Spy Agencies Are on a Mission to Hire From College Ranks

University of Virginia senior Amee Arvindi Patel speaks fluent Gujarati and Spanish, has high grades in international politics and finance and longs to travel in exotic lands. Her dream job?

“I’d love to join the CIA,” declares the 20-year-old Louisiana native.

“We’ll be in touch,” promises CIA recruiter Bob Park, studying her resume at a minority-student job fair on the Virginia campus. “You’re the kind of person we want.”

America’s premier spook shop is looking for a few good spies. Lots of them, actually. Plus hundreds of analysts, computer programmers, engineers, linguists, scientists and other specialists in what the CIA is calling its biggest recruitment drive since the Cold War buildup in the early 1980s.

Other members of America’s covert intelligence community, including the National Security Agency, which does electronic eavesdropping around the world, and the Defense Intelligence Agency, which studies foreign military forces, also have gone public in the hunt for fresh faces. Like the CIA, they are sending recruiters to colleges coast to coast this fall, offering everything from signing bonuses to complimentary popcorn.

The goal is to reinvigorate America’s battered cloak-and-computer corps after years of budget cuts, hemorrhaging staff, flagging morale and high-profile screw-ups. The key reason: growing awareness in Washington that global threats still exist, even if the Soviet Union doesn’t.

CIA Director Calls World Dangerous

George J. Tenet, director of the CIA, argues that the world is more dangerous today because new alignments have yet to replace the bipolar boundaries of the past. “As a result, I believe the potential for surprise is greater than at any time since the end of World War II,” he warned in a recent speech.

To meet the need, Congress approved about $29 billion in 1999 spending for the 13 U.S. intelligence agencies. Exact figures are classified, but officials say that the sum is close to the Cold War record. Most goes to the NSA and the National Reconnaissance Office, which builds and maintains America’s spy satellites.

And far more spending is likely. The Clinton administration has asked Congress to allocate funds to build the next generation of image and signal collection satellites, as well as other major intelligence investments, over the next five to seven years.

In the meantime, recruiting secret agents--or even secret accountants and mail clerks--is no picnic. Angry protests and bomb threats, once common when the CIA and its brethren came to campus, are now rare. But other problems persist.

“It’s tough,” says an official at the NSA, an agency so hush-hush that its initials sometimes are said to mean No Such Agency. “We say, ‘This is an exciting place to work. We can’t actually tell you what we do. But trust us.’ That’s a hard sell.”

NSA Goes After College Students

NSA recruiter Ken Acosta says his job is even harder when an NSA technical expert comes along for the day. “I hate it when he tells a student, ‘I can’t talk about that. If I tell you, I have to kill you,’ ” he jokes at a college job fair in New York City.

Acosta, 36, sports a broad smile and a rugby-style shirt as he chats and offers NSA pens, pads and glossy-black recruiting brochures labeled “For Your Eyes Only” to a steady stream of students from Princeton, Yale, Columbia and other top schools. A few particularly promising candidates also get a yellow NSA flashlight and a follow-up interview.

Acosta explains that NSA technicians operate ground stations that help intercept foreign communication. NSA mathematicians then decode the encrypted signals. NSA linguists translate them. And NSA analysts interpret them for military and political leaders. Oh, and by the way, Acosta adds, everyone is required to pass a polygraph exam and psychological tests and to obtain top-secret clearance.

Vincent Salcedo, a 21-year-old engineering major at Swarthmore College, is intrigued. “They do ‘Mission Impossible’-type stuff,” he says enthusiastically. Then he pauses and adds: “I guess if they say I’ll be punching numbers all day, it’s less exciting.”

NSA bigwigs bemoan such exciting but clearly inaccurate portrayals as the recent Hollywood blockbuster “Enemy of the State,” in which evil NSA operatives kill a U.S. senator, break into homes and bank records and somehow use spy satellites and other high-tech gizmos to track people inside high-rise buildings.

But Acosta says that applications began flooding in after the fanciful film cast a spotlight on the NSA. “It helped us,” he says with a laugh. “Students think we do real underground stuff. We tell them no, but we do a lot of other cool stuff.”

Like complex algorithms. The NSA claims to be America’s, and perhaps the world’s, largest employer of mathematicians. “The challenge is to use probability, statistics, Fourier analysis, Galois theory, stochastic processes and other techniques to outwit the world experts in creating or breaking codes and ciphers,” an NSA recruiting sheet explains helpfully.

“We’ve never had a competition with anyone for mathematicians except academia,” said Deborah Bonanni, NSA head of human resources. “Now Microsoft is hiring mathematicians. We’re a little concerned about that.”

