Higher Espionage

"Handled with care, I think it can work," he says. "I don't mean to dismiss it, but I think in most cases the fears are overblown."

For Christopher Simpson, a professor at American University in Washington and an authority on CIA/university ties, a major worry is that scholars are just too easily manipulated.

"The ways in which the CIA ... pursues its academic interests are just as carefully considered as other agency operations," he says. "For example, if a professor or administrator is regarded by the agency as sympathetic, there are efforts to facilitate that person's success - to be sure they get invited to meetings and get access to records. This is antischolarly."

The agency's scholarly needs during the cold-war era were focused on Russia, China, and a few other regions. With the Soviet Union's collapse, CIA priorities shifted to a host of other areas, such as third-world indebtedness, narcotics trafficking, illicit arms markets, and immigration patterns - and to scholars who study those subjects.

But to expand the agency's reach, first there had to be fence-mending. That began in earnest in the mid-1980s but intensified in 1995, when John Deutch became CIA director. A former Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, he directed the CIA to actively pursue contacts with the brightest minds in academia, health sciences, and the corporate world.

"It wasn't just a nice thing to reach these experts," says John Gannon, recently retired from the agency. "To do it was absolutely essential for us. We needed those relationships."

Since then, academic contacts have mushroomed, says Dr. Gannon, deputy director for intelligence from 1995 to 1997 and chairman of the CIA-run National Intelligence Council from 1997 to 2001. In 1996, he says, the agency developed a strategic plan "to extend our relationship with the academic and corporate world. We had to break our analysts out of the monastery."

The number of agency-funded conferences and information on the increase in its contract work with academic analysts are unavailable, says a CIA spokesman. But Jervis, Gannon, and others say that invitations to CIA-sponsored events are more plentiful these days and that CIA employees also mingle with professors at other venues, such as meetings of the International Studies Association (ISA).

Part of the connection is forged by money, as professors, especially in the social sciences, scramble for funding.

"A lot of private-foundation funding for research on areas of the world and languages [is] drying up for a variety of reasons," says Craig Murphy, a professor at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and a former ISA president. "At the same time, there's a push to link more and more federal [scholarships and fellowships] to security and intelligence goals."

But if scholarships and viewing secret data add depth perception to research, then aren't tradeoffs reasonable? "It is being seen among scholars that intelligence has an important role to play," says Frederick Hitz, a former CIA director of operations turned scholar. "People are willing to move forward positively, if cautiously."

Page: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4