On Thursday, Britain’s CIA-equivalent agency the Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, began broadcasting a recruiting advertisement designed to attract more women and minorities into its ranks. But this recruitment drive isn’t about affirmative action or public relations. It’s about making the SIS more effective at stealing high-quality secrets abroad.
The SIS’s problem is that British perceptions of its work have been heavily influenced by the “James Bond” movies. And while those movies help the SIS to attract talented male intelligence officers, the Bond-factor obviously has less appeal to female recruits and to minorities who might not look like Bond. That reality is rendered in the fact that only 6 percent of the SIS’s total staff are minorities — a share four to five times smaller than the CIA’s workforce.
The diversity deficit matters for a few reasons.
For a start, it limits access to what intelligence professionals call hard targets or areas in which it is hard to spy effectively. White, male intelligence officers can blend in across much of Europe, but they cannot easily conduct a dead drop in Islamabad’s Fatima Jinnah park or a brush past in Mogadishu’s bakaara market without attracting attention. Predominating officer ethnicity is a special concern in China, where the domestic security services aggressively watch over suspected foreign intelligence officers.
Minority officers who fit in with foreign crowds thus enable easier intelligence access to harder targets. But more than that, if an SIS “P”-production officer has an ethnic, familial, or historical relationship with a foreign locale, he or she will have a greater ability to pick up the nuances and cultural idiosyncrasies that others might miss. Getting those understandings right is crucial, because failure can result in someone dying.
The importance of recruiting more women is similarly significant. Female officers from the Russian SVR and GRU intelligence services and China’s army intelligence division and ministry of state security are often employed to cultivate or compromise agents via seduction. The Israeli Mossad does this a bit, but most Western services employ female officers as they employ male officers: to recruit and run agents who can provide intelligence of national import. From the SIS’s perspective, it doesn’t matter if a “P”-production officer is a man or woman as long as they can do their job well. Although it is true that in certain cultures a female officer can raise fewer red flags from a potential agent during the early, most complicated stages of recruitment (although the opposite is true in other cultures).
Yet the SIS’s recruitment drive isn’t just about officers out in the field. The spy service also wants to bolster its analytical officer — or “R”-reports officer — ranks. These officers assess intelligence reports from the field for accuracy and strategic import. But by focusing on broadening the SIS’s appeal to women, it hopes to recruit talented female journalists, foreign policy researchers, attorneys, and international businesswomen who might otherwise have assumed SIS was a “boys only” club.
Regardless, this recruitment drive isn’t about making the SIS more politically correct, it’s about making it more effective.
