CIA goes on a hiring spree to revamp image

“It is fair to say that the cupboard is nearly bare in the area of human intelligence,” Congressman Porter Goss, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a former CIA case officer, said recently. That sentiment was echoed by the retired Admiral David Jeremiah, who was appointed to inquire into the failure to predict the Indian nuclear tests. He had concluded that the CIA had detailed too few officers to study India. No estimates areavailable, but it is generally known that the CIA has had to downsize its operations the world over in the aftermath of the Cold War.

According to the Jeremiah panel, there was only one analyst dedicated to studying satellite pictures of important Indian nuclear and missile sites. The CIA’s human intelligence was even worse and it had “no spies worth the name” in India. The agency had also failed to penetrate the Indian nuclear programme, in sharp contrast to the success it has had with the Chinese and Pakistani programmes. Jeremiah said there were not enough personnel to study the data on India and a lot of imagery was left on the “cutting floor”. It required 13 analysts to piece together the evidence showing a potential nuclear test. “Besides, most of the staff is relatively new and have little experience. India has been a forgotten case for long,” a former CIA analyst told The Indian Express.

The agency has now fanned out to American colleges on an intensive recruitment drive, much likecorporate headhunters. But while in the old days, the East Coast Ivy League institutions — particularly Yale — was the happy hunting ground, the agency has now spread out to 164 schools across the United States, targeting institutions in the south and west. Experts say this is also because Wall Street and allies are outbidding Uncle Sam in the Ivy League schools. CIA starting salaries are a modest $ 32,000 to $ 50,000 annual. The profile of the targets is also changing. Where once the CIA booked academic achievers in political sciences with good social skills, it is now looking for a wider range of people — engineers, scientists, computer jockeys, linguists etc. Last year, the agency landed only 14 per cent of its target for computer specialists. The social profile of the potential spooks is also changing — more minorities and more women. “White males stick out overseas,” a CIA recruiter said in a rare magazine interview recently.

The agency’s emphasis on information technology is particularlyinteresting given the recent infiltration into the Indian atomic energy establishment by teenage hackers. According to reports, the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology now has two new units — the Clandestine Information Technology and Advanced Analytic Tools. These wings are expected to overseecomputer break-ins and new advances in language and encryption. Once seen as a shadowy, malevolent organisation filled with freebooters, the CIA is also going in for an image makeover and trying to present a more human face. Last year, the agency reportedly scrubbed most of its dubious sub-agents, particularly in Latin and Central America. The Agency now has a homepage for kids on the World Wide Web (odci.gov/cia/ciakids) showing a black female executive with a white spook in a trademark trench coat, posing with a dog (the CIA’s Canine Corps) and an aerial photography pigeon.

But not everyone is convinced about the makeover and the agency and its director, former Senate staffer George Tenet, have beentrashed. “The accumulated egg now on the Central Intelligence Agency’s face would feed half of Rwanda. Its agents in the Soviet Union slept through the demise of Communism there. Despite its $ 27 billion budget, it now claims that it was stretched too thin to focus on the fact that India’s hard-line government was in the atomic bomb business until the bombs actually burst. CIA needs more than `scouring’; it needs a director and staff with an active interest in current events,” one critic wrote recently.

But the agency has its own gripe. For one, the CIA itself gets only about $ 3 billion of the $ 27 billion budget. Most of it goes to the more fancied but lesser known behemoths like the National Security Agency (which handles “electronic intelligence” aka eavesdropping) and the National Reconnaissance Organisation, which builds and maintains spy satellites. Analysts also say the agency’s findings and outputs have often been ignored or downplayed by policy makers, particularly the state department.

Infact, the CIA established with much fanfare some years back a Non-Proliferation Center (NPC) with a 100-strong staff. But the centre’s findings, particularly with regard to China’s proliferation activities, was winked at by the state department, and the director of the centre was eased out last year. “There was considerable demoralisation there. The non-proliferation agenda was definitely not getting the importance it should have,” one analyst said.