CIA Director William Burns alleged a noose was found outside a secret Virginia facility in an internal report that – according to the New York Times – insisted “racism and racist symbols would not be tolerated” in the notoriously brutal spy agency, which collaborated with the apartheid regime of South Africa to jail Nelson Mandela and plotted the execution of the first democratically-elected leader of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The Times notes “it was not entirely clear that the object was even meant to be a noose, or if whoever placed it there knew that the CIA secretly operated in the building,” and the Hill reports it’s also “not necessarily suspected to have been left by a CIA employee.” But the spy agency is nevertheless using the alleged occurrence to emphasize its supposed anti-racist bona fides.
The “CIA has zero tolerance for actions or symbols of hatred and treats any such incidents with the utmost seriousness,” an agency spokesperson told the Times. “Our values and our vital national security mission demand that we uphold nothing less than the highest standards of inclusiveness and safety.”
In 2021, the CIA drew widespread scorn after publishing a recruitment video in which a young Latina woman claimed to be overcoming “internalized misguided patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be” by working as an intelligence officer, before declaring she would no longer “apologize for the space I occupy.”
“I am a woman of color, I am a mom, I am a cisgender millennial who’s been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder,” she insisted in the widely-panned video, before announcing “I am intersectional.”