Office of the Director of National Intelligence

“ Many IC elements adopted diversity training, such as unconscious bias workshops, and focused on leadership competencies to ensure that understanding and promoting diversity, inclusion, and EEO are viewed as key to effective leadership. ”

“ The IC assesses that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, probably emerged and infected humans through an initial small-scale exposure that occurred no later than November 2019 with the first known cluster of COVID-19 cases arising in Wuhan, China in December 2019. In addition, the IC was able to reach broad agreement on several other key issues. We judge the virus was not developed as a biological weapon. ”

“ Five-year trends (FY 20011-2015) in minority representation continues to slowly trend in a positive direction. Minority representation in FY 2011 was 23.2%. In FY 2015 minority representation was 24.6%. In FY 2015, overall IC minority representation in hiring increased from 23.6% (FY 2014) to 24.9%, largely due to a 1.4% increase in Hispanic hiring. The proportion of women in the IC remained just below 40% over the last five years. The share of attrition for women in the IC decreased by 1.7 percentage points between FY 2014 and FY 2015. ”

“ Another key to the success of CIA's program is the involvement of CIA's substantive terrorism experts, who work together with the full spectrum of CIA's operations officers. In addition to interrogators, detainees are questioned by subject matter experts with years of experience studying and tracking al-Qa'ida members and plots whose expertise contributed to the capture of the detainees. ”

“ Multiple safeguards have been built into the program to assure its professionalism. All those involved in the questioning of detainees are carefully chosen and screened for demonstrated professional judgement and maturity; the average age of officers interrogating detainees is 43. Once selected, they must complete more than 250 hours of specialize training before they are allowed to come face-to-face with a terrorist. Additional fieldwork under the direct supervision of an experienced officer is required before they can direct an interrogation. ”

“ Analysts at three IC elements remain unable to coalesce around either explanation without additional information, with some analysts favoring natural origin, others a laboratory origin, and some seeing the hypotheses as equally likely. ”

“ Their expertise helps to maintain a fast pace of questions and answers: they know the detainee's history and what information he should know; they can direct the questions to obtain the most critical information a detainee possesses ”