| From the issue dated March 25, 2005 |
Many social scientists say a new government program will turn fieldwork abroad into spying. Can secrecy coexist with academic openness?
In 1995, as the American Anthropological Association debated a revision to its code of ethics, Felix Moos made an argument that was unpopular among his peers. Anthropologists, he said, should be permitted -- indeed, should feel a duty -- to conduct classified research that might help the U.S. government understand global conflicts. His opponents said that secrecy had no place in academe, and that his proposal would put scholars in bed with clandestine agencies that have, at best, a spotty record of protecting human rights.
Six years later, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Mr. Moos, who emigrated from Germany in 1948 and has taught at the University of Kansas since 1961, began to press his case with new urgency. He worked the phone, sent faxes, knocked on doors. To anyone who would listen, he presented a two-page proposal for a new program, modeled loosely on the Reserve Officer Training Corps, that would prepare college students to become analysts for the Central Intelligence Agency.
After all, he reasoned, people across the political spectrum now agreed that the U.S. government desperately lacked knowledge of the history, languages, and cultures of Central Asia and the Middle East. Why not create a pipeline that would send trained, motivated social scientists directly into intelligence agencies?
Last spring Mr. Moos's efforts bore fruit. Since April 2004, dozens of analysts-in-training have entered American universities to burnish their skills in certain languages, cultures, and technical fields that U.S. intelligence agencies deem to be critically important.
This pilot project -- the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program -- is seen by some observers as a long-overdue effort to remedy the federal government's collective ignorance about foreign lands. Other scholars, however, view the semisecret program as a profound threat to universities' integrity and to the ethical norms of social science. If Mr. Moos faced a tough crowd in a roomful of his fellow anthropologists in 1995, he now has a far larger audience -- and there is an actual program for critics to attack.
"It is naïve to suggest that the CIA has not historically collected information about what goes on in the classroom," says David H. Price, an associate professor of anthropology at St. Martin's College, in Lacey, Wash., who is the Roberts program's most prominent detractor. "And it is naïve to say that they would be off-mission to do this."
Mr. Moos finds such concerns misplaced. He says that "a one-man Church committee" -- referring to the 1970s Congressional panel that held hearings on the CIA's behavior -- "is not what American academe really needs at this moment. We need to get our act together to produce individuals who know areas and know languages."
Speed and Stealth
One of the first people Mr. Moos contacted after the September 11 attacks was Sen. Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican who is chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Mr. Roberts, whose voice carries a dry Great Plains wit not unlike Bob Dole's, had been worried for several years about the quality of American intelligence analysis.
"We have on the Intelligence Committee what I call 'Oh my God' hearings," Mr. Roberts says. "As in: 'Oh, my God, how did this happen?'" He sat through such hearings after terrorists bombed a U.S. military-housing complex in Saudi Arabia in 1996, after the United States mistakenly bombed a pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan in 1998, and after the CIA failed to predict the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests that same year.
After September 11, the senator says, those intelligence weaknesses seemed not just embarrassing, but catastrophic.
When Mr. Moos flew to Washington to pitch his concept to Senator Roberts in person, he emphasized speed. The program, he said, could produce new analysts within a year or two. The promise of quick results appealed to Mr. Roberts. The professor also said the government should not rely solely on federally financed area-studies centers (known as "Title VI centers," after a section of the Higher Education Act) to produce an adequate crop of motivated analysts. "I'm a former director of a Title VI center," he says, "and I think it would take a decade to reform that system or to create a new title from scratch."
What's more, he argued, the National Security Education Program -- a 14-year-old scholarship program that he otherwise admires -- "just wasn't producing the numbers we need." Students who receive scholarships through the NSEP are obliged to seek employment in government agencies related to foreign policy, but only a small fraction of the recipients become intelligence analysts.
Mr. Roberts and his committee decided to bring Mr. Moos's proposal to life. They crafted a three-year, $4-million pilot program -- set to last through September 30, 2006 -- to train a maximum of 150 analysts. Participants receive tuition and stipends (up to $25,000 annually) for university programs that have been approved by any one of 15 U.S. intelligence agencies. In exchange for the scholarship, which typically is good for two years, each participant promises to work as an analyst for the approving agency for at least 18 months. About 110 people have entered the program so far. An unspecified number of them (officials declined to estimate how many) have not been sent anew into universities, but instead have been reimbursed for previous graduate study -- in essence paid a bonus to sign on.
The Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program differs in noteworthy ways from Mr. Moos's original conception. He had imagined an ROTC-style program that would draw in undergraduates, but the pilot project has, at least so far, been used to finance academic study for slightly older people -- typically in their mid-20s -- who have already been hired by an intelligence agency.
And although Mr. Moos had imagined an essentially transparent program, in which the participants' names would be known on their campuses, the Roberts program allows its participants to choose whether to tell their professors and fellow students about their intelligence roles. No public list of the participants exists, and officials of the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee declined a reporter's request to be put in contact with a participant, even when anonymity was promised.
