DEI Game: Why the CIA needs more blacks to infiltrate North Korea

Or something.

When it comes to racial, ethnic, and cultural matters, the term “diversity” in American discourse has two meanings: either the increasingly obsolete “more variety” or “more Blacks.”

For example, a few people of dubious character like myself would say that U. of Iowa white football players Cooper DeJean and Riley Moss brought more diversity to starting NFL cornerbacks in 2024.

But most sportswriters feel that if DeJean and Moss next season are injured or cut or switched to safety, that would increase the diversity of the cornerback spot from its currently being only 62/64th diverse to its traditional standing as 64/64th diverse. The latter number is bigger than the former, so therefore going back to all black cornerbacks would increase the diversity, because blackness is diversity.

An article in the New York Times news section tries to have it both ways, making a sensible argument about recruiting CIA agents who speak the languages of target countries in the Middle East and the like, but then using as their example an African-American retired agent.

C.I.A. Rejects Diversity Efforts Once Deemed as Essential to Its Mission

The Trump administration is dismantling programs that some former directors believed helped sharpen the agency’s competitive edge.

By Julian E. Barnes

Reporting from Washington

May 13, 2025

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.

After all, who is less likely to draw attention while skulking about Pyongyang, Beijing, Tehran, or Moscow than an African-American?

“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.”

I made the same point in my November 2001 review of Tony Scott’s action thriller Spy Game with Robert Redford and Brad Pitt as CIA agents operating undercover in China and Lebanon:

If all CIA covert operatives look like Robert Redford and Brad Pitt, the stars of the snazzy but brainless "Spy Game," it's no wonder our spooks have proven so ineffectual ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall deprived them of a blond enemy they could infiltrate.

I last saw Redford play a CIA man outwitting his heartless Agency superiors in 1975's "Three Days of the Condor." In the quarter century since, my own hair has deteriorated sadly. Yet, I'm happy to say, not a hair on Redford's 64-year-old head has changed, other than that the passing decades seem to have infused his hair with even more body.

… In contrast to his hair, Redford's skin looks like that of man who's been surfing or skiing for the last fifty years. So, you can't figure out how old Redford's character is supposed to be. The top half of his head seems much younger than the bottom half.

"Spy Game" is set in 1991, when retiring master spy Redford learns that his protégé Pitt has been arrested in China. (The wily Communists caught him by using the sophisticated counter-espionage technique of noticing that Brad Pitt isn't Chinese.)

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