In Search of Enemies - A CIA Story - John Stockwell

CIA People Policies
find in Angola. I carefully dropped comments about Land Rovers,
dust, hard beds, poor rations, and the absence of doctors, booze, and
playful women. We shook hands in front of the Credit Union and
I went back to work.
A few days later I heard that Sam Hilton had retired and was on
his way to Florida. After some delay Nick Kohler went to Lusaka.
Andy Anderson was also inter~sted, and he would have been a
good man for Angola. But he was black. His loyalty should have
been far beyond question, since he had originally been recruited to
surveil and report on American black radicals as they traveled in
North Africa, in one of the agency's most explosively sensitive and
closely held operations against Americans. But Potts felt we had to
be very careful about letting blacks into the program, because of the
South African involvement.
Most minority groups in the agency are subjected to subtle but
firm discriminatory barriers. It could not be otherwise. The men who
control the CIA are of an older, conservative generation which has
kept the agency fifteen or twenty years behind the progress of the
nation at large. The Equal Employment Opportunities Office and the
other standard bureaucratic mechanisms for handling complaints
are ineffective against the subtle barriers of discrimination. Blacks
will rarely have a specific incident to complain about, but their fitness
reports will say "proficient and strong" instead of "strong and outstanding"
and they have difficulty getting the good jobs, until they
inevitably plateau at the GS 12 or 13 levels. The personnel management
committees are exclusively white, men of the agency's older
generation, and they meet behind closed doors.
In Vietnam a competent GS 13 black officer volunteered to come
up to my post when we were being shelled frequently and two whites
had broken under the strain. He too had a family and kids back in
the States, but he ignored the danger and worked hard. When awards
were given months later he received a Certificate of Distinction-a
piece of paper. The rest of us got medals.
Second- and third-generation orientals are acceptable. Several
have made supergrade.
One young woman was suggested for the task force with a cryptic,
"If you want her.'' I knew Laura Holiday. In 1972 she had collaborated
well with me on a special project, a test of special agent
communications equipment wherein she had driven across the east-