CIA's First Black Spymaster

An excerpt from NBC News - 

George Hocker broke through barriers as one of the CIA’s first Black spymasters

After witnessing Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, Hocker decided he wasn't "going to let discrimination define me, and I was going to be a Black spy for my country.”

By Dan De Luce

George Hocker, left, with Robert Gates, former director of the CIA
and secretary of defense.CIA Archive

When George Hocker underwent a grueling training course to become a CIA spy, much of America was still segregated. That meant Hocker, as a Black man, could not go to restaurants in Virginia to meet with agency instructors playing the part of foreign informants.

Different exercises had to be developed for Hocker. “I had to have car meetings, whereas my classmates could go and have a nice meal in a restaurant,” he said.

Out of a class of 75, Hocker was the only Black person. He passed the course and went on to blaze a trail as one of the Central Intelligence Agency’s first Black clandestine officers, the first to open a CIA station abroad and the first to lead a branch inside the Directorate of Operations.

Hocker’s pioneering experience at the spy agency — along with a small number of other African Americans who joined in the 1960s — has been largely overlooked until recently, partly due to the secrecy that requires most CIA officers to serve in anonymity.

But the agency recently installed an exhibit dedicated to Hocker at its museum at CIA headquarters, and interviewed him on its official podcast. And he is now writing a memoir, saying he wants to pass on the lessons he learned as a “Black spymaster” about resilience and determination.

n an interview with NBC News, Hocker, 84, described the discrimination he faced throughout his career and his sometimes harrowing missions overseas.

After starting out in the CIA’s records department in 1957 while a student at Howard University in Washington, D.C., Hocker was later promoted to be an analyst at the CIA. But he was apprehensive about signing up for the spy training course.

Seeing no African American role models at the agency, he planned to leave for the Labor Department to work as economist.

“I had pretty much decided that this was not a place where I wanted to try to make a career,” he said.

Then Hocker attended the historic 1963 March on Washington, where he stood only 100 yards away as Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. He was deeply affected by what he saw and heard that day, including seeing Black and white Americans walking together peacefully, in common cause.

Hocker said it was “a defining moment for me, and I decided that I wasn’t going to let bigotry and discrimination define me, and that I was going to be a Black spy for my country.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/investigations/george-hocker-cia-first-black-spy-spymasters-rcna160148