Posted on 03/06/2005 1:46:43 PM PST by CHARLITE
The Central Intelligence Agency might be the last place in Washington you'd expect political correctness to have taken root. But as Gabriel Schoenfeld demonstrates in a disturbing new article, "What Became of the CIA," in the March issue of Commentary magazine, the agency has turned into "a government bureaucracy like any other, its managers and employees preoccupied with endless reams of restrictive regulations and simultaneously caught up in many of the newfangled pathologies of the American workplace," including affirmative action programs. Is it possible that in its zeal to promote more women and minorities, the CIA compromised its own mission? What role, if any, did affirmative action play in the spectacular failures of the CIA prior to 9/11? And what is being done now to undo the damage to the agency?
Schoenfeld reports that the agency has been under pressure since the early 1990s to reform its "old boy network" image. A 1991 CIA-commissioned study found that women did not achieve "at the same pace of or [to] the same degree as men," and received "proportionately fewer awards," missing out on choice assignments in the agency. The report also noted that, "in order to be accepted," female officers tolerated widespread sexual harassment. When Clinton-appointed CIA Director R. James Woolsey took over in 1993, the agency embarked on an ambitious plan not only to break the so-called "glass ceiling" but to identify the top 50 jobs within each directorate and collect data on how many women and minority candidates applied and were chosen for the slots.
Although Woolsey promised "we have not and will not set down quotas," the affirmative action plan he put in place soon transmogrified into rigid hiring goals. When Woolsey's replacement, John Deutch, took over, one of his first actions was to establish a "strategic diversity plan." By 1995, Schoenfeld notes, "the effort to remake the agency in the name of 'diversity' had intensified markedly."
Deutch appointed Nora Slatkin, a former Capitol Hill staffer and assistant secretary of the Navy, as CIA executive director, the No. 3 job in the agency. Slatkin immediately declared "a goal that one out of every three officers hired in fiscal years 1995-97 be of Hispanic or Asian-Pacific origin." According to Schoenfeld, Slatkin "moved no less aggressively to alter the ethnic and sexual complexion of the CIA's higher levels. In just six months, she was able to report, '42 percent of officers selected for senior assignments ha[d] been women or minorities.'" Nonetheless, Deutch's successor, George Tenet, bemoaned the under-representation of "[m]inorities, women, and people with disabilities" in the agency's mid-level and senior officer positions, and proclaimed diversity "one of the most powerful tools we have to help make the world a safer place."
Obviously, the undermining of the CIA during the Clinton years was not entirely due to overzealous affirmative action. As Schoenfeld points out, the agency's budget suffered large cuts under Clinton and, most importantly, many senior political appointees seemed contemptuous of the agency's very mission, to gather and protect national security intelligence. Deutch eventually admitted to mishandling highly classified material by storing it on unsecured home computers while he was CIA director. He signed a Justice Department plea bargain admitting his guilt, but the agreement was essentially nullified when outgoing President Bill Clinton pardoned him on Jan. 20, 2001. (Deutch's affirmative action gadfly Slatkin was one of six CIA officials later reprimanded for her role in stalling the investigation into Deutch's abuse of classified material.)
But even if affirmative action was not the primary culprit in the perilous decline of the CIA, it contributed to the problem. Schoenfeld points out, "The drive to hire more 'Asian-Pacific' and Hispanic officers at the very moment the CIA was facing a critical shortage of Arabic speakers, and at the very moment when Islamic terrorism was emerging as the most significant threat to our national security, speaks volumes about how and why the agency failed in its mission of safeguarding the United States."
It's now up to the director of the CIA, Porter Goss, and the newly appointed director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, to put the nation's need for timely intelligence ahead of political correctness.
Mrs. Chavez is a nationally syndicated columnist, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, and author of Betrayal: How Union Bosses Shake Down Their Members and Corrupt American Politics (Crown Forum).
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Well congratulations then on a job well done. On 9/11 a whole LOT of ceilings got broken! Bravo! Bravo!
