Transcript: America’s LGBT S pies – Secret Agents (of Change) PANEL TRANSCRIPT Recorded March 14, 2016 South by Southwest Interactive Festival Austin, Texas PARTICIPANTS Tracey Ballard – CIA Katrina Gossman – FBI / ODNI Kris Gill – NGA Rita Sampson - ODNI Rita Sampson: Good Afternoon. I’m Rita Sampson and I’m the Chief of the Equal Employment Opportunity and Diversity within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and we want to welcome you here today for the session on America’s LGBT spies, secret agents of change. I want to just let you know we are talking about the entire Intelligence Community, which is a collaboration of about 17 different intelligence agencies and today IC EEOD Chief Rita Sampson welcomes audience members we’re going to hear personal stories and to the “Secret Agents of Change” panel. perspectives from three of those agencies. But before we get going I also have the pleasure of introducing you to the number two person in the United States Intelligence Community and that is Stephanie O’Sullivan who has joined us here today from Washington DC to share some of her thoughts and perspectives. So if you will help me welcome Ms. O’Sullivan with a round of applause. Stephanie O’Sullivan: I am glad everybody is here this afternoon because I think we have some really important things to talk about. I asked Rita if I could say a few words and I won’t take longer than that because like you, I’m here to listen and learn even though I’ve heard some of these amazing stories before. The intelligence professionals that are going to be up here on the stage in a few minutes are tremendous advocates. It is an honor to be in the PDDNI Stephanie O’Sullivan introduces IC panelists at SXSW same room with them, even for just a couple of minutes. Throughout my career I’ve been profoundly inspired by the service of our LGBT officers. They’ve endured, and overcome, and continued to engage, not for personal gain, but just to be able to serve their country. That is the very definition of selfless patriotism. I’m humbled by their sacrifice and awed by their achievements. Because intelligence is about making sense of a complex world that we live in… without diverse thinking and unique perspectives we will fail. If you look back over the 70 years of the Intelligence Community whenever we have had an intelligence failure, you can often look at things like the failure of being rooted and having similar perspectives and experiences and not having diverse voices that spoke out and talked to us about different ways of looking at a given problem. So without that kind of diversity and different viewpoints, intelligence just doesn’t work. We need every bit of the diversity of talent, skills and insight of the IC’s workforce, and every bit of diversity this country has to bring. Not only because it’s imperative for our work, but because it’s a reflection of who we are and we aren’t the only intelligence organization to figure this out. In fact, just a few weeks ago MI5, the FBI counterpart in the UK, was awarded and named the most LGBT friendly employer in that country. We were kind of hoping that we would make a mark here today for the US government, you know as we looked at that mark that our MI5 compatriots made but it’s pretty hard to beat out our boss who made a statement by having a rainbow over his plane as he went. But if anyone could make a statement that matched what our boss had to say when he landed here last week is the panel that you’re going to hear from today and the accomplishments they have to talk to you about so with that I’ll get back to Rita and the group of folks that are going to be talking to you. They are terrific representatives of our country. Thank you. Rita Sampson: We want to make sure that you know that you can follow us on twitter and also we have a Tumblr account as well. So this is a way that we believe the power of today’s session is to be interactive and so we don’t want to sit here and lecture to you about how great the Intelligence Community is or how inclusive we are as an environment, all of those things are true but we’re not going to lecture about that. What we want to do is to have a conversation and help you to see a rare glimpse into the Intelligence Community. And to have that perspective we think its best that it comes from the individual officers that make up the Intelligence Community. So I will introduce those officers: Pictured left to right: Kris Gill, NGA; Katrina Gossman, FBI/ODNI; Tracey Ballard, CIA and Rita Sampson, ODNI We have Tracy and we’ll start with Tracy. Tracy Ballard from the CIA who we all know is the agency that has all of the secret spies in it. Remember I said there were 17 elements of the IC so we give a quick glimpse of what each one of them does. Katrina Gossman, she is from FBI and they’re the ones that have the guns. And on the very end is Kris Gill, and Kris is from the National-Geospatial Intelligence Agency, the agency that is mapping the world from outer space. Without further ado, I just want to encourage everyone if you have a question just go up to the mic and let’s just start talking about life in the Intelligence Community. What we want to do is give just a couple of minutes to share introductory remarks and then we’ll just go straight into Q&A. Alright, so over to you Tracy. Tracy Ballard: Hi, good afternoon. My name is Tracy Ballard and I have been with the Central Intelligence Agency for 30 years as a technical intelligence officer within the Directorate of Science and Technology. In 1988, three years after I started working with the Central Intelligence Agency, I came out to our security office because it was so important to who I was as a person but I did that at great risk because those that came before me were typically removed CIA’s Tracey Ballard from service, and lost their clearances. To put that in perspective, this was 7 years prior to the signing of Executive Order 12968 which took place by President Clinton in 1995, which effectively overturned the ban to access classified information based solely on sexual orientation. It was during this time with that executive order in hand that I stood out even more publicly in our workplace and I founded our LGBT employee resource group, what we call Angle, agency network of gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, transgender officers and our allies. And I did this for two particular reasons. One, because I recognized that I had had a privilege over the 7 previous years of being out and cleared in our organization so I had a responsibility to those who didn’t yet have a voice. And two, there was no longer, I could no longer stand and have silence be the response to some of our workplace environments. To me it was no longer acceptable to have that as our response. So I have worked with our LGBT persons. We have had LGBT persons in our workplace for decades. We have history of it, except they typically were removed or remained closeted and they did that at great risk. However, they were dedicated and contributed to our mission regardless of the oppression that existed for them and I think we have to understand that history and understand the steps that they took to allow me to come out and I think that’s very important to do. For the last twenty years I have advocated for LGBT employees, not just our LGBT employees, but all our employees and all the unique perspectives that our families bring to the table because it’s important that we understand that our best resources are our individual officers. And with those twenty years, we have, our organization has done an amazing about face of how we used to treat our employees to where we are today. And I think that cultural change is probably one of the biggest and greatest achievements that we have done in the last few years. Rita Sampson: Thank you. Katrina? Katrina Gossman: Hi. In 2004, I became the first FBI employee to marry my partner. When Massachusetts opened its doors, to same sex marriages, we were there, the very first week. When I returned to the office, with the help from my HR colleagues, I submitted my marriage certificate to FBI headquarters. My wife received spousal benefits. The FBI, the people of the FBI, wanted and tried to do the right thing. FBI’s Katrina Gossman, currently detailed to ODNI. About two months later I received an email that stated because of the Defense of Marriage Act, all benefits extended to my wife were rescinded. This made national news. And I became the most outed employee in the FBI. I also received numerous emails from other FBI employees with their support. Notably, one from the time… the top agent in the Washington field office… who with his wife and two sons thanked me for not being a face in the crowd. And he said, I know you didn’t intend to be the poster child of FBI LGBT issues and rights it is important and I thank you for your support.