After the Cold War ended, and again after the Sept. 11 attacks, a string of C.I.A. directors and congressional overseers pushed the agency to diversify its ranks.
The drive had little to do with any sense of racial justice, civil rights or equity. It was, rather, a hard-nosed national security decision.
The agency’s leaders had come to believe that having analysts from an array of backgrounds would lead to better conclusions. Officers with cultural knowledge would see things others might miss. Case officers who reflected America’s diversity would move about foreign cities more easily without being detected.
“If there is one place that there is a clear business case for diversity it is at the C.I.A. and intelligence agencies,” said Senator Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat who is a longtime senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “You have to have spies around the world in all countries. They can’t all be white men, or our intelligence collection will suffer.”
But what was once a bipartisan emphasis on the importance of diversity at the agency is facing new pressure. Under the Trump administration, the C.I.A. has moved to dismantle its recruitment programs, especially those that have sought to bring racial and ethnic minorities into the organization, which is mostly white.
John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, says those steps are about making a colorblind organization solely focused on hiring and promoting people based on merit.
Defenders of diversity recruitment say the battle to integrate the agency is being abandoned when it is only partially complete. In the 1980s, white men filled 90 percent of top leadership positions. Those numbers began to fall a decade later as the agency recruited, and promoted, more women and minorities.
The recruitment helped, though it did not result in a spy agency that looked precisely like America. Ten years ago, the last time the agency released detailed numbers, more women had ascended to top jobs. But people with racial or ethnic minority backgrounds made up only a quarter of the agency and representation in leadership roles lagged much further back.
Critics of the Trump administration’s moves fear that without aggressive recruiting of minorities, the C.I.A. will be less able to carry out its mission of working covertly in any country in the world and stealing secrets for the United States.
Mr. Ratcliffe not only shut down the diversity recruiting efforts but also started firing the officers assigned to them. Other high-ranking C.I.A. officials argued that the officers be allowed to transferred to other jobs at the agency, but they were overruled by Mr. Ratcliffe, who cited President Trump’s orders to roll back diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
Suddenly, C.I.A. officers who had been assigned to help find the next generation of spy handlers — even those who had worked at recruiting at primarily white universities — were on the chopping block.
Liz Lyons, a C.I.A. spokeswoman, defended that decision.
“C.I.A. will be the ultimate meritocracy that employs, develops, empowers and retains officers who are steadfastly focused on our mission to recruit spies and collect foreign intelligence better than any other intelligence organization in the world,” she said.
A federal judge has halted the firings, putting in place a temporary injunction and then ordering the agency to hear appeals and consider the officers for other positions. Last week, the government appealed the judge’s order.
Defenders of the fired officers argue that there was no reason to let them go. They were not experts in human resources or diversity hiring. They were spies chosen for an initiative that was important to previous administrations.
“There are no D.E.I. officers, there are only intelligence officers at C.I.A.,” said Darrell Blocker, a former senior C.I.A. officer who led the agency’s training efforts and is Black.
The first Trump administration was not as hostile to efforts to diversify the agency. Under Gina Haspel, who, as the first woman to lead the agency, served as director for much of Mr. Trump’s first term, the C.I.A. continued recruiting diverse candidates.
In 2020, the agency created its first television streaming advertisement, to demonstrate to women and minorities that the agency valued inclusivity, according to one official at the time.
The one-minute ad shows a group of officers — people of color, women and white men — being brought into the agency. A veteran employee who lectures to the recruits is Black. A language expert is of South Asian descent. The senior officers who order an overseas operation are women. And a case officer who executes a brush pass with a source in the field is a Black woman.
Now, the C.I.A. has created a new recruiting video. It focuses on technology and showcases a whiter group of officers, according to people who have seen it.
It is not the first retreat from diversity in the history of American intelligence. The spy organization that preceded the C.I.A. prized diversity in a way that its successor did not in its early years.
Maj. Gen. William J. Donovan, the director of the agency’s predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services, recruited women and Black Americans to be among his “glorious amateurs” conducting covert operations during World War II.
In a speech after the O.S.S. was shuttered — and before the C.I.A. took its place — General Donovan highlighted the diversity of the group he had assembled.
