Ending Another "Boys Only" Tradition?

I’m getting to this a bit late, but Parade Magazine on Sunday featured a story in the Intelligence Report column here about a lawsuit filed against the CIA by women fired from that agency for having foreign fiancées, boyfriends, or relatives (that is claimed in the lawsuit anyway, and the charges seem to be valid – the story appears under “Sexism Among Spies”).

This actually is based on an extensive U.S. News and World Report article written by David E. Kaplan last April that can be accessed from Talk Left here. Kaplan’s story discusses a few of the cases, with almost all of the women using aliases to tell their story – Janine Brookner is featured primarily; she is a former agent who was dismissed and subsequently put herself through law school and now represents the 25 (at last count) who have joined the complaint against the agency. The CIA’s Centers for Security and Counterintelligence is the department singled out in the complaint (the equivalent of a police department’s “Internal Affairs” unit); a key point of contention is that the men at the agency engaged in similar activities as the women (as well as stuff like sex parties of one type or another), but received preferential treatment.

A typical case is that of “Sherry Norris,” who discusses in the article the extent to which all agents are required to divulge their activities with anyone who could compromise them (Norris describes how she met and fell in love with a Middle Eastern diplomat and told CIA headquarters everything, including “when we first made love…it was pretty embarrassing”).

Norris did all she could to end the relationship when told to do so in order to preserve her career, but she still was interrogated by the Centers for Security and Counterintelligence and had to take a polygraph. She was told that she had failed the polygraph, then afterwards let inspectors into her house to download everything from her computer in an attempt to defend herself.

Her case was referred to the FBI, which eventually cleared her of any wrongdoing, but a CIA personnel evaluation board then decided to review her case. The board found her insubordinate and voted to fire her, even denying her the opportunity to meet with the board and plead her case (the ordeal dragged on for two years).

So how has the CIA responded? As noted in the article (page 7)…

Security concerns aside, the women's case falls short of the standards required for it to be certified a class action, the CIA has argued before the EEOC. The agency has scoured its records going back to 1995, officials say, and found only four women forced to leave, at least in part, because of unauthorized contact with foreigners. But that's not how it works, say the women U.S. News interviewed. Most are pushed out, they claim, on other charges. Words like unsuitability, lack of candor, insubordination, and security violations fill their personnel files-all because, they say, of their having flings and friendships that male officers routinely enjoyed. The impact is far-reaching: Security clearances are revoked, and the person is in effect blacklisted from work at the Pentagon, the FBI, or other agencies that do classified work. That's why key among the lawsuit's demands is expunging of their files. "It means more than money to the women," says Brookner.

By summer this year, an administrative judge at the EEOC's Washington field office will decide whether Norris, Griffith, and the others will get their day in court. If their class action suit goes forward-and if the CIA's personnel records indeed show a pattern of bias-the agency may well move to settle out of court. And if the case fails, the women say they at least will have shone some needed light on one of the darker corners of the CIA.

To say nothing of being patently wrong, treatment such as this is stupid because these women are specialists in (among other things) speaking in Farsi, Arabic, and Chinese. Don’t you think we have a need for people skilled in those particular areas?

The CIA also states in its defense that 39 percent of the National Clandestine Service is now female, including more than a fifth of its case officers or spies.

(As I read Kaplan’s article, the impression I got was that the CIA was being dragged kicking and screaming into cleaning up its act, with director Michael Hayden talking a lot about the importance of diversity – we’ll see if that’s for real or not. Also, Brookner is trying to sue on behalf of women who have been turned down for jobs with the agency, claiming that more men have been hired – if she can make her case, more power to her, but it sounds like a stretch.)

And speaking of the National Clandestine Service, author R.J. Hillhouse describes here how more than 50 percent of that agency has been outsourced to private firms, which in effect means that companies such as Abraxas, Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon have direct input into the President’s Daily Brief, this country’s most important and most sensitive national security document. And the article also notes their role in the massive domestic spying effort going on in this country, which no doubt means big money for these companies.

(Sounds to me that, since the Repug executive branch has effectively abandoned its task of governance which it abhorred and didn’t do very well anyway, then the CEOs of these operations might as well take up residence in the White House and tell Dubya to go to Camp David and sit out the duration. They might as well make it official at this point.)