Activist and abolitionist Harriet Tubman won a statue at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The monument was inaugurated weeks ago by the current director of the US intelligence agency, William J. Burns, in a private ceremony which Tina Wyatt, a descendant of Tubman, also attended, according to The Washington Post.
According to the outlet, the project had been proposed by CIA officials after an internal dynamic in Maryland, where Tubman grew up. The work reproduces, with permission of the original artist Brian Hanlon, a sculpture honoring the abolitionist located at the New York State Equal Rights Heritage Center in Auburn.
The Tubman statue joins two others on the CIA campus. One represents Nathan Hale, an American spy killed by the British in the American War of Independence (1775-1783); the other is by William J. Donovan, considered the founder of the agency.
At first, a civil rights activist who regularly broke the law to free some 300 enslaved people might seem like an unusual inspiration to today’s CIA contractors. But Robert Byer, director of the agency’s museum, told the Washington Post that there are many similarities between Tubman’s style and that of agents on duty.
Since 2018, one of the exercises given by the agency to its employees has been to repeat Tubman’s missions through the “clandestine railroad” – the name given to the route that enslaved individuals used to flee to the abolitionist north – on the east coast.
In these missions, the activist guided the enslaved to freedom, actions that, according to Byer, the intelligence community would call “extraction from a forbidden place”. The museum director also says that the tasks evoke characteristics shared by Tubman and the CIA, such as dedication, sacrifice and good management.
Known for her role as an abolitionist, Tubman was also a great spy — or intelligence agent, in Byer’s words, since she wasn’t stealing confidential information and passing it on to a foreign entity.
In the Civil War, in her early forties, she became the first woman to plan and lead a US Army expedition, infiltrating enemy lines in South Carolina dressed as a slave to gather information on the location of Confederate torpedoes. on the Combahee River.
Armed with this knowledge, Union boats were able to cross the river undetected by the Confederates and attack enemy forts. Returning to the river, Union troops freed hundreds of enslaved, many of whom joined their fight.
Byer also reinforced to the Post the importance of diversity for the agency. “We need her to carry out our mission. If those enslaved had not trusted Harriet Tubman, they would not have given her information,” he said.
Last week, former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo went against this idea, writing on Twitter that “a ‘woke’ army is a weak army”.
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