How One Black Man Blazed A Trail In The CIA

The CIA recently gave George Hocker a prominent place in its museum.

In 1957, George Hocker became one of the first Black officers in the CIA after a friend encouraged him to apply to the organization while they were both undergraduates at Howard University. At that time, Hocker was selected to join the CIA on part-time duty, but Hocker soon found himself passed over for promotions and sponsorships that went to his caucasian colleagues.

In his recent return to the CIA headquarters, the organization gave him a prominent place in its museum, marking another first in Hocker’s venerated career.

This is despite Hocker’s recollection of the CIA that some within the organization held the racist belief that Black officers couldn’t be spies.

“There was this scuttlebutt going around the Agency that Blacks could not be spies because they would stand out anywhere in the world… The lightbulb went off for me and a couple of my friends—if anybody were to stand out in the world, it’s going to be white guys because 90-plus percent of the world are people of color, some kind of color. I had decided that I was going to break this mold of people saying Blacks couldn’t be spies—we can do this, and the world needs us,” Hocker said in an interview for the CIA’s blog.

This would be a theme throughout Hocker’s tenure at the CIA, where he would become the first Black officer accepted into the agency’s paramilitary course, the first Black officer to open a new CIA station, and the first Black branch chief within the Directorate of Operations (D.O.)

In January, Hocker penned an op-ed for Newsweek, detailing how his attendance at the March on Washington in 1963 strengthened his resolve.

“I joined the CIA in 1957 as a file clerk to make money to help pay for my education at Howard University. Higher-ups told me that I’d never become a spy because Black people were not intelligent enough and could not ‘blend in’ anywhere. I believed it. At the March on Washington in 1963, that changed,” he recalled.

“Standing only 100 yards from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as he described his now famous ‘dream,’ I had a revelation. It felt like a wave of self-discovery coursed through my body. I realized that I did not have to give in to racists. I determined I would become a spy.”

Hocker continued, placing his tenure at the CIA with other notable Black spies. “It was never lost on me that, while I was fighting for my country’s interests in some of the world’s most dangerous regions, my fellow Black Americans were facing war zones of their own at home. The battle for civil rights and freedoms was often bloody. The same government that counted on me was doing awful things that directly impacted my friends and family. I myself had been brutalized by police as a teenager. I knew the pain of being Black in America.”

Hocker concluded, “Many Black patriots have faced that contradiction. James Lafayette, an enslaved man, spied for America in the Revolutionary War. Harriet Tubman, a conductor on the Underground Railroad, spied for the Union during the Civil War. Spying for the United States doesn’t mean agreeing with everything it does; it means being part of the effort to protect the nation and make it better.”