A smaller agency, however, did make a participant available for an interview. In January the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency used the Roberts program as an inducement to hire Tito (he declined to reveal his last name), who recently earned a master's degree in physics from North Carolina A&T State University. The agency has paid off his student loans, in exchange for which Tito has committed to work as an image scientist for at least three years. He spends his days operating computer systems that process satellite images.
"I think this is an excellent opportunity for people interested in serving their country," Tito says. "I do feel that we're making a difference daily in protecting our country, and I think especially the war fighter -- helping the soldier in the field."
Disclosure and Denial
It is the program's semisecrecy that most alarms its critics. After all, they point out, it is intended to train deskbound analysts, not people who will serve in the agencies' covert, or "operations," arms. Why, then, the need for opacity?
For skeptics, the presence of anonymous intelligence personnel on campus raises memories of the cold-war era, when the FBI kept elaborate files on professors' political affiliations, and the research agendas of area-studies centers were shaped by the CIA's needs. If the government wanted a forecast of Ukraine's potato harvest for 1956, Harvard University's Russian Research Center would produce one. In 1951 the CIA secretly financed (and guided) the anthropology association's first effort to create a comprehensive database of its members. The roster included information about what languages the scholars spoke, which countries they had visited, and their political contacts overseas.
"A key defining feature of an open, vibrant democracy, it seems to me, is that there are sectors of society, including higher education, that should be independent of the state -- particularly from agencies of the state that are involved in things like propaganda dissemination and spying," says David N. Gibbs, an associate professor of history and political science at the University of Arizona, who wrote The Political Economy of Third World Intervention: Mines, Money, and U.S. Policy in the Congo Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 1991).
More notoriously, American social scientists occasionally joined secret research projects that were intertwined both with the CIA and with authoritarian regimes overseas. In the late 1960s, several anthropologists worked on classified projects designed to stabilize the government of Thailand. Among other things, they surveyed villagers about their attitudes toward communism. It is believed (although not known for certain) that the Thai military used the survey data when deciding where to conduct counterinsurgency operations.
After the Thailand projects were exposed, in 1970, the American Anthropological Association tightened its ethical rules for researchers, declaring, among other things, that "the aims of all their professional activities should be clearly communicated by anthropologists to those among whom they work." That sentence has generally been taken to mean that if field researchers have relationships with governments, the military, or for-profit companies, they should disclose those relationships to their research subjects.
If the analysts-in-training of the Pat Roberts program go overseas to conduct research for a degree in, say, South Asian studies, will they disclose their future intelligence roles to their research subjects? If they have kept their government-financed scholarships a secret from their professors and classmates, why tell villagers in Pakistan?
"It's fine with me if someone wants to work for the CIA and go live in another country and conduct fieldwork," says Mr. Price, of St. Martin's College, who wrote Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists (Duke University Press, 2004). "But they need to tell people -- not just at the airport, when they're being let into the country, but the people they talk to -- who they're working for." The long-established principle of informed consent, Mr. Price says, demands that potential research subjects have access to full information about a researcher's purposes and affiliations.
"When you're working with human beings, you need to practice openness and full disclosure," says Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, a professor of anthropology at Rhode Island College and chair of the association's committee on ethics. She concedes that the Roberts participants are -- at least officially -- not yet intelligence analysts, and are conducting fieldwork only in order to deepen their language skills and cultural knowledge. "But that is walking a very, very fine line," she says.
The Roberts program's acting manager, Thomas P. Glakas, estimates that only 10 percent of current participants will go overseas as part of their studies. In those cases, he says, "I guess you can disclose that you're working for the United States government. But do you have to disclose that you're going to school to become an analyst for a certain intelligence agency? Just disclosing that you work for the U.S. government," he argues, ought to satisfy the ethical concerns of the anthropology association.
"You do need to train people, and there are trade-offs," Mr. Glakas says. "Nothing is perfect in this life."
A related worry is that efforts like the Roberts program might give authoritarian regimes -- say, Uzbekistan's -- an excuse to forbid all American social scientists to conduct research in those countries, on the ground that they are spies. "Those who are carrying out intelligence activities make it difficult for the genuine researcher," says Ms. Fluehr-Lobban, "because people don't know how to distinguish one from the other. So it harms the overall scientific effort."
To that concern, a staff member at the Senate Intelligence Committee replies, "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it." Senator Roberts points out that there is already an enormous amount of paranoia about the CIA throughout the world, and that a $4-million training program is not likely to make much difference. "In some countries," he says, "if a traffic light goes out, the government will blame it on the CIA."
Mr. Price finds such responses too glib. "Their careless disregard of ethical issues and the safety of researchers needs to alarm everyone in academia," he says. "They don't care about us. They don't care about our research, they don't care about the people we study, they don't care about our well-being, they don't care about our reputation. We need to care about it, and we need to distance ourselves from them."
