Higher Espionage

He worries in particular about conversations he's had more frequently at academic conferences. "I'll make a point with someone about Chinese politics, say, and his response will be, 'Well you're wrong, but I can't really talk about why I know that,' " says Dr. Cumings. "You see, he's done classified work for the agency and signed a secrecy agreement, so he just can't talk about it. This is the sort of corrosive effect that undermines scholarly debate."

Another sign of warming: It has become more acceptable to openly acknowledge doing scholarly work for the CIA or one of America's 12 other intelligence agencies - just as it is more common since 9/11 to see lines of students at CIA recruiting tables during campus job fairs.

"You have always had interaction between the CIA and the academy, but it was discreet, mainly because it was odious to scholars," says David Gibbs, a political scientist at the University of Arizona who is critical of CIA ties to academia. "These ties are now out in the open. People feel no embarrassment about working with the CIA."

One of those is Robert Jervis, a Columbia University political scientist and former president of the American Political Science Association, who has long acknowledged doing analysis on contract for the CIA. He's noticed others now doing it, too.

"The degree to which people feel ostracized by their colleagues was never as great as the media portrayed it," Dr. Jervis says. "But 9/11 certainly did lower the bar significantly for many faculty who were reluctant to admit working for the CIA before."

Even so, many on campus voice concern about the lifetime secrecy agreements scholars must sign in order to see classified material. From then on, they must submit for agency review anything that bears on the topics covered by the pact.

Loch Johnson, a University of Georgia intelligence historian, gives this hypothetical example: The CIA offers a $100,000 contract to a university expert on Mongolia. The caveat is that the research must remain classified - unseen outside the agency. So the expert does the work without telling anyone on his faculty.

"Ethically, he's supposed to present his findings to the public and his institution," says Dr. Johnson, author of "America's Secret Power: The CIA in a Democratic Society." "But his agreement with the CIA keeps it bottled up. So there's a bit of a corruption."

As for concern about objectivity, critics say it's especially acute when historical or political- science research is involved. Modern historical research on Cuba, Guatemala, and Chile, for instance, often involves the CIA's own role.

Even those who have done such work for the CIA or security agencies are hardly sanguine.

"One has to proceed with care," Jervis says. "Anytime you're working for a very powerful organization, you want to stop and think. There are some real questions about biomedical companies unduly influencing medical research. I would say working for CIA raises some of the same questions."

Even so, he and others say, government can benefit from scholars' insights - a gain that is worth some minor compromises.

In the late 1970s, for instance, Jervis wrote a classified study for the CIA on why the agency failed to foresee the fall of the shah of Iran. in the late 1980s, he published a "very sanitized" version of his findings, he says.

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