Obama Administration Looks to Colleges for Future Spies

[Orwellian_Ghost]

Obama Administration Looks to Colleges for Future Spies
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 20, 2009

To the list of collegiate types -- nerds, jocks, Greeks -- add one more: spies in training. The government is hoping they'll be hard to spot.

The Obama administration has proposed the creation of an intelligence officer training program in colleges and universities that would function much like the Reserve Officers' Training Corps run by the military services. The idea is to create a stream "of first- and second-generation Americans, who already have critical language and cultural knowledge, and prepare them for careers in the intelligence agencies," according to a description sent to Congress by Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair.

In recent years, the CIA and other intelligence agencies have struggled to find qualified recruits who can work the streets of the Middle East and South Asia to penetrate terrorist groups and criminal enterprises. The proposed program is an effort to cultivate and educate a new generation of career intelligence officers from ethnically and culturally diverse backgrounds.

Under the proposal, part of the administration's 2010 intelligence authorization bill, colleges and universities would apply for grants that would be used to expand or introduce courses of study to "meet the emerging needs of the intelligence community." Those courses would include certain foreign languages, analysis and specific scientific and technical fields.


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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/19/AR2009061903501.html

[OmahaBlueDog]

1. Really, there's nothing new here

The CIA has recruited at the nations top schools going back to Wild Bill DOnovan and the OSS. The public schools -- often land grant schools -- were given the land so the schools could produce men suitable to become officers in the US military. There is little stretch from that to this.

[dynasaw]

2. Nothing new about this

Yale has been the top place for recruiting future spies since the '40s and '50s.