'Erosion of Confidence'
Mr. Price and his allies worry that the Roberts program will compromise ethics not only overseas but also in the classroom itself. "The door is open for the CIA to return to its historical practice of operating within universities," he says. He fears that Roberts participants will be encouraged, explicitly or implicitly, to tell their intelligence colleagues about professors who seem hostile to U.S. policies, or who might be willing to share their skills and expertise with the government.
Mr. Roberts finds that absurd. The Church committee and other 1970s-era reform efforts, he says, have erected a huge array of safeguards against inappropriate domestic surveillance. He calls Mr. Price's argument "an Internet conspiracy theory."
"Sometimes people do learn from their mistakes," says Mr. Glakas. "There is stuff that was done back in the 50s and 60s that we do not want to repeat. ... J. Edgar Hoover is no longer director of the FBI."
Elizabeth Rindskopf Parker, a former general counsel of the CIA who is now dean of the University of the Pacific's McGeorge School of Law, agrees with Mr. Roberts and Mr. Glakas about the unlikelihood that the Roberts program will foster abuses in classrooms. She adds, however, that "to some extent, it doesn't matter whether I'm right or I'm wrong. The mere fact that people are asking this question is a sign of trouble. Some of the things that have been happening -- whether it's Abu Ghraib or the CIA's straining the rules about turning prisoners over to other nations -- all of this erodes confidence. And it's this erosion of confidence that causes such concern."
Ms. Parker and other observers sympathetic to the program suggest that the air could be cleared with more openness -- if the participants were instructed to be candid with their professors and fellow students about their scholarships.
Loch Johnson, a professor of political science at the University of Georgia, who served as Sen. Frank Church's assistant on the Senate's 1970s intelligence-reform committee, supports the Roberts program's goal. "September 11 shook us the way Sputnik did," he says. "There was a deep realization that our analysts' work is not what it should be."
But he also believes strongly in greater transparency. "This program is violating the most important norm of the campus," he says, "which is openness."
Not everyone agrees. "It seems to me that it's absolutely essential not to tell," says Michael Scheuer, a former CIA analyst and covert operative who (as "Anonymous") wrote the much-discussed Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror (Brassey's, 2004). "There seems to be a tremendous amount of hostility on campus toward the intelligence community. You'd probably want to keep the participants' identities secret just to make sure that they'd get a fair shake from the faculty."
On the opposite end of the spectrum, Lesley Gill, an associate professor of anthropology at American University and author of The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas (Duke University Press, 2004), suggests that she would oppose the Roberts program even if it were more open. "Part of the core notion of anthropology," she says, "is that you won't use your work to undermine or harm your subjects -- and it seems to me that going to work for an intelligence agency undermines that commitment." She has refused to write a recommendation for a student who wanted to apply for an NSEP fellowship, she adds, because she regards that program, too, as unethical.
Gilbert W. Merkx, Duke University's vice provost for international affairs, once sat on the informal academic advisory board that oversees the NSEP fellowships. He says the Roberts program should strongly consider creating a similar body.
"I'm not concerned about the principle of federally funding the training of people who want to become intelligence officers," he says. "I have no objection in principle to that. I am concerned about how it's done. ... I think what one wants is maximum transparency. Over the long run, that's what puts suspicions to rest."
If people are worried about intelligence agents being inserted into the classroom, Mr. Merkx says, a transparent system and an academic advisory board might help assuage them. "How you conduct the program," he says, "can either feed that fear or allay that fear."
Mr. Glakas says such an advisory board may indeed be created.
Measuring Success
Alongside those debates over morality lies a more pragmatic question: Will the Roberts program function as advertised? Will it make a dent in the CIA's goal, announced last November, of increasing its roster of analysts by 50 percent?
The program is less than a year old, so it is too soon for any real assessment. Mr. Glakas, the acting manager, will soon submit to Congress a progress report -- much of which, he says, will probably be classified. Oversight of the program is currently in flux, as it is being placed under the newly created office of the director of national intelligence.
Some observers see room for optimism. Mr. Scheuer, who has written caustically about what he views as the CIA's profound weaknesses, says the Roberts program may be a small sign that the agency has finally woken up and recognized its skills deficit.
He adds, however, that the effort will succeed only if the CIA ditches its habit of favoring "generalists" in its hiring and promotion decisions. Program participants, he says, should be encouraged to concentrate on a single language, region, or technical field throughout their careers.
For his part, Mr. Moos says, he is proud of the new program, although he, too, says he wishes that the list of participants would be made public. In the intelligence-reform bill that Congress passed in December, lawmakers authorized (but did not finance) a project very similar to the Roberts program.
It seems almost certain that the Roberts program, or something like it, will become permanent. "I think it was long past time," says Mr. Moos, "for us to try something new."
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