DEI hires ‘damaged’ CIA, other intelligence agencies, former analyst charges

Federal government diversity policies that favor sexual identity groups, ethnic minorities and women have damaged the effectiveness of the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies and are undermining national security, according to a critical new book by a former CIA analyst.

Diversity, equity and inclusion policies were aggressively imposed during the Obama administration and revived and advanced under President Biden. Contrary to claims of senior U.S. intelligence leaders, DEI has not improved agency performance, said author John A. Gentry, who spent 12 years as a CIA analyst.

The book describes James R. Clapper, the Obama administration’s director of national intelligence, as an overtly partisan leader. Mr. Clapper said demographic diversity improves the operation of intelligence agencies, and current DNI Avril Haines holds similar views, Mr. Gentry said.

“The book documents the extensive damage that DEI policies of the Obama and Biden administrations have done to U.S. intelligence, and it speculates about the resultant damage to national security,” Mr. Gentry said.

The book also highlights what Mr. Gentry calls the politicization of U.S. intelligence since 2009.

Mr. Gentry said he debunked Mr. Clapper’s claims through academic analysis of available information in 2021. “There is not a shred of evidence that DEI policies improve the operational performance of the agencies,” he said.

He said DEI policies were not meant to address fairness or social justice issues.

“They were enacted for Marxian ideological reasons with the goal of fundamentally and permanently changing the organizational cultures of the agencies and, in the Biden years, the U.S. government as a whole,” Mr. Gentry said in an interview.

Mr. Gentry said he was “canceled” as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University for his opposition to DEI.

He said senior intelligence officials rationalized DEI policies under Mr. Biden as motivated by politics rather than performance.

His book, “Diversity Dysfunction: The DEI Threat to National Security Intelligence,” is a harsh critique of the intelligence community’s aggressive program to favor Black, LGBTQ and female intelligence officials at the expense of White men, viewed as “toxic” under DEI nostrums. It was published in October.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA declined to comment. A CIA spokesman referred questions to Director William J. Burns’ comments supporting diversity and inclusion efforts at the CIA.

Mr. Burns told Congress in March that the agency was progressing toward a more diverse workforce. He said it was “not just the right thing to do for us as Americans, it’s the smart thing.”

DEI policies were introduced during the Clinton administration to boost minority representation in the nation’s intelligence community but were greatly accelerated during the Obama and Biden administrations.

“The damage done to the [intelligence community] by the Obama and Biden administrations has been significant” across 18 government agencies, Mr. Gentry said.

Soviet similarities

The CIA and other intelligence agencies were required to set up special DEI groups and committees. Mr. Gentry compared that process to the political commissars employed in communist China and the former Soviet Union to ensure ideological conformity. The groups can limit the functions of intelligence agencies, advance promotions of favored identity groups and oppose others they see as not contributing to DEI goals.

The ODNI’s DEI policies “balkanized” intelligence agency workforces under the rubric of “equity” in creating “employee resource groups” or “affinity groups,” the book says.

The National Security Agency gave code names to its 11 demographic “employee resource groups,” including AA for African American, W for women, ESL for English as a Second Language, HLAT for Hispanic/Latino and PRIDE for “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and allies.” Based on information provided by current and former CIA officials, the book presents case studies of “diversity hire” minorities who were fired from senior positions in the agency for “underperforming” or failing to do their jobs.

A former CIA operations officer described one minority female CIA station chief as “an unfit leader who was allowed to ‘retire early’ to save face while being removed early from this last field assignment.”

The former case officer said headquarters often countermanded the station chief’s orders.

“Diversity was blamed by all who knew her background (causing morale problems for all of us who had to sit under her obviously flawed leadership ability),” the former officer said. “She would have three-hour-long staff meetings every day. You can imagine how that affected performance and morale. She broke down crying in two staff meetings that I was in.”

A minority man assigned as chief of a CIA base overseas “flamed out at his previous post as a manager within a large station. (All accounts indicated that he was unfit for leadership and faced a rebellion of his entire staff.),” said an active-duty CIA officer.

The minority chief sued the CIA, claiming racial discrimination, and was reinstated to a senior position in another base.

“That appointment — which occurred because of a diversity-related issue, even though he had a clear track record of nonperformance — created total chaos for the new base,” the officer said. “He was so bad that officers literally agreed that, if he came to one of our houses after hours, we would not let him in.”

The underperforming official was eventually removed from the post and given a job within the CIA with no subordinates.

A former CIA operations officer described a poorly performing female case officer whom a superior called “disruptive.” The ethnic minority and LGBTQ case officer claimed discrimination when she was challenged.

“She was regarded as a diversity hire who had made it through the training (and was now failing terribly) because the wrong criteria were used to move her through the system,” the former officer said.

During the Biden administration, one CIA station chief asked a male case officer who had recruited several agents to “share” one of the recruits with a female case officer who had failed to sign up any foreign agents and had no role in the recruitment.

At CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, a CIA operations officer said a less-qualified minority female official filed a racial discrimination lawsuit after she was passed over for promotion in favor of a White male official.

“Long story short, she was handed the job,” the officer said. “The division’s weekly meeting included references to Elton John’s ‘The Bitch is Back’ when it became clear she had won.

