After reporting about the CIA diversity quilts ("Blinded Vigilance," Oct. 15), Insight requested permission to visit CIA headquarters and photograph them. The CIA declined the request, and a spokeswoman went so far as adamantly to deny their existence, claiming that maybe a decade ago some intelligence offers voluntarily had sewn one. The intelligence officers who were forced to make them, and who pleaded for anonymity against reprisal from holdovers in the CIA management, are adamant that under Tenet they were pressured to make pieces of the diversity quilts. Apparently, under CIA security restrictions, such programs are revealed only on a need-to-know basis.
"They made us sit and talk to groups about how it feels when someone makes an insensitive remark," a mid-level CIA officer tells Insight. "It was all very condescending and insulting."
Almost none of the more than 20 employees and officials that Insight surveyed in the national-security and intelligence communities -- including the CIA, DIA, FBI and departments of Defense, Energy and State -- see any real value to the sensitivity-training courses and diversity programs that became so important under Bill Clinton, except where the specific hiring of, say, a native speaker of Pashto would further U.S. objectives to collect intelligence or conduct operations. Some call it little more than brainwashing.