CIA’s new mission: Wokeness over expertise

Diversity, equity, and inclusion are now “mission” in the Central Intelligence Agency. After more than a decade of constant politicization, American intelligence is now officially woke.

Promotions of the best intelligence professionals are unlikely in the new CIA, unless all the DEI criteria are met.

This is not virtue-signaling. It is a very real, fundamental transformation of American intelligence.

The cultural revolution has been under way for years. The starting point can be traced to 2011, when President Barack Obama issued Executive Order 13583 to impose critical race and gender theory on the entire federal workforce. It had nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with further politicizing the bureaucracy. CIA Director John Brennan implemented the order with gusto.

In the final months of the Trump administration, CIA Director Gina Haspel released the “2020-2023 CIA Diversity and Inclusion Strategy” after years of preparation. Haspel explained that her strategy “weaves diversity and inclusion throughout the talent cycle” — there was no “equity” at that point — “calls for an increase in the diversity of the talent pool for our leadership positions, and prioritizes inclusion.” The purpose was not for the CIA to do a better job, but to “build a more inclusive culture.”

Those objectives “are in the DNA” of the new “2024-2027 CIA Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Strategy.” CIA Director William J. Burns released the latest DEI three-year plan last fall, adding an “A” for accessibility.

“Our DEIA strategy lays out our commitment to shaping a workforce that fully reflects the diversity of our great nation,” Burns said in the introduction. He said nothing about the strategy improving America’s defense against its enemies abroad. It was not about equal employment opportunities. It was about diversity for diversity’s sake.

Imposition of critical race theory and broader critical gender theory and critical legal theory took decades of development from something called the Frankfurt School that refined cultural Marxism as a weapon against the West. What began as a Kremlin active-measures operation under Stalin has morphed over generations to become what the CIA calls part of its “core” doctrine.

The injection of DEI ideology into the CIA first began, like most political subversion, with the creation of cells embedded throughout the bureaucracy. These cells, which look and behave much like the old Communist Party cells in government, cater to aggrieved identity groups based on sex, sexual preference and fetish, and ethnicity and race.

The CIA officially recognizes them as agency resource groups, or ARGs. The cells are organized horizontally and integrated across the intelligence community. They pushed their grievance agendas at the lower levels. They recruited like-minded people and banded together with what they called “allies” so that by the time of Obama’s 2011 executive order, the CIA had organized cadres available for promotion to upper management in the name of DEI.

In the 2024-2027 plan, the CIA’s chief diversity and inclusion officer (yes, there is such a thing) credited the leaders of the ARGs “who contributed to this strategy.”

This is not virtue-signaling. It is a very real, fundamental transformation of American intelligence. As with the Haspel plan of 2020-2023 and Brennan’s plan before it, the new CIA diversity strategy spells out what Burns calls the “measurables” — the quarterly quotas and behavior modifications to advance the revolution.

Both strategies spell out a numbing litany of bureaucratic means to measure compliance with the new ideology.

The CIA personnel system requires lots of boxes to check so that every officer, analyst, and employee is evaluated on how he, she, or it complies with the ever-changing and ever-tightening cultural revolutionary requirements under way.

The public got a glimpse of it in 2021, when the agency launched Haspel’s “Humans of the CIA” recruitment drive for a woke new generation. The cornerstone video featured a 36-year-old CIA employee who spent two and a half minutes talking only about herself: “I am perfectly made.” “I am a woman of color.” “I am a cis-gender Millennial who’s been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder.” “I am intersectional.” “I am a walking declaration.” The CIA woman referred to herself at least 45 times, informing the viewer that “I am educated, qualified, and competent,” and boasting about “my brilliance.”

This was the profile that the CIA leadership choreographed in a planned, carefully staged and recorded social media recruitment campaign.

To speed more DEI promotions regardless of professionalism, the 2024-2027 strategy says the agency will “review and adjust standards for Senior Intelligence Service incentives based on impact of actions to support enterprise diversity, inclusion, equity, and accessibility efforts.”

In other words, if you don’t promote critical race theory, gender theory, and queer theory, no matter how fine an intelligence officer, analyst, or supervisor you may be, you won’t go far any more at the new CIA.