The intelligence community has long known the value of DEI

DEI measures improve analysis by overriding cognitive biases and foster relationships vital to human intelligence collection.

Photo by David Matos on Unsplash

The Trump administration's closure of federal agency DEI programs and offices may vary in its impact, but for the intelligence agencies, it is an assault on a longstanding and proven strategy for success. Long before DEI became fashionable, intelligence professionals around the world have understood that a diverse workforce and a culture that includes and captures different points of views is vital to the ability to recruit the human sources they need and correctly analyze information to inform policy.

Intelligence analysts are rigorously trained to counter the kinds of cognitive biases that diversity and inclusion can offset. Racial and other biases have a moral component, but they also result from inherent human cognition. The human brain is innately tribal, and it can make harmful leaps and connections as a short cut in information processing.

Some of our worst intelligence failures have resulted from the activation of these biases. Iraq WMD analysis, for example, was influenced by a mirror imaging bias, in which analysts applied their own cultural assumptions to their target; American analysts did not imagine Saddam Hussein would purposefully deceive the international community to save face in the region. Perhaps the presence of more naturalized Arab Americans would have made a difference. The rapid fall of the Soviet Union was discounted by experts who had closely followed the issue for years partially because the human mind left to its natural patterns adjusts to incremental change. Inclusion of more junior officers' perspectives could have helped.

As a CIA analyst on Africa, I vividly learned the danger of "group think" to accurate assessments and the benefit of seeking out analysts of diverse backgrounds and experience. The inclusion of a naturalized officer from the country I worked on from another office had a tangible impact on making the correct call in one particular case.

Diversity is equally essential for operations, which are, at their core, built on relationships. Forming personal connections, establishing trust, and fostering loyalties are all made easier by obvious commonalities like race, ethnicity, culture, language, and religion. In Africa, where the colonial baggage is heavy and the competition from adversarial intelligence services is fierce, our diversity as a nation is a major asset. As it reflects that diversity, CIA's workforce is a walking advertisement for the superiority of American values and possibilities for respectful partnership. Officers who already inhabit the cultures on which they work understand on a deep level what motivates or repels potential sources. Their native fluency in critical languages allow them to accurately collect information from assets under the enormous time and situational constraints that such meetings often take place.

Before the diversity section of the DNI's website was taken down this week, it correctly stated that "diversity is a mission-critical imperative, essential to ensuring our Nation's security." Increasing diversity has been a priority for the community across multiple administrations, including in Trump's first term, since the CIA's early days, during which almost all its officers were white, Ivy League-educated men. Over the years, the intelligence community has sought out diversity of all kinds, including educational, expertise-based, socio-economic, and regional diversity. CIA not only recruits at HBCUs, but at state schools and other non-elite colleges around the country in order to hire Americans from all backgrounds and stations with as many different perspectives. A perusal of the bumper stickers in the CIA parking lot anecdotally indicates a good deal of political diversity, too (I saw Let’s Go Brandon stickers during the Brandon administration. Somehow no one ordered a purge).

Recruiting and retaining minority officers has of course been a priority, as it heavily overlaps with the kind of diversity with international implications and applications. In recent years, there has been improvement on the recruiting front, but attrition among some minority officers remains disproportional, hindering diversity in more senior ranks. Trump's DEI policies are likely to fuel that trend, as well as dampen recruiting efforts, by sending a message that officers from diverse backgrounds are suspect and unwelcome. I shudder to consider the loss of cultural and linguistic expertise on which, as an intelligence analyst, I could never get enough.

Aside from the impact to the makeup of the workforce, I am also saddened to consider the possible change to the culture of the intelligence community. Far from making me feel targeted as a white person, the diversity training I received over the course of my 19 years at the CIA helped me become a more considerate colleague and fostered my curiosity and awareness, foundational character traits of not only a good analyst but a good person.

And far from being frivolous, most of the training included an explicit connection to our national security role. I was equally enriched by the presence of various workplace affinity groups, many of them rooted in international origin and culture that meaningfully educated officers about the regions and issues they must understand for the success of the mission.

For many institutions, the erosion of DEI initiatives is unfortunate. But for the intelligence community, it is potentially devastating, as it strikes at the heart of what makes it great on behalf of all Americans.