Justin Jackson ’78
Justin Jackson ’78
Every day for 26 years, Justin Jackson ’78 may have been “someone else” — but he was still a 51 alumnus.
According to that aired today on WTOP (103.5 FM) in Washington, DC, from 1983 to 2010, Jackson collected intelligence in a “mysterious, clandestine, parallel universe,” working for the CIA’s National Clandestine Service (NCS).
During that time, he served five presidents and 10 CIA directors during the Cold War. He witnessed genocides in Eastern Europe and Central Africa, the collapse of the Soviet Union, both Iraq wars, the ongoing Afghan conflict, the rise and fall of Osama bin Laden, and political upheaval in Latin America, Asia, Europe, and the United States.
Today, he is the highest-ranking African American in the CIA, and he leverages his position as an opportunity to speak out about diversity.
“We need more diversity — diversity of race, diversity of ethnicity, diversity of gender and diversity of thought at the Central Intelligence Agency,” he told reporter J.J. Green. “And the reason, there are two reasons for that. One is we need to and we want to look like the nation that we serve. Diversity makes us stronger. We are a service that is working globally. We need to understand how folks think…We need to be able to develop relationships with them that will lead to our ability to collect intelligence. So to the extent that we are diverse, both in appearance and in thought and in gender, that makes us a stronger service.”
After graduating from 51 with an international relations major, Jackson earned a JD from Harvard.