School for New Brand of Spooks

It is a five-story structure of polished brick and smoked glass, identical to its neighbors and similar to hundreds of sleek buildings in scores of new office parks in suburban Virginia’s high-tech corridor.

But on the second floor of this anonymous building, the CIA’s newest spy school is in session.

The students wear laminated blue neck tags showing that they have security clearance to use classroom computers marked “top secret.” Their trash is shredded and burned each day. And the study area has so many guards, locks and alarms that it is called “the vault.”

The building is sheathed with special materials and sensors to stop anyone from secretly listening in. That’s just as well, since a recent morning’s visit found two instructors and 25 students deep in discussion of past coups, assassinations and invasions. Flunking out “is not an option,” one teacher warns.

Welcome to the Sherman Kent School for Intelligence Analysis. Open since mid-May, it is the first comprehensive training program for the unheralded CIA analysts who sift stolen secrets, pore over satellite photos, review wiretap transcripts, scan State Department studies and wade through newspaper and other media reports.

The new school is the latest effort by the CIA to change the way it works. Buffeted by budget cuts, frustrated by new technology and mortified by scandals and failures, America’s premier spook shop quietly has spent the last two years reevaluating its role--critics would say its rationale--and recharting its course in the post-Cold War world.

The goal, CIA Director George J. Tenet said recently, “is to make sense of a world that is more complicated and less predictable than it ever has been in our history.” With the Cold War over, Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), head of the House Intelligence Committee, warns of “pop-up targets that threaten our national security.”

Once focused primarily on the Soviet Union, the CIA now spies on China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea and Russia as strategic priorities. But it also tracks a host of smaller targets, from terrorists to drug traffickers, and a long list of thorny topics, from refugees to earthquakes.

Last year, for example, the CIA provided maps for humanitarian operations in Turkey and Taiwan, reported on arms traders in Africa, traced money laundering in the Caribbean and helped eliminate terrorist cells in Europe and the Middle East.

The CIA’s Clandestine Service, home to the secret agents of legend and lore, also has been beefed up. A legion of new operatives--including a growing number of women and nonwhites--have been recruited. And funding is up for covert operations, new spy gizmos and a basic training course that includes crashing cars through barricades and parachuting from planes.

Spy Agency Extends Its High-Tech Reach

The CIA’s gadget gurus, meanwhile, have tapped Silicon Valley. They launched a nonprofit corporation, In-Q-Tel, last fall to support private-sector development of information technology that the CIA can use. Flooded with proposals, the company has signed 10 contracts so far.

“We’re looking at real ‘Mission Impossible’ stuff,” Gilman G. Louie, president of In-Q-Tel, said earlier this year.

Analysts at the CIA are usually more sedate, but they often play the most crucial role in influencing U.S. policy. That’s because they write the world’s most expensive and exclusive newspaper: the President’s Daily Brief.

Drawing on the entire U.S. intelligence community--an estimated $30-billion-a-year enterprise--the top-secret file tries to tell the president and about a dozen of his top advisors what really is going on each day in the inner circles of power, from Beijing to Bosnia, and what it means for U.S. interests and forces around the globe.

President Bush, a former CIA chief, insisted on starting his day with the PDB. President Nixon famously ignored his, once deriding “those clowns” at the CIA for failing to foresee the outbreak of the Middle East’s Yom Kippur War in October 1973.

But the lessons of that failure and other high-profile CIA screw-ups form the core of the Kent School curriculum. For example, the agency told the president that there were no Soviet missiles in Cuba two weeks before they were discovered in 1962 and failed to foresee that the shah of Iran was in serious trouble at home before he was deposed in 1979.

“We spend a lot of time in this course studying mistakes,” said Frans Bax, the Kent School dean and a 20-year CIA veteran.

There are plenty to study. The CIA was caught off-guard when India tested a series of underground nuclear devices in May 1998, even though the new government in New Delhi had been elected on a vow to develop nuclear weapons. Three months later, the agency was stunned again when North Korea launched a sophisticated three-stage rocket over Japan in a failed attempt to put a satellite into orbit.

