AFFIRMATIVE ACTION FOR SPIES: Hudson Institute senior fellow Gabriel Schoenfeld on “The Central Inclusiveness Agency.”
The Central Intelligence Agency is once again mired in crisis. CIA Director John Brennan finds himself “deeply concerned.” The spy agency he runs suffers from an affliction that he says has “persisted despite repeated efforts by Agency leaders to address it.”
What is ailing this vital guardian of national security? The CIA’s upper echelon, Mr. Brennan said on Tuesday, does “not reflect the diversity of the Agency workforce or of the nation.”
Mr. Brennan was commenting on the “Director’s Diversity in Leadership Study,” an unclassified report released that day. The study comes to the “unequivocal conclusion,” he said in a statement, that there has been a major failure at the agency in the “crucial” area of diversity and inclusiveness. . . .
The report is unsparing. Senior positions at the “highest levels of the CIA” are “consistently occupied by white male career officers.” While minority officers make up 23.9% of the CIA workforce, the higher echelons of the CIA don’t come close to that number. For example, the Senior Intelligence Service, the crème de la crème of the spy agency’s personnel, manages only a 10.8% minority composition. Spies with disabilities and LGBT spies, according to the report, are no better represented in the CIA’s upper leadership, though women are generally faring well.
Yeah, I was just thinking to myself the other day, “Why, oh why, aren’t there more disabled and LGBT spies?” And of course there’s only one logical answer (at least to the Obama Administration): discrimination.
The solution? For one thing, “all leaders, managers, and supervisors” in the CIA should be subject to “mandatory stand-alone diversity and inclusion training.” This must include such “well-established tools” as “unconscious bias training” so that all CIA officers can “learn how societal forces and their own experiences mold their daily decisions and perceptions.”
I’m glad my tax dollars are now going to go toward remedying this atrocity. Because, you know, how on earth can we gather reliable intelligence if we don’t have enough transgendered or gay spies? They will be particularly useful in our efforts to infiltrate ISIS, I’m sure.
UPDATE: Fixed broken link.