The NSA and DIA share a recruiting table at the job fair in the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. The NSA side is draped in blue, the DIA in red. It is the first time either agency has attended the one-day event, which also lures scores of blue-chip banks, Internet companies, trucking firms and other major corporations.

DIA recruiter Bob Anetz, a former Army intelligence officer, works the front of the table. Dressed in a polo shirt and slacks, he passes out pouches of microwave popcorn and praises the Pentagon’s preeminent military intelligence division.

Several students listen briefly, peer suspiciously at the DIA crest on the popcorn bags and walk away. Anetz sighs. “We’ve got a problem. Most people don’t know who we are.”

But Nora Farid knows. A linguistics major at Wesleyan University, she speaks four languages, has studied in Cairo and says that she is “fascinated with espionage.” She adds: “The only reason I came here today was the DIA and NSA. I’m not very interested in the corporate life.”

That’s just as well. With few exceptions, intelligence agency salaries are below Silicon Valley standards. An entry-level NSA linguist earns about $30,000, a computer scientist about $38,000. Two of the agencies, the CIA and NSA, can offer signing bonuses and other perks as incentives for mid-level, more-experienced hires.

By day’s end, Anetz has collected 30 resumes. Six are set aside for follow-up and two are clear candidates. The NSA has more resumes, but only seven merit follow-up. “I’m going to recommend we not come back,” Acosta says as he packs up. “It’s not worth it.”

No such problems plague the CIA. Thanks in part to a clever series of newspaper and magazine ads, America’s best-known intelligence agency is besieged with applicants this year. That’s a far cry from the sieges CIA recruiters faced a decade ago at elite schools like Middlebury College in Vermont.

“I had a sit-in and protesters there chanting, ‘Stop the killing, stop today, we don’t want the CIA,’ ” recalls Bryan Peters, the CIA’s New England recruiter. “It’s very disruptive to hear that when you’re trying to recruit people.”

But Peters has been invited back to Middlebury as well as scores of other schools that once shunned the CIA.

He and fellow recruiter Sharon Cordero are at Boston University’s job fair on a recent afternoon, the agency’s first visit to the urban campus in nine years. With 130 Wall Street, pharmaceutical, soft-drink and other recruiters jamming the hall, the huge CIA booth holds prime real estate beside the front door.

Students crowd four deep around the banner-draped CIA table for much of the day, lining up to ask questions, hand in resumes and scoop up CIA pens and whistles. After five hours, Peters has 90 resumes that he will recommend for follow-up and another stack nearly as thick that he won’t.

A few students are confused: One woman asks if her “distinguishing mark,” which turns out to be a tattoo, bars her from applying. (No.) Another wants to join because he likes “the guys who stand by the president with little earpieces.” (That’s the Secret Service.)

But Tae H. Kim, 23, a naturalized American from Korea who already has two degrees and is working on a third in international relations, knows what the CIA does and why he wants to apply. “It’s a chance to make a difference,” the Orange County, Calif., resident says firmly.

No Complaints at BU

Richard Leger, head of BU’s office of career services, says that no one on campus has complained about the CIA’s presence. “I’ve had complaints against companies that make nuclear weapons. And some garment companies are a problem for us because of offshore operations and child labor issues.”

The CIA has a problem with its own offshore operations, better known as its clandestine service. Budget cuts, early retirements and a hiring freeze slashed nearly one-fourth of the agency’s work force in the early 1990s and overseas operations were especially hard hit. Although official figures are secret, the CIA is believed to have about 16,000 employees, including fewer than 1,000 operatives abroad.

The agency now hopes to hire 30% more clandestine agents and case officers. So it is quietly reaching out to lawyers, bankers and other mid-career professionals looking for a new line of work. Applicants must be U.S. citizens, younger than 35, able to speak a (preferably obscure) foreign language and willing to work a day job as cover for nocturnal espionage. Salaries start from $33,000 to $51,000. Baccarat-playing thrill-seekers need not apply.

“We’re not looking for James Bond,” warns Gil Medeiros, head of CIA recruiting.

“We have to make that very clear to people. You never see James Bond sitting down the next day and drafting the cable of what he did the night before. Or asking for approval for his next move. But that’s what we do.”

Still, the dashing and derring-do inevitably is part of the CIA’s mystique. Daniel Martin, an engineering major at BU, hands in his resume and says that he’s applying because of the “really cool toys” CIA agents get to use, at least in the movies.

“But I better be careful what I say,” he adds in a stage whisper. “I don’t want to get shot.”