"diversity: "one of the most powerful tools we have to help make the world a safer place."
Oh man, I guess you can't make this stuff up. Not enough Arabic speakers, but at least they made good progress in promoting Asian-Pacific and Hispanic employees.
Anyway, I got news for these overfed, overpaid, long haired leaping gnomes and gas bags. The only entity I'm familiar with that ever made the world a safer place was the U.S. MILITARY - and not some steenking affirmative action infected bureaucracy!
And thanks to a great American, Linda Chavez, for a great article!
When pigs fly.
What, does anyone believe they will fire a bunch of women and minorities, no matter how unqualified they may be?
Does anyone believe they will even fire a known traitor like Valerie Plame?
When pigs fly.
Commentary Mag article has much more about much more
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Excellent article.
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The issue of diversity at the CIA is more complicated than elsewhere. For some types of assignments, "the best man for the job" is pretty much by definition an Arab woman. Quotas and bean counting in the front office are a real problem, but today's CIA has to be diverse in order to do good covert operations, and, frankly to avoid tunnel vision in the analysis of data. I have no doubt that the Clinton folks went too far -- or pursued the wrong kind of diversity for the wrong reasons -- but a clear headed DCI ought to be damn sure he's got arabs on the ground in the field and in the front office, and that he's got hispanics, asians and africans as well. You simply can't do the job right without adequate boots on the ground.
But the fact that a national security advisor [Clinton appointee Lake] believed the Iranian government over his own intelligence service showed the low regard for U.S. intelligence held by the president [Clinton] and hist top advisors.
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Instead of field agents, lawyers are the pervasive force inside the CIA, as they are in any other Washington bureaucracy. Lawyers accompany agents in the field to make sure the CIA won't be sued for their actions. Indeed, the CIA seems to fear its own people.
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Deutch changed to rules so that someone with no experience in running an agent, or making an agent recruitment, could become chief of an entire operating division or even higher. Under Deutch, a CIA analyst, David Cohen, with no experience as a field agent, was put in charge of the Clandestine Service. Why? Deutch deliberately picked an outsider, as Baer put it, "to f___ the place." Morale sank within the espionage branch as inexperienced bureaucrats got the upper hand.
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Without question, the most damaging director was John Deutch, who was appointed to the job in 1995 and left under a cloud in 1996, after he was passed over for the job of defense secretary in the second Clinton administration.
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The Deutch rules weren't Deutch's only negative legacy to the agency. He also followed the Clinton administration tradition of playing politics, placing former Democratic congressional staffers in key CIA positions. Among these was George Tenet. Another was former House Intelligence Committee staff member Michael J. O'Neil. O'Neil worked on the notorious House Intelligence Committee panel chaired by Congressman Edward Boland, a Massachusetts Democrat, which was a major opponent of intelligence operations during the Reagon administration. As CIA general counsel, O'Neil continued his efforts to stifle U.S. intelligence capabilities.
"He's bringing the anti-intelligence mind-set of the 1970s to the current CIA," a former senior intelligence official said at the time of O'Neil's appointment. "It will politicize everything the CIA does and will prevent us from identifying the proper mission for U.S. intelligence in the post-Cold War period." The official was right.
Nora Slatkin was another former Democratic congressional staffer appointed by Deutch. She was named executive director of the agency and charged with changing the "culture" of the Operations directorate. Change the culture would translate into seriously undermining the CIA's capability to conduct clandestine operations.
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The current system rewards officers who play the game at headquarters and punishes those who show innovation in the field. "Today, it is little more than a semi-secret version of the State Department, relying on dinners with host country intelligence services, passing out specialized equipment, and rewarding favorites with free trips to the United States," [foreign policy advisor Randy Scheunemann] said. "The messy business of back-alley tradecraft has taken a back set to the much simpler business of 'liaison' with foreign intelligence services."
Breakdown: How America's Intelligence Failures Led to September 11
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