Revisiting the Lavender Scare

Good history of LGBT service in the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community:

In the closing months of World War II, a gay officer of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) led two operations to spirit German scientists and diplomats out of the Soviet occupation zone. Within a few years, that same officer—Carmel Offie—one of the earliest employees of the new Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), became the first known CIA employee dismissed solely because of his sexual orientation. He was among the earliest casualties of a sweeping campaign to purge lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender federal workers, an episode historians later called the “Lavender Scare.”

Over seven decades, the CIA moved from systematically hunting and expelling LGBT officers to actively recruiting them, celebrating their contributions, and extending full benefits to same-sex partners. Along the way, individual officers—many of whom served in silence for decades—challenged the assumptions that had cast them as security risks, while allies in the CIA’s leadership slowly but steadily dismantled the policies that had marginalized them.

The story has now come full circle, with a ban on the CIA’s LGBT group and Pride Month celebrations, an end to minority outreach and recruitment, and the firing of officers for participating in diversity efforts or transgender-related group chats.

Trump administration executive orders eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and preventing transgender officers from using government restroom facilities have rolled back the considerable gains made in recent decades and threaten a new Lavender Scare that will harm the CIA’s ability to carry out its national security mission.

The problem with undermining LGBT service is threefold. First, cutting the intelligence community off from any source of human capital is bad, and discouraging LGBT applicants loses both their service and the service of folks who are justifiably alienated by the exclusion of their peers. Second, while in the 1950s a threat to out a gay officer might have been an effective lever for foreign intelligence operation even without career danger, now it’s pretty close to meaningless; very few people in the IC are going to be so terrified of being dragged out of the closet that they cooperate with a Chinese spy. That is, UNLESS open LGBT identification becomes a severe danger to a career… which is pretty much what the Trump administration wants to do. Third, it turns out that there are a lot of LGBT people in the world and some of them are legitimate intelligence targets and it’s helpful in such circumstances to have case officers who actually understand the LGBT world.

So, basically just shooting ourselves in the foot three times over.