...........new book, "Denial and Deception" by Melissa Boyle Mahle. Until 2002, Ms. Mahle was an Arabic-speaking field operative in the CIA's clandestine service. With degrees from Berkeley and Columbia, she also served as an agency recruiter, visiting college campuses in search of suitable candidates for the directorate of operations. At some point in her career, she herself became the object of a counterintelligence inquiry and was eventually forced to resign. The details of her dismissal remain classified; her only comment here is that "it was not a friendly departure. I made a mistake, to which I admitted freely, accepting responsibility for a poor decision."

....the Clinton administration came into power, combating sexual harassment and the "glass ceiling" became part of a much broader campaign to reconstitute the agency work force. Ms. Mahle tells part of the story, the part about "the old boy network"; congressional documents supply the missing pieces concerning the hiring and promotion of minority candidates. Bill Clinton's first CIA director was R. James Woolsey--who tried valiantly, and failed, to get the president to focus on the threat of terrorism in the aftermath of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. During his tenure, though, the agency announced an ambitious affirmative-action plan.

To reduce these statistical discrepancies, Ms. Slatkin declared "a goal that one out of every three officers hired in fiscal years 1995-97 be of Hispanic or Asian-Pacific origin." She moved no less aggressively to alter the ethnic and sexual complexion of the CIA's higher levels. In just six months, she was able to report, "42 percent of officers selected for senior assignments ha[d] been women or minorities."