Diversity, equity, and inclusion are now “missions” 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.
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.”
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