It's not necessarily because of political correctness. A person with a family background and who may have been brought up in the target country has language ski

It's not necessarily because of political correctness. A person with a family background and who may have been brought up in the target country has language skills and cultural knowledge that it would be difficult to learn otherwise. Those are useful skills for an intelligence agency to have. For example, a native Pashto speaker who spent their formative years in Pakistan is likely to prove a valuable asset, and it's hard to leverage that value without giving them access to sensitive information.