Nearly four years after now-lame duck president Donald Trump worked to purge foreign intelligence services of anyone who wasn’t a straight white English speaker, the Central Intelligence Agency is now working to recruit employees from diverse cultures and backgrounds, ABC News reports.
CIA Director Gina Haspel has made diversifying the workforce a priority in an agency where knowledge of world cultures, languages and customs can lead to an important lead or vital tip in a national security situation.
The agency recently revamped its website to make the number and types of available jobs more readily accessible, and it streamlined its application process to encourage more people to apply for the thousands of jobs that open up annually.
It’s also hired its first executive for Hispanic engagement, Ilka Rodriguez-Diaz, who joined the CIA three decades ago after going to a job fair in New Jersey.
“The CIA had never been on my radar,” she wrote in an op-ed in The Miami Herald after getting the job in October. “I didn’t think I fit the ‘profile.’ After all, the spies I saw on TV were male Anglo-Saxon Ivy leaguers, not Latinas from New Jersey. Still, I went to my expert life coach, my mother, for advice. She said, ‘No pierdes nada con ir.’ (What have you got to lose in going?) So, I went to the job fair. The rest, as they say, is history.”
During the GW Bush and Trump administrations, people of non-white, non-christian cultures often found entry into the agency difficult, and those in the agency found advancement difficult. After the invasion of Iraq in 2003, US intelligence agencies found they lacked enough Arabic and Farsi speakers to cover the intelligence needs in the region.