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Gabriel Schoenfeld. “The Central Inclusiveness Agency; CIA Director John Brennan Says America’s Top Spies Are Not Diverse Enough. and He’s Doing Something About It”, in Wall Street Journal, July 3, 2015.
CIA Director John Brennan believes the most important mission of the CIA is to be more diverse, replacing White men with diverse People of Color. The new “Director’s Diversity in Leadership Study” reports that the failure to promote diversity has been the major failure of the agency in recent decades. While minorities are 23.8% of CIA personnel, only 10.8% of senior officers are People of Color (POC). The report concludes that all senior leadership of the CIA are simply not committed to diversity, despite the inspiring leadership of Pres. Obama, who is Black himself. Moreover, “unconscious bias” pervades the agency, even among people who are deeply committed to diversity. One important step to increasing diversity is mandatory re-education of all leadership and managers, but it is not clear that it can erase unconscious bias. One short-term goal is that 30% of senior leadership, GS-13 and above, must be POCs.
Despite some miscellaneous. lesser issues like Russian and Chinese and Iranian and Syrian aggression, Director Brennan is convinced that the first priority and only real priority of the CIA is diversity.
One hopes that it will not take a national security disaster to remind Director Brennan that the purpose of the CIA is gathering intelligence and killing terrorism, not social engineering.
[Schoenfeld is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute.]
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