The Intersectional CIA?

As the intelligence agency tries to recruit a more diverse workforce, it returns to its original mission of co-opting liberalism.

On March 25, the CIA posted a recruiting ad on Youtube featuring a woman who describes herself as “a proud first generation Latina and CIA officer.”

Against a background of inspirational swelling music, the officer says, “I’m a women of color. I’m a mom. I am a cisgender millennial who has been diagnosed generalized anxiety disorder. I am intersectional.” She adds, “I used to struggle with imposter syndrome but at age 36 I refuse to internalize misguided patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be. I am tired for feeling like I should apologize for the space I occupy rather than intoxicate people with my effort, my brilliance.”

The video ends with a play on the self-affirmation slogan, “Mija, yes you can.” The CIA officer says, “Know your worth, command your space. Mija, you are worth it.”

The ad is part of a broader outreach program bizarrely titled “Humans of CIA.” (This implies that there is also divisions devoted to animals of CIA, robots of CIA, extraterrestrials of CIA and other non-human CIA employees.)

Although it’s been around for month, the ad started gaining some traction on Twitter over the weekend, where it was met with a mixture of befuddlement and annoyance that spanned the political spectrum. As far as I can tell, only a small sprinkling of liberals welcomed the idea of the CIA’s seeming embrace of anti-racist and feminist language (mixed in with therapeutic self-help lingo). More common was leftist nausea at what seems like a clumsy co-option effort. On the right, there were complaints about a woke CIA, the national security counterpart to the supposed threat of woke capitalism.

Glenn Greenwald, as is his wont in recent months, echoed the conservative complaint, writing, “Liberals and parts of the cultural left refuse to admit they have power -- they always insist it's the right who wields it -- but the fact that the most powerful entities in the country now speak this way (corporations, security agencies, etc.) is a testament to their hegemony.”

Is the video really proof that liberals and “parts of the cultural left” have hegemony? I think it’s more useful to see it as partially motivated by a desire to recruit a younger workforce, which is more diverse. The language used in the video is almost a caricature of how older people think young people talk.

But the video, to the extent it uses vaguely progressive diction, is a return to the CIA’s original mission of working to align liberals and the non-communist left with American foreign policy.

In his useful 1989 book The Liberal Conspiracy, the historian Peter Coleman emphasizes that the CIA and American State Department in the early days of the Cold War shared the view that the key to ideological victory was the non-communist left (commonly referred to by the acronym NCL). During the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, communists parties remained major forces in countries like France and Italy (where they were seen as heroes in the fight against fascism). The NCL was regarded by American officialdom as the essential bulwark which could stop the red tide.

The NCL took the form of not just social democratic parties and non-communist labor unions but also liberal and socialist intellectuals, who were prized for their ability to engage in dialectical argument with the Marxist left and to champion American cultural achievements like jazz and abstract expressionism. This was the root of of the CIA’s decision to secretly fund literary magazines like Encounter and The Paris Review as well as art exhibits and travelling concerts.

The historian Arthur Schlesinger’s influential 1949 manifesto The Vital Center expressed the underlying logic of the NCL: for Schlesinger, an only viable and attractive alternative to totalitarianism was the middle ground between fascism and Stalinism: the vital center that spanned European social democracy and New Deal liberalism.

As Coleman writes, “At this apocalyptic stage of the Cold War, there was a further deepening of what Schlesinger called the ‘quiet revolution’ in the State Department of the late 1940s, when, under the influence of such figures as [George] Kennan, [Charles] Bohlen, and the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin, it came to understand and support the ideas of the formerly isolated non-Communist Left (the ‘NCL’ ). Now, at a unique historic moment, there developed a convergence, almost to the point of identity, between the assessments and agenda of the ‘NCL’ intellectuals and that combination of Ivy League, anglophile, liberal, can-do gentlemen, academics, and idealists who constituted the new CIA.”

In one of his innumerable memoirs, Norman Podhoretz summed up the zeitgeist in this way, “You see, in the late fifties the important forces in the intellectual world—magazines like Partisan Review, Commentary, and Encounter, and writers like Lionel Trilling, Hannah Arendt, Reinhold Niebuhr, Arthur Koestler, Sidney Hook, Leslie Fiedler, Saul Bellow, etc. etc. etc.—were against radicalism. That doesn’t mean (as again you Ve been led to imagine) that they were on the Right or that they were conservative in the sense, say, that William F. Buckley, Jr., and The National Review were. On the contrary, they were all liberals. This was even true of Encounter, which turned out to have been subsidized secretly by the CIA up until the late 60s. But (still another complication) the CIA was itself a liberal organization. Yes, yes, I know, it did illiberal things. Nevertheless the people who ran it were liberals. For example, the officer who headed the division that was responsible for Encounter had come to the CIA from a high position in the United World Federalists, than which nothing could have been more liberal.” (From Breaking Ranks, 1979).

In his typically blunderbuss and obtuse manner, Podhoretz sums up the the peculiar constellation of the mid-century CIA co-option of liberalism: to oppose the revolutionary left, the CIA wanted to shore up those cultural forces that were anti-radical but (often only nominally) liberal. At the same time, as Podhoretz admits, the CIA “did illiberal things.” (Secret government funding of liberal magazines is itself illiberal). In other words, an organization that was profoundly illiberal in purpose found it useful to ally itself with liberals and have liberal staffers.

Even at the height of it support of NCL, the CIA was never fully liberal and always had agents who kept a notably close contact with the nascent conservative movement. The ultra-reactionary CIA agent E. Howard Hunt was involved with everything from the Bay of Pigs to (after he supposedly left the agency) the Watergate break-in. Hunt was also often lurking in the background in the vicinity of William F. Buckley and his brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell, Jr.. Hunt recruited Buckley into the CIA in 1950 and later worked in a shadowy capacity as campaign advisor to Bozell in a failed congressional candidacy in 1964.

The CIA is a mansion of many rooms and in the early Cold War, there was ample space for those aligned with the NCL. Supporting the NCL was one of the core missions of the CIA from its founding in 1947 until about 1968, when the fracturing of Cold War liberalism under the pressure of the Vietnam War and the emerging new left made the old formula of co-option impossible. Many of the former Cold War liberals, who had once organized around the Congress for Cultural Freedom, moved towards neo-conservatism. A notable case being Irving Kristol, former editor of the CIA-funded Encounter.

The CIA itself in the new era became a haven for people who were explicitly anti-liberal. In 1978, William Colby, head of the CIA from 1973 to 1976, gave an interview with Playboy where he warned that “the most obvious threat is the fact that there are 60,000,000 Mexicans today and there are going to be 120,000,000 of them at the end of the century.” (In reality, Mexico didn’t reach 120 million people until 2014). He added, “we can reinforce the Border Patrol and they don’t have enough bullets to stop them all.”

Colby was obviously not woke, nor were the torturers, coup plotters, and dictator lovers who populated the upper echelon of the Agency. CIA’s alliance of convenience with the NCL, like its current embrace of progressive rhetoric, was all for show.

One possible reason for the CIA’s appropriation of progressive lingo is that there is a similar agenda as in the mid-century outreach to the non-communist left: a desire to fend off radicalism by alliance with those who are politically liberal but anti-radical.

The putatively intersectional CIA is not a sign of the hegemony of liberalism or the cultural left so much as a cynical ploy to co-opt a significant element of the population into supporting American foreign policy. Just as the CIA supported the NCL while also employing the ultra-reactionary E. Howard Hunt, it’s likely that the current dalliance with intersectional language is compatible with many sinister policies and agendas.