“Every key position was quickly filled by women or minorities until the makeup of the office no longer represented the U.S. population,” he said. “As a measure of her toxicity, she regularly made subordinate managers cry.”

Afghan tragedy

Mr. Gentry said the most prominent and deadly example of damage from DEI policies involved the killings of seven CIA employees in a suicide bombing at Camp Chapman near Khost, Afghanistan, on Dec. 30, 2009. The incident is dramatized in the film “Zero Dark Thirty.”

One of those killed was career CIA analyst Jennifer Matthews, who had no operations experience in the field but was favored by managers. She went to the combat zone in a bid for promotion to the senior intelligence service.

A former CIA officer who was in Khost after the terrorist bombing told Mr. Gentry that Matthews lacked qualifications for the job.

“I never heard her assignment spoken of in terms of favoritism, but I suppose it was implied by the perpetuation of the idea that she simply wasn’t qualified for the job (and her decisions led to the death of officers),” the former officer said.

An Islamist terrorist who carried out the Camp Chapman attack was falsely believed to have been turned into a counterterrorism asset for the CIA. The terrorist was accepted as a trusted agent and used his access at Camp Chapman to set off a bomb sewn into his vest, killing the CIA officers and contractors.

Critics familiar with the case said Matthews failed to vet the person who carried out the suicide bombing and let too many agency people get too close to him at the base.

Ideological roots

The former CIA analyst describes DEI as an ideology-based political agenda with philosophical roots in neo-Marxist critical theory developed in the 1920s at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. 

Advocates became known as the “Frankfurt School,” and many of its leaders moved to the United States and began instructing generations of American intellectuals. The central theme is that infiltrating the culture and institutions of civic life could result in a Marxist transformation of society.

Marxist-based diversity policies seek to create and enhance divisions within groups of people and were accelerated under Mr. Obama, Mr. Gentry said. Mr. Obama, the nation’s first Black president, promoted policies of preferential treatment for favored domestic demographic “identity” groups, including Black, female and LGBTQ people. These groups became known as the “Obama Coalition” of Democratic Party supporters.

The policies continued in the Biden administration, and people in the identity groups began thinking and acting alike. The ironic result was a sharp drop in the intellectual diversity within the society and intelligence agencies, Mr. Gentry said.

“Obama and Biden and their subordinates have practiced critical race theory by employing DEI dogma to reshape the federal bureaucracy and instilled political activism in federal employees along with commitment to DEI principles,” he said.

“Pioneering CIA analyst Sherman Kent argued as long ago as 1949 that any good intelligence service should have room for the ‘queer bird and eccentric with a unique talent’ even if he is occasionally wrong — a concept foreign to DEI thinking, which insists that its tenets are always correct, or at least unfalsifiable,” he said.

Under Donald Trump’s first administration, DEI policies were blamed for promoting anti-Trump activism within the federal bureaucracy. Mr. Gentry said he believes the president-elect and his aides have learned their lesson.

“Trump and his advisers in 2024 seem to have realized that they made a mistake and reportedly have formulated plans to reform the bureaucracy,” Mr. Gentry wrote before Mr. Trump’s Nov. 5 election win.

Mr. Trump has said in campaign speeches and on social media that he wants to remove DEI programs from the federal government.

In announcing his pick for defense secretary, Fox News host Pete Hegseth, Mr. Trump declared, “I will restore the proud culture and honored traditions of America’s armed forces, and there will be no Marxism allowed, no communism allowed, and we’ll get rid of the fascists.”

Tracking the damage

Mr. Gentry wrote that a full accounting of DEI policy damages in the intelligence agencies would be difficult because the services and their political appointee leaders have not focused on measuring the extent of the problem.

Foreign adversaries, he said, do not appear to have attempted to use the flawed policies against the United States — yet.

“Enemies have not yet attempted to exploit U.S. intelligence-related weaknesses and vulnerabilities in war or in other strategically significant ways,” he said. “But perceptive adversaries surely have noticed at least some of the troubles identified herein and maybe others.

“Given the importance of intelligence to national security, we should conclude that DEI policies have already appreciably damaged national security,” he said. “Given the history of Marxism in the United States as a tool of Soviet subversion, its role in developing DEI policies, and its transferral to anti-American actors at home and abroad, it is not far-fetched to believe the damage is intentional.”

Congressional oversight committees should conduct a major investigation into the problem of DEI within the national security system and the intelligence services, Mr. Gentry said.

“We may have to wait until the next big intelligence failure for a presidential commission to examine in detail the role(s) of DEI policies in causing the failure,” he said.

The author predicts that reversing the damage of DEI policies in the federal bureaucracy will be difficult, even with Mr. Trump’s victory. Executive orders can be altered, but some DEI policies are required by law and can be pared back or eliminated only through congressional action.

Changing personnel management policies will also be difficult for the next administration because ideologically motivated social engineering in government has been underway for nearly 15 years, about half the career of the average government bureaucrat.

Mr. Trump said during his campaign that he plans to change federal worker rules, which could end civil service protection for potentially tens of thousands of federal workers. The change would allow the president to fire employees more readily.

Correction: An earlier version of this report misidentified the movie “Zero Dark Thirty.”