"It is fair to say that it is a higher priority under the new director," CIA Spokesman Michael Mansfield told United Press International, saying the issue was "very, very important" to Hayden.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the CIA has been under pressure to ramp up its human intelligence capabilities against Islamic and Arabic-speaking extremist networks, in part by recruiting more from relevant communities in the United States.

Diversity "is a top priority and a mission imperative," said Mansfield, adding that last year, 23 percent of the CIA's new recruits were from racial or ethnic minorities.

Former Maryland congressman and civil rights leader Kweisi Mfume was the keynote speaker at the agency's Martin Luther King Day event, at its Langley, Va., headquarters on Jan. 16.

And National Public Radio correspondent and Fox News commentator Juan Williams gave a speech there on the subject of inclusive leadership the following week.

Mansfield said that for the event on Martin Luther King Day, a national holiday celebrating the slain civil rights leader and the movement he has come to symbolize, there was a standing-room only crowd of more than 600 in the CIA's main auditorium -- dubbed "The Bubble" by insiders -- and that hundreds more employees watched the event on the agency's internal TV network.

Mfume, who led the nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, for nearly a decade until January 2005, told UPI he had gone to Langley to deliver a message to minority staff at the agency.

"In addition to the dream (of racial equality), you need to work hard and seize the opportunities you have," he said he told them, "Opportunities that wouldn't have come their way without" the successes of the civil rights movement.

He said that audience had been "very diverse," and that he had been impressed with the employees who had spoken to him afterwards.

"They were eager to talk about why this day, and what it celebrates, is important to them," he said, adding that many saw themselves as "direct beneficiaries" of the King legacy. They "realize that if that movement had not been successful, they might not be working at the CIA today," he said.

Williams said he too had been impressed with the agency's employees, and with the senior management officials he had lunch with after his speech.

"They seemed to really get it," he said. "You have all these images, stereotypes almost, in your mind" about an agency like the CIA, but he had found the audience -- which he described as "overwhelmingly white" -- "so thoughtful about race and American society and so open about their struggles" with the issue of diversity.

Mfume said he came away "with a strong feeling about the sincerity and commitment (of the new CIA director) to increasing diversity."

Both men said the CIA leadership had been very clear that diversity was an issue of effectiveness, not just fairness, for the agency.

"The agency ... knows that in an increasingly globalized world, its ability to be effective depends on its ability to look like the rest of the world," said Mfume.

"They have hired so many people that more than half of the staff have been there less than five years," said Williams, adding that the new generation of recruits were likely to be, as their counterparts in the private sector, "aggressive ... and more non-hierarchical" in their approach at work.

"These are not old school bureaucrats," he said, adding management had to "expand their comfort zone," and "learn to see potential in unusual or unexpected places," if it was to keep attracting the "best and the brightest" in a rapidly changing world.

In August 2001, Jeffrey Sterling, an African-American CIA employee sued the agency for race discrimination. The case was never decided, because a court accepted the government's argument that hearing it would necessarily expose secret details about Sterling's job as a Farsi-speaking operations officer.

Mark Zaid, Sterling's attorney, said that, at least pre-Sept. 11, there had been "an undercurrent of concern among minorities at the agency that they were not represented in the operations division or in management, and that historically, they had been concentrated in the support or administrative roles."

Thomas Powers, who worked at the CIA briefly after having graduated its first post-Sept. 11 training class for operational personnel -- and wrote a book about it -- told UPI that he never encountered any such concerns during his training.

Mansfield declined to respond in detail to Zaid's remarks, reiterating that Hayden and his team were "deeply committed to expanding diversity -- across the CIA and at all levels of the organization -- so that we can more effectively identify, collect, and understand the information that is vital to America's safety."

"We have made significant strides, but we need to make more," he added.

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