And last year, in one of its worst foul-ups, the CIA provided incorrect targeting data that led U.S. warplanes to bomb the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during the North Atlantic Treaty Organization air war against Yugoslavia. The CIA had not noticed the embassy’s new address in the Belgrade telephone directory.

Those failures added to the push for better collection, technology and analysis.

In the past, for example, CIA analysts were hired, given two to four weeks of training and assigned a desk at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. Now, hundreds of new analysts are being recruited. Many will serve at least temporary tours overseas after attending the Kent School’s six-month course in intelligence trade craft.

The curriculum includes everything from ethics to “Fundamentals of Denial and Deception.” Case studies will focus on the fall of President Suharto in Indonesia in 1998 and the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Field trips are planned to the supersecret National Security Agency in Fort Meade, Md., and the Pentagon’s Pacific Command and Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.

The final week, at least this semester, will include a nonstop 28-hour exercise, starting at 2 a.m., involving a mock terrorist attack. “This is deliberately designed to be intensive and stressful,” Denis Stadther, director of the school’s career analyst program, said cheerfully.

Emphasis Is on Expertise, Loyalty

Martin Petersen, head of strategic programs in the CIA’s directorate of intelligence, said that the course is designed to build expertise and a loyalty to the CIA among the Gen-Xers who could easily find work in the outside world.

“What they do here is get a short, intense slice of what they’ll face for the rest of their careers,” Petersen said. “It’s not about answers. It’s about a mission. And heavy responsibilities. There are lives at stake in what they do.”

Not surprisingly, the veteran analysts who run the school argue that stolen blueprints and bugged hotel rooms are swell, but swift and insightful analysis of the growing torrent of information pouring into the CIA is the key to telling the president the real intentions of America’s adversaries.

“Electronic intercepts are great, but you don’t know if you’ve got two idiots talking on the phone,” Petersen said. “And a picture may say 1,000 words, but it’s still just a snapshot. There is no context.”

Providing context was critical to the late Sherman Kent, a revered CIA analyst and tobacco-chewing Yale history professor who first proposed creating the analysts’ school in 1953. A Times reporter was allowed to visit his namesake on condition that the paper not publish its location or the names of students and teachers.

The school’s first class of 11 women and 14 men is an impressive group. Two-thirds have master’s, doctor’s or law degrees. Half have lived or worked abroad and are fluent in another language. A half dozen served in the military.

And at least one, James, 34, has worked 10 years abroad as a CIA case officer--in other words, an agent who sweet-talks generals, file clerks and other foreigners into betraying their country. He says that trading danger and derring-do for the intellectual challenge of solving puzzles has been “an eye-opener.” His current project: “I’m changing my cover,” referring to his former false identity.

Denise, the youngest student at 22, said that she already has learned the key difference between writing for the CIA and her professors back at UCLA. “Here you state the conclusions first,” she said with a laugh. “And you have to be concise.”

Another student, Kim, 31, is less enthusiastic. “I think they don’t know what to do with a PhD in agricultural economics,” she said. But later she admitted that her attitude may explain why she is there. “Skepticism is a characteristic that’s encouraged here. So is being judgmental.”

During a morning class on “Assumptions, Biases and Mindsets,” the casually dressed students sit at five U-shaped tables, surrounded by flip-charts, in a windowless room.

The instructors--Helen, a Haiti expert, and Lynn, a Middle East specialist--use an overhead projector and pose “what if” questions based on real conflicts and crises. In each case, the students must analyze incomplete, and often conflicting, information.

“Look for things that aren’t there,” Lynn told the class. “If we make up our minds too early, we shut ourselves off to possible answers.”

Later, the students discuss classified papers they are preparing. Their topics range from Chinese smuggling and illicit migration in Europe to food security and refugees in the Horn of Africa and the Balkans.

But during a break, Stewart, 27, confessed that his friends doubt he is studying such dry fare. “They wonder if I really learn to break someone’s arm in three places and drive cars really fast.” They’re disappointed, he added, when he says no.