“We have come to the end of an unusual experiment,” he said. “This experiment was to determine whether a group of Americans constituting a cross-section of racial origins, of abilities, temperaments and talents, could risk an encounter with the long-established and well-trained enemy organizations.”
While the Pentagon has begun purging material that celebrates the diversity of the armed services, the C.I.A. has not started editing its history. The agency’s website still has a page highlighting General Donovan’s quote and the contributions of Black, Japanese American, Hispanic and female O.S.S. officers.
“Bill Donovan recognized that diversity was our strength,” Mr. Blocker said.
But General Donovan’s commitment to a diverse force did not carry over when the C.I.A. was established in 1947.
“Despite Donovan’s best measures, it was basically: ‘OK little ladies, go back to the kitchen,’” Mr. Blocker said.
It was only after the fall of the Berlin Wall that change began on a larger scale.
John McLaughlin, a former deputy director of the agency, said perceptions about the agency’s needs began to shift.
“From that point on, it was commonly understood that diversity was not simply something nice to have, it was a business requirement,” Mr. McLaughlin said. “You really needed people who could blend in, in different parts of the world, and who didn’t look like me. I blend in in Ireland and that’s not useful to anyone.”
The push for a more diverse work force intensified after the Sept. 11 attacks, as the Middle East and terrorism became top priorities. Members of Congress criticized the agency for not having enough Arabic, Dari and Pashto speakers, and too few officers focused on the Middle East and Central Asia.
Mr. McLaughlin said the C.I.A. brought in analysts who had family ties and cultural knowledge of the countries and societies they studied, in addition to deep academic knowledge.
Teams of officers that include a range of experiences and backgrounds can be more adept at reading between the lines of pronouncements from authoritarian governments, and more aware of cultural differences in the way others express themselves.
“The point is, if someone has grown up in another culture or at least experienced it, they’re going to have a different perspective,” Mr. McLaughlin said. “And you want a variety of perspectives in the room.”
Not everyone buys the argument that Chinese Americans make better case officers in Beijing than anyone else.
When he was running the C.I.A.’s Near East Division, Daniel Hoffman, a retired senior clandestine services officer, said he worked hard to eliminate any bias in promotions and potential discrimination, and to ensure that promotions were based on merit.
That, he said, made for a stronger and more diverse agency.
But recruiting spies and stealing secrets overseas is all about good tradecraft and language ability, Mr. Hoffman said.
Mr. Hoffman, who developed fluency in four languages while serving at the C.I.A., said the agency had an impressive record of training non-Chinese American officers to master Mandarin.
For Mr. Hoffman, promoting people solely because they were female or from a minority background was counterproductive, but he said ensuring that no one was held back because of their sex, ethnicity or gender reflected the nation’s core values and made the C.I.A. stronger.
“We just need the best people at the agency,” Mr. Hoffman said. “We need to hire and promote the best people without any predisposed bias.”
Mr. Blocker said he did not disagree with the idea that any talented officer could be trained in good tradecraft and language skills. But he said the most effective stations he served in had a diverse group of officers.
He grew up on Okinawa and served in South Korea during a stint in the Air Force. When he came to the C.I.A. in 1990, he knew he wanted to work on Asian issues. He spent his first months as a Soviet weapons and tactics analyst specializing in North Korea.
He intended to make his career as an Asia specialist, until he met William Mosebey Jr.
“This guy knew more about Africa than anyone I’d have ever met,” Mr. Blocker said. Mr. Mosebey could get any African leader on the phone, hired a diverse bench of officers and taught them how to recruit any kind of source.
“As much as I didn’t want to be a Black dude going to Africa, after meeting Bill Mosebey, it changed my life,” Mr. Blocker said.
Mr. Mosebey, who was white, believed in the importance of having people of many perspectives in his stations, and persuaded Mr. Blocker to join his team.
“Black officers in the Africa division could blend in more easily than white officers of the past, but we always had, and needed, a good blend of people: Black, white, male, female,” Mr. Blocker said. “I have served in a number of stations. I have never served where they didn’t have another Black officer.”
Former officials said that, in essence, was why the C.I.A. tried to pursue diversity: to lean into the competitive advantage that American society offers.
“This is not kumbaya,” Mr. McLaughlin said. “The whole idea of wokeism is silly in this context. Diversity is not a nice to have, it is a business requirement.”
