Job Seekers Swamp U.S. Spy Shops

They don’t pay particularly well and the work they offer ranges from the dull to the dangerous. But since Sept. 11, the nation’s intelligence agencies have seen a wave of applications more earnest and enormous than recruiters once dared to imagine.

The CIA has fielded 20,000 applications since the terrorist attacks and up to 600 more resumes arrive each day, five times the pre-attack volume. Not far away at the National Security Agency, 16,000 applications have flooded e-mail and fax lines that collected just 3,000 inquiries in the same six-week stretch a year ago. In other corners of the intelligence community, the statistics are similar, fueled by resurgent patriotism and a receding private sector economy.

It’s an opportune moment for U.S. spy shops, with so many eager recruits and Congress inclined to provide every resource. But can the agencies capitalize? Analysts and former intelligence officials are skeptical, saying the CIA and other agencies have been better in recent years at attracting talent than retaining or using it.

“They’re getting a lot of good people with good potential, but will they stay?” asked Vince Cannistraro, former chief of counter-terrorism at the CIA. “Kids come in bright-eyed and bushy-tailed with impressive degrees but walk into this mush factory and quit.”

CIA officials acknowledge that the agency isn’t for everyone. The hiring process involves extensive background checks that can take as long as nine months and requires applicants to submit to polygraph tests. Far more employees work as everyday analysts, programmers and linguists in suburban Virginia than ever see overseas, cloak-and-dagger duty. And the starting pay is typical federal government scale, ranging from $35,000 to $55,000 a year.

But none of that seemed to curb the enthusiasm of college students this week who flocked to tables occupied by the CIA, the NSA and a host of other intelligence agencies at a job fair at Georgetown University. While nearby booths drew steady streams of students, the line for one-on-one time with CIA recruiters ran eight-deep.

“I didn’t think I’d have to stand in line for an hour to talk to the CIA,” said Marsha Dixon, 21, a senior majoring in government and English at Georgetown. Like many in line, she said last month’s attacks have influenced her career plans.

“After Sept. 11, everyone realizes intelligence is a really big factor in our lives,” Dixon said. The country, she added, “needs people doing this work.”

Jobs Are Tight in Traditional Sectors

Of course, many are also motivated by economic realities. With the heady dot-com era over and employment opportunities in banking and other traditional sectors ebbing, intelligence work is one of the few growth fields.

“There’s definitely a patriotic impulse” fueling interest in intelligence work, said Julia Pollock, 21, an economics major at American University who dropped her resume at the CIA table. “But more than being able to do something meaningful,” she said, “a lot of students are talking about how to get a job at all.”

The soaring interest among job seekers has been a pleasant turnabout for intelligence agencies, particularly the CIA, which was reviled on college campuses in the 1970s and almost invisible to students in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

In fact, until recently, the CIA seemed to be crumbling from within, its ranks thinned by post-Cold War budget cuts and morale sapped by a series of spy scandals and other misadventures.

But the agency has been on a rebuilding push since 1998, when it began sending recruiters to dozens of campuses, ramped up its employment advertising budget substantially and even invested in piles of mugs, pins and T-shirts to dole out to potential recruits.

The effort has been paying off, said Anya Guilsher, a spokeswoman for the CIA. The agency’s latest graduating class was the largest ever--though she declined to say exactly how large--and included students fluent in 22 languages. Among the languages were Farsi, Urdu, Vietnamese, Korean, Arabic and Chinese.

But there are also clear signs that the agency, which has roughly 16,000 employees, is still trying to fill major gaps. Last week, the CIA posted on its Web site openings for people able to translate Arabic, Dari and Pashto--the predominant languages of Afghanistan. Analysts saw this as a sign that the agency is still playing catch-up in the war on terrorism.

“With all of their thousands of new applicants, they have not yet filled some of their most elementary intelligence needs,” said Steven Aftergood, an intelligence policy analyst at the Federation of American Scientists.

Other critics fear the agency will only squander the new talent it is beginning to attract. Cannistraro, the former counter-terrorism chief, said the CIA typically loses up to 30% of its new recruits within a few years. “Especially the brighter ones,” he said. “This isn’t what they want. It’s a bureaucracy, and parts of it are indistinguishable from the Department of Agriculture.”

Other former CIA officers say the agency has adopted an increasingly conformist, politically correct culture that drives away the sort of maverick personalities willing to take on dangerous assignments.

One former officer pointed to an instance several years ago when the CIA had simultaneous openings in Athens and Copenhagen. Athens, an active post in which officers are routinely exposed to danger, attracted no interest. The Copenhagen position, considered cushier, attracted 18 applications.

“There’s not enough people who are willing to go to the hellholes of the world,” the former officer said, “and that’s a regrettable result of the change in culture in the place.”

Guilsher would not discuss that account, but she rejected the suggestion that the CIA has become risk-averse.

All-Out Fight Against Terrorism

“There are men and women taking risks here every single day, and some of the work we do is very dangerous,” she said. “And our current engagement on the fight against terrorism is nothing short of all-out.”

Guilsher said the agency is impressed overall with the caliber of the new crop of applicants. Traditionally, about 20% of applicants warrant at least a follow-up phone call, and “that’s still holding true,” she said.

Aside from targeting recruits with expertise in the Middle East, the CIA is seeking chemists and biologists who can help the agency track the proliferation of anthrax and other biochemical weapons.

With the sudden surge in interest, the agency is increasingly picky.

Recruiters’ faces lit up at the Georgetown job fair, however, when a 24-year-old James Madison University senior informed them that he was born in Afghanistan, is a U.S. citizen and speaks Farsi, Dari and Pashto.

“They said they’d call me in a day or two,” the student said afterward. He offered only his first name, Soloman, explaining that he wished to protect his identity “in case they send me over there.”