A Glaring Sign of Rot Within the CIA

This article originally appeared in American Greatness on December 22, 2023.

In his powerful new book, Neutering the CIA: Why Us Intelligence Versus Trump Has Long-term Consequences, former CIA analyst John Gentry discusses how the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) agenda has harmed national security by elevating the goals of left-wing identity politics as paramount in the selection and promotion of officers. For example, late last month, the Financial Times revealed that a CIA officer posted pro-Palestinian images on her Facebook page and a selfie photo with the caption “Free Palestine.”

The agency officer, later identified as Amy McFadden, reportedly posted at least one of these images to the Internet after the horrific October 7, Hamas attack on Israel in which more than 1,300 Jews were killed by Hamas terrorists, many of them raped and mutilated, and more than 250 taken hostage.

According to the New York Post, two weeks after the Hamas terrorist attack, the senior CIA official “changed her cover photo to an image of a man waving a Palestinian flag in a keffiyeh-patterned shirt — a design euphemistically referred to as a symbol of Palestinian ‘solidarity’ popularized by the late Palestine Liberation Organization terrorist-in-chief Yasser Arafat.”

But McFadden is hardly the only example. A State Department employee publicly accused President Biden of being “complicit in genocide” by providing military assistance to our ally Israel. Sylvia Yacoub, a foreign affairs officer in the Bureau of Middle East Affairs, tweeted directly at the President with his handle “@POTUS,” and also tweeted directly at the Vice President, “Embarrassingly out of touch @VP,” after Vice President Kamala Harris met with the Prime Minister of the U.K., our closest ally.

It is important to note that these are not obscure bureaucrats. McFadden is one the Agency’s most senior officials, currently serving as Associate Deputy Director of the CIA Directorate of Analysis, a position overseeing thousands of analysts. Prior to this top CIA post, McFadden oversaw the production of the President’s Daily Brief (PDB), arguably the most important U.S. intelligence community analysis product. Yacoub is a graduate of the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, one of America’s most prestigious graduate schools that feeds thousands of its graduates into U.S. national security jobs. She also spent three years working at the Obama Foundation and more than a year working on the Hillary Clinton campaign for President. It was on the strength of these credentials she was selected to serve, not as a political appointee, but as a State Department careerist.

The rot we are experiencing in government isn’t just in failing to screen for individuals who hold views antithetical to the United States, its interests, and its allies. It is also how the embedded ideology in the U.S. government promotes them not based on excellence in their work but on whether they share the DEI movement’s radical ideology.

Read full op-ed in American Greatness.