.”
One might note that no one being interviewed in the ads spoke very much about running intelligence operations or anything similar, which is presumably what CIA is supposed to be all about. The monologues largely consist of “identity politics” narratives combined with achieving diversity goals for the speakers, but they are also intended to demonstrate that today’s CIA is socially progressive, doing good for the world. One could observe that the employees might as well be working for the Department of Agriculture but for the fact that they may endanger the country’s food supplies while they sit around in their offices navel gazing.
More interesting is the likelihood that the CIA ads reflect who the Agency senior managers and the White House think to be likely candidates to work for them in the new social environment. It might be described as wokeness comes to the intelligence world. The Nation calls it the age of “intersectional empire,” an example of “imperial rebranding.” A lesbian on one of the videos describes how she knew she was welcome when she took the oath of loyalty to the Constitution at a ceremony presided over by Director John Brennan, who was wearing a LGBT rainbow ribbon on the lanyard supporting his badge. Excuse me, but as Brennan was a monster, the architect of President Barack Obama’s kill by drone program, he should hardly be honored because he was friendly to gays.
Some do not believe that the United States needs an intelligence community at all, but if one concedes that threats to national survival can and possibly even do exist, it is perhaps necessary to consider why a country’s intelligence agencies have security clearances and background checks. They are primarily done to make sure that the candidate does not have a close and continuing relationship with a foreign nation that can be exploited by that nation to seek the betrayal of classified information. A number of spy cases have included Chinese and Jewish Americans who were susceptible to pitches made by their co-ethnics and co-religionists. Beyond that, the background screening and polygraph exams are intended to expose any personal vices or criminal behavior that can likewise be exploited by foreign intelligence services. Up until fairly recently, homosexuality was grounds for rejection by CIA because employees have to operate in countries where such relationships are illegal, making the new hire vulnerable to a recruitment approach essentially based on blackmail.
One has to wonder what categories of behavior are now considered outside the pale when it comes to hiring by CIA. “White supremacists?” one might conjecture, however they choose to define them, or do they not do background security checks at all if the candidate checks some of the desirable diversity boxes? As the new Agency ads reveal, rejecting gay hiring prospects is clearly no longer the case, nor was it ever really fully enforced. Indeed, one recent Director was homosexual. Even during my own long-ago time in CIA there were a number of fairly openly acknowledged homosexual officers who somehow managed to dodge the polygraph questions and two of them were likely pedophiles. State Department, which had many more personnel in sensitive positions overseas than did the Agency, never had an effective ban on homosexuality and, in fact, employed numerous gay officers.
It is telling that none of the ads featured new officers referring to “patriotism” or “to serve my country.” Nor is there much indication that they speak desirable foreign languages or have valuable experience living overseas or understanding foreigners. The fact is that under the new regime in Washington, diversity has become the wedge issue to turn the federal hiring and promotion system on its head. It is intended to make the government look more like the Democratic Party demographically speaking, which means that it will effectively be anti-white. The bureaucracy will never be the same after four to eight years of Democratic Party imposed political correctness, which is, of course, the intention. And there will be consequences. One might anticipate more resources wasted on social engineering which will lead to CIA intelligence failures derived from the inability of inward-looking newly hired officers to understand the world as it is as opposed to the woke world that exists largely in their imaginations.
Philip Giraldi has a PhD in modern history from University College London and served in the US Army during the Vietnam War followed by 18 years as an operations officer with the Central Intelligence Agency.
