By Vernon Loeb Washington Post Service
WASHINGTON - Her family immigrated to the United States when she was a teenager, searching for the kind of opportunity they never had in Latin America. Her parents preached hard work, education, patriotism. Now she is preparing to put her Latino heritage and her education at a top U.S. university to use in a globe-trotting career - as a spy in countries where, she believes, her language skills and appearance will allow her to operate in ways ''a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed American'' never could.
''My parents are very proud,'' she said.
While CIA officials refused to disclose the woman's name, age or country of birth, they made her available for an interview at the agency's headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to illustrate the CIA's new push for diversity in its clandestine branch, the Directorate of Operations.
Like other government agencies, the Central Intelligence Agency has long viewed affirmative action as a desirable social goal, and its clandestine service has long made use of immigrants capable of blending into foreign locales. But with an increasing focus on terrorists, narcotics traffickers, weapons sellers and other ''hard targets'' who do not show up at embassy cocktail parties, the agency's need to hire nonwhite spies fluent in many languages has never been greater, top officials say.
''When you're trying to recruit an agent, you're establishing a bond with that person,'' said David Carey, the CIA's executive director, its No. 3 post. ''If you're a blond-haired guy from Oklahoma, there are some parts of the world where that's an uphill battle.''
In its biggest hiring push in more than a decade, the agency has run a series of advertisements in newspapers and highbrow magazines, such as the Economist, that depict the Directorate of Operations as a rainbow coalition of good-looking 20-somethings.
The truth, at the moment, is somewhat different. Of the CIA's corps of case officers - believed to number more than 1,000 - just 11 percent are minorities and 18 percent are women. Although the CIA director, George Tenet, six months ago appointed an African-American, Donald Cryer, as his special assistant for diversity programs, the agency's top managers are still predominantly white men.
But CIA officials say that a third of the new operations officers hired in the past year have been women. While just 11 percent have been minorities as traditionally defined - blacks, Asians or Hispanics - 20 percent of all new operations officers are native speakers of a foreign language and 75 percent have advanced proficiency in foreign languages, many because they have lived abroad. Almost half have advanced degrees.
''We are currently hiring officers in the Directorate of Operations with specialized skills directly applicable to combating terrorism worldwide,'' such as fluency in Russian, Arabic, Persian and Chinese, said James Pavitt, the agency's deputy director for operations.
''Fluency in these languages, almost by definition, suggests that they may be native-born and learned the language at their mother's knee,'' Mr. Pavitt added. ''If you're looking at diversity, from a purely social perspective, can we do better? You bet. But I'm looking at it now not only from that perspective, but from the business perspective as well: How do I operate in parts of the world where I need a different breed of cat, not somebody who necessarily looks like me or talks like me?''
CIA officials acknowledge that they face some image problems in recruiting minorities, given the past support of the agency for coups in Latin America and the Middle East and a belief among some African-Americans that CIA operatives helped bring crack cocaine to urban America.
''Are we going to be effective going in and setting up our recruitment booth in Watts? No, clearly not,'' Mr. Carey said, referring to the Los Angeles neighborhood that is mainly populated by blacks and migrants from Mexico and Central America.
But the Latino émigré in training to be a CIA spy expressed no such reservations. On the contrary, she said a keen sense of patriotism attracted her to the agency. CIA officials insist that they are able to find many minority candidates who harbor no negative views about the agency.
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THE VALUE OF DIVERSITY in a spy service that operates in almost every country would seem to be obvious. ''You can't have white guys doing operational things in most of the world and expect them to get away with it,'' said Brian Fairchild, a retired operations officer.
Yet Mr. Fairchild and a dozen other current and former spies say it is possible to overstate the value of diversity for clandestine operations, since much street-level espionage activity is performed by foreigners.
In CIA parlance, a U.S. citizen working as a professional spy overseas is a ''case officer,'' while a foreigner on the CIA payroll is an ''agent.'' Many agents are not handled directly by a case officer but by a ''principal agent'' of the same nationality. There are also ''access agents,'' who help CIA officers get closer to their targets, and ''support agents,'' who provide transportation, safe houses and other services.
The need for diversity is also diminished, some former agency officers maintain, by the CIA's frequent use of embassy cover, the practice of having CIA officers work out of U.S. embassies under the guise of State Department employees, which quickly brings them to the attention of foreign intelligence agencies.
One former operations officer scoffed at Mr. Tenet's promotion of diversity as an ''operational imperative,'' contending that a skilled case officer of any ethnic background - whether black, white, Asian or Latino - can operate anywhere in the world, using his or her own skills and those of foreign agents, where necessary.
''Diversity of experience is a necessity,'' the former officer said. ''Ethnic diversity may be a laudable social goal, but it is not by any means an operational imperative.''
But most current and former operatives interviewed disagreed, arguing that it is often essential to be able to put, say, an officer of Arabic descent on the ground in Amman or a native speaker of Persian in Tehran.
Garrett Jones, who served as CIA station chief in Somalia during peacekeeping operations in 1993, cited the example of an African-American officer who was able to work undercover for weeks in north Mogadishu, which he said would have been all but impossible for himself or any of the station's other white officers.
''They've got a new world to operate in,'' said Milt Bearden, a former station chief in Bonn, Khartoum, Sudan, and Islamabad, Pakistan. ''It's not a bunch of second secretaries chasing second secretaries at embassies in Bern.''
Jack Downing, the only person in CIA history to serve as station chief in both Moscow and Beijing, said it was not until the 1970s that the CIA first posted officers in countries from which they, or their parents, had recently emigrated. Until then, the agency feared that such officers would be seriously hampered by the host countries' intense mistrust - and surveillance - of them.
While such first- and second-generation émigrés have indeed faced surveillance, he said, experience has shown that they also have enormous potential once they are able to evade their watchers and function on the streets as a native.