The intel officers on the chopping block
From a public-facing DEI official who is now gagged to a new hire who was assigned to the CIA's diversity office and hadn't started. A conversation with their attorney, Kevin Carroll.
So far, more than a dozen intelligence officers find themselves one step closer to being terminated for working on diversity issues, after a federal district judge decided Thursday that CIA Director John Ratcliffe could fire agency personnel without the courts weighing in.
National security attorney Kevin Carroll tells me he is holding out hope that Ratcliffe won’t end their employment. “The judge was clear that the director should let these people apply for other jobs in the agency,” he said. “If [Ratcliffe] doesn’t do that, we may be right back in court.”
The CIA did not immediately respond to my question as to whether Ratcliffe plans to allow these officers to apply for other jobs.
But like all CIA officers, they spent years applying to positions at the CIA, receiving security clearances, and being trained. So how are they feeling today? “They want to stay in the fight for America as CIA officers working against foreign adversaries,” Kevin said. “None of them is a partisan, political ideologue. They just want to get back to doing their jobs.”
Details on the officers
Kevin and I spoke the day after the judge’s decision. I wanted to know more about the faceless, nameless people he is representing. “Some of them have been in [the CIA] 19 years, just short of their pension,” he told me.
“Others are new hires who haven’t really touched anything DEI-related yet. One just finished CIA 101 orientation, and they said her first administrative job would be in the agency’s diversity and inclusion office.” That wasn’t her choice, she was just assigned to the position, Kevin said. Still, she could lose her job because of it.
Another young woman is a data scientist who has “like eight other offers for work within the agency,” he said. With that many positions available to her, suggesting a broad appeal of her skills, will she get to stay on?
And then there is the head of diversity for the entire intelligence community. She has been placed on paid administrative leave and wants to speak to the press. But the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has gagged her, Kevin tells me. “It’s bullshit because she isn’t a clandestine officer, her face and name were on the website until recently. They have no legitimate basis whatsoever.”
ODNI did not immediately respond to my emailed request for comment. But I didn’t have to ask her name. It was easy to find, even with her page now down on the ODNI website. Because Google remembered.
As Kevin said, Stephanie La Rue’s identity was public. According to one biography, before overseeing all DEI across the intel community at the ODNI, she was the CIA’s chief diversity strategist, leading a multi-year effort that resulted in her receiving the Donald Cryer Award for her contributions to the agency’s mission.
All of the 19 plaintiffs that Kevin said he is representing are members of at least one protected class, he told me. They are female, over the age of 40, gay, Black. “At least 1 has a military service-connected disability.”
How their termination notices came about
It was Friday morning, around 8:30am, before President’s Day weekend. By chance, the officers had contacted Kevin. They were concerned about the safety of their jobs after reading media reports. “We’re on a conference call and they started getting a mix of phone calls, emails, and FedExs, saying ‘Report to your CIA visitor center with your intelligence community ID,’ which everyone knows means you’re about to get fired.”
Kevin says the notices were disorganized, coming from a series of different HR officials in various components of the CIA.
And the case could have implications for some 51 officers who were put on administration leave after President Donald Trump issued an executive order to end DEI work in the government.
Back to 1988 and what’s next
Intelligence officers are unlike other government personnel. They are subject to Section 3036(e)(1), which gives the CIA director the statutory authority to terminate any agency worker whenever he or she “deems the termination of employment of such officer or employee necessary or advisable in the interests of the United States.”
Which takes us to a Supreme Court case from 1988. Thomas Egan was denied a security clearance and then lost his job at a naval facility in the state of Washington.
According to the Supreme Court’s text, there was reason to deny his clearance: Egan had California and Washington state criminal records for assault and for being a felon in possession of a gun, and he did not disclose two earlier convictions for carrying a loaded firearm on his application for federal employment. The Navy also said he had drinking problems in the past. Between his checkered history and his withholding of information, Egan could potentially be blackmailed by a foreign adversary.
But what mattered most was that the majority of the justices believed the President can grant or revoke security clearances for national security matters, outside of judicial review. “The President, after all, is the ‘Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.’ His authority to classify and control access to information bearing on national security and to determine whether an individual is sufficiently trustworthy to occupy a position in the Executive Branch that will give that person access to such information flows primarily from this constitutional investment of power in the President and exists quite apart from any explicit congressional grant.”
Kevin thinks the Trump administration is pressing Section 3036 too far. “To my knowledge, it has only ever been used for a counterintelligence use,” he said. “The classic reason, explained to me by [former CIA] Director [Gen. Michael] Hayden, ‘Let’s say suddenly we get human penetration of a Russian service… CIA has the authority to fire that day without explaining why. And that makes sense.”
If this authority does indeed hinge on a counterintelligence threat, well personally, I have not learned of a case where officers working on DEI issues were compromised. It reminds me of the Lavender Scare, when then-U.S Senator Joseph McCarthy said, “Homosexuals must not be handling top secret material.” There was a resounding belief that the gay community would be vulnerable to blackmail. But that was never proven. (And here’s a video report from me on the history of LGBTQ spies.)
Indeed, another Supreme Court case in 1988, Webster v. Doe, focused on an apparently stellar CIA employee who was fired after disclosing he was gay. (The court held that while a termination due to national security is generally not subject to judicial review, claims alleging a violation of constitutional rights could warrant review.)
Trump has said that DEI is illegal, immoral, and obstructs merit-based hires. Does that suffice under Section 3036? If ever DEI posed a counterintelligence risk, it may be when officers get pushed out of an agency in which they invested years and risked their lives.