WASHINGTON — U.S. intelligence agencies had already obtained a trove of Chinese data containing potential clues on the origins of the coronavirus pandemic when President Joe Biden ordered a review earlier this year. The challenge was in deciphering it.
Spy agencies needed data scientists to process the intelligence, biologists to put it into context, and Mandarin Chinese speakers to help translate it. All of them needed security clearances for access to classified information.
It was a high-profile example of a growing challenge within the intelligence community.
“When you’re able to clandestinely acquire a very technical document, there’s only a handful of people you can then go to and ask, ‘what does this say?’” said Emily Harding, deputy director and senior fellow with the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former leadership analyst at the CIA.
“One of the really sad realities about the intelligence community,” Harding said, “is that the very skills and backgrounds that we desperately need are the same ones that are difficult to clear.”
CIA Director Bill Burns is urging the agency to recruit Chinese speakers, scientists and engineers in even greater numbers.
The CIA is hiring over 100 language and science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) experts who can work with its newly formed China and technology mission centers. “The revolution in technology has transformed the nature of global challenges and threats to the United States,” Luis Rossello, CIA’s deputy press secretary, told McClatchy.
The new recruitment focus comes at the encouragement of the president and leadership in Congress.
“As the intelligence community refocuses its efforts around great power competition and a rising and increasingly aggressive China, ensuring that we have both technical experts and Mandarin speakers is critical to the IC’s mission,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., told McClatchy.
His committee’s September 2020 special report on China “identified both of these priorities as key strategic requirements,” Schiff said, “and we have been working collaboratively with the IC to address them.”
Competition for scientists
In its new recruitment efforts, the CIA faces old and familiar headwinds.
Competition with the private sector for top talent in the sciences has always been a challenge and has only grown more intense in recent years. To compete, the CIA is offering competitive salaries and hiring bonuses, and working to significantly reduce the time it takes applicants to join the agency, Rossello said.
The CIA argues that joining the intelligence agency is an opportunity to serve the country and work with cutting-edge classified technology.
“We call on our employees to use everything they know: Decipher the patterns. Tell the story. Transform that information into intelligible and actionable reports,” Rossello said. “Their work helps to provide clarity to some of the most complex security puzzles to help the president, the Cabinet, Congress and others make informed decisions on national security.”
The CIA works with American universities to recruit STEM talent through faculty interactions and classroom engagements.
“You might be surprised at the broad range of STEM disciplines that the CIA needs to get a comprehensive picture of the world: applied physics, biology, chemistry, computer science, electrochemistry, materials science, and nanotechnology, to name a few,” Rossello said.
Last year, the agency created CIA Labs that serves as an in-house research and development laboratory focusing on intelligence challenges in technology such as artificial intelligence, biotechnology and quantum computing.
Burns also appointed a chief technology officer in October and launched a CIA Technology Fellows program to bring experts to the CIA for one- or two-year stints.
Biden, during a July visit to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, emphasized the need for spy agencies to boost the recruitment of scientists, saying, “more people have been killed in the United States of America because of COVID than in every single major war we fought combined. Every single one.”
“What’s next? What is intended? There’s a lot of research going on,” he said in remarks broadcast to the intelligence community workforce. “You’re going to have to increase your ranks with people with significant scientific capacity relative to pathogens.
“As we compete for the future of the 21st century with China and other nations, we have to stay on top of the cutting-edge developments of science and technology,” Biden added.
Clearance for Mandarin speakers
The CIA clearance process for fluent Chinese speakers, many of whom have spent significant time in China or have family there, is particularly cumbersome after the agency experienced several cases in recent years of current and former officers selling government secrets to Beijing.
“The core of the problem is that people who have experience in China are not trusted,” said Douglas Paal, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former senior CIA analyst.
“We’ve had a couple of examples of people who China has tried to recruit and then put into the CIA,” Paal said, “and that has put the people responsible for clearances on notice that they could be bringing in somebody who could be a sleeper or a long-term threat to the integrity of the security in the system.”
In October, Burns launched the China Mission Center and a Transnational and Technology Mission Center to adjust the CIA’s organizational structure “to best position it to address current and future national security challenges,” the agency said at the time.
Agency leadership is trying to reduce the time it takes to hire Chinese speakers, but the same security clearance challenges remain.
The agency is also recruiting speakers in Russian, Korean, Farsi, Arabic, Pashto and Turkish. But the focus on Chinese has sharpened.
“People who come from these countries or people whose families come from these countries, who speak the language like a native or speak the language with a technical proficiency, probably have a ton of family that still live there or have gone to school there or spent significant time there,” Harding from CSIS said. “And that also makes people very difficult to clear, because the security people want to know that a foreign power isn’t going to have some kind of sway over you, and thus persuade you to share classified information.”
One approach the agency has taken is to train existing CIA officers in new languages, or to improve their existing language skills, all in-house. The CIA’s Intelligence Language Institute has been expanded and the agency is offering monetary bonuses for officers who meet language proficiency requirements.
“Throughout our history, CIA has stepped up to meet whatever challenges come our way,” Burns told the CIA workforce in October as he announced the new mission centers. “And now facing our toughest geopolitical test in a new era of great power rivalry, CIA will be at the forefront of this effort.”
He added: “There’s no doubt we have the talent for the job."
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