Under the best of circumstances, it is difficult for any intelligence service to collect, analyze, and produce actionable, predictive data for a nation’s leadership. This task is made considerably harder when lockstep adherence to a fringe political ideology is imposed upon the workforce tasked with carrying out this challenging mission. Unfortunately, this is the situation the Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies of the U.S. Intelligence Community are in: to America’s detriment, their leadership enthusiastically imposed Diversity, Equity and Inclusion ideology upon their employees.

To underscore how deeply DEI has metastasized inside the host, in a recent enlightening and publicly available statement, the CIA’s Chief DEI officer said there are three criteria by which an intelligence officer can be promoted at America’s most important foreign intelligence service. Only one of them is related to mission impact. The others are a rather vague “corporate mindset”—and DEI.

Of the three, adherence to the cant of DEI is the most important; those who do not vocally and unreservedly support it are denied promotions and meaningful assignments. Like rallies held by authoritarian regimes, you do not want to be the first to stop clapping at the approved, serial pronouncements.

It’s ironic that a CIA created to oppose the Soviet Union would embrace the ideological straitjacket that is DEI, an enterprise that uncomfortably mirrors the USSR’s political commissars. Guardians of the party’s orthodoxy, the commissars were coequal with the leadership inside the government agencies where they were assigned, holding considerable sway over who was promoted and who got what assignments. While they were successful for some time in keeping the ruling clique in power, their endless purity tests and unreviewable power helped breed endemic cynicism among the government workers who had to play along to keep their jobs. It accelerated the systemic, institutional incompetence that plagued the Soviet Union to the end of its unlamented run.