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CIA Invades American Campuses
October 4, 2002
PAGE ONE
After Sept. 11, CIA Becomes A Growing Force on Campus
Agency Finds It Needs Experts From Academia,
And Colleges Pressed for Cash Like the Revenue
By DANIEL GOLDEN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
HENRIETTA, N.Y. -- John Phillips has some daunting assignments for
seniors at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
To graduate, some of them will tackle any of a half-dozen science
projects he's dreamed up at RIT's request. For instance: how to
identify a terrorist in disguise based on bone structure, and how to
bend light rays to keep a spy in the shadows.
"Make me invisible," the 6-foot-3, 250-pound Mr. Phillips exhorted
researchers during an August visit to the 15,300-student
university in this Rochester suburb.
Mr. Phillips takes more than an academic interest in these
questions. As chief scientist for the Central Intelligence Agency,
he's looking for creative ways -- and minds -- to protect American
operatives and track down enemies.
In recent years, RIT has been unfriendly territory for the CIA. The
agency was nearly invisible here after a 1991 scandal over its
influence on research and curriculum led to the resignation of the
school's president, who had for a time concealed his own work for
the agency. But now the school and the espionage agency are
engaged in what one faculty member terms a "courtship dance" --
reflecting a rapprochement between the CIA and higher education
nationally in recent years, and particularly since the Sept. 11
attacks.
The agency is feting scholars in key fields with the aim of
recruiting their top students. Desperate to upgrade its technology
and analysis after failing to anticipate the terrorist attacks, it's
hiring more scholars as consultants and boosting funding for
academic research in such fields as language-translation software,
computer security and sensors that can detect chemicals, sounds
or movement from a long distance.
Academia, long suspicious of the CIA, has been receptive -- for
reasons of both patriotism and self-interest. At a time when
American companies are cutting back on hiring and research
support, universities are turning to the 13 federal intelligence
agencies, including the CIA, to pick up the slack. "It's just
amazing,
the number of universities coming to us and saying, 'What can we
do to help?' " says Mr. Phillips. He says one scientist now accepting
CIA funding told him, "Before 9/11, I wouldn't have been seen in the
same room with you."
Agency Links
Underscoring this newfound rapport, two state universities this
year appointed presidents with links to the CIA. Texas A&M
University named former CIA director Robert Gates. Arizona State
chose Michael Crow, vice chairman of In-Q-Tel Inc., the nonprofit
venture-capital arm of the CIA that funds companies developing
spy technology.
About 30 academic political scientists and economists are now
moonlighting with the intelligence community, plugging gaps left in
its monitoring of global backwaters such as the Pacific Islands
after agency analysts were transferred to the counterterrorism
beat. The academics get paid for contributing to memos prepared
for senior policy makers and for speaking at official seminars,
among other things. A typical reservist might make $10,000 a
year for such work.
"It would have been very difficult to have this program 10 years
ago, during the Cold War, because there was much more of a rift
between academia and government," says program coordinator
Christopher Darlington. "Times have changed."
Since the CIA's founding in 1947, the agency's relationship with
academe has waxed and waned. Ivy League faculty largely created
the CIA's analytic branch, which studies other countries but isn't
directly involved in spying on them. Then, in the Vietnam era, the
agency became anathema on campus for its covert activities in
Latin America and elsewhere. In the 1980s, it sought to re-
establish ties, sponsoring as many as 75 academic conferences
a year. After the Soviet Union collapsed, the agency closed its
research-and-development office and cut back funding for
academia.
Now, the funding taps have been turned on again. Since Sept. 11,
Mr. Phillips says the budget of his Intelligence Technology
Innovation Center has doubled, although the specific figures are
classified. That has given the 56-year-old scientist a chance to
convert his fantasies into reality.
In his office at CIA headquarters, Mr. Phillips looks through a
magnifying glass at what he calls "the world's smallest robot," a
miniature remote-controlled go-cart that's about the size of a
nickel. "You could mount a camera on this," he suggests. "I'd like to
drop this on Saddam Hussein, have it follow him around and tell you
what he's doing."
Since fiscal 2000, Mr. Phillips's office has sponsored $2 million a
year of unclassified research by postdoctoral fellows at Sandia
National Laboratories, where the robot was developed, as well as
18 universities, including Harvard, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, the
University of Michigan and Louisiana State.
Fostering Relationships
Mr. Phillips says he is particularly interested in fostering long-
term
relationships with young scientists, such as the post-doctoral
fellows. "We don't want to turn them into spies," he says. "We want
to capture them intellectually."
Of course, not everybody is eager to be captured, and there's a fair
amount of dissent bubbling up at universities around the country.
"There's kind of a very patriotic atmosphere that's un-self-critical
and unreflective -- precisely the sort of environment in which you'd
expect academics to drop whatever scruples they have," says David
Gibbs, a University of Arizona political scientist and longtime CIA
critic "The idea that now we have to rely more on the CIA ignores
the fact the CIA did so much to get us into this mess in the first
place."
One arena of conflict is the CIA's practice of restricting research
opportunities for international students. Since Sept. 11, several
federal agencies including the CIA have increasingly insisted that
only U.S. citizens can work on the research they fund, even if it is
unclassified. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the
University of California, among other schools, have balked, saying
they will reject such contracts. They contend such rules
discriminate against international students and relegate them to
second-tier status.
Another stumbling block is the CIA's obsession with secrecy. Most
prominent universities have banned secret research on campus as
incompatible with academic values of openness and peer review. MIT
recently reaffirmed its prohibition, in response to government
efforts to limit open research for the sake of national security.
But more often than not these days, the agency gets a warmer
reception than it once did. Last December, the National Science
Foundation -- the federal sponsor of science research -- introduced
Mr. Phillips' staff to 40 top computer scientists. Fifteen of them
have since accepted CIA funding totaling $8 million a year on top of
their NSF grants.
Shortly after last year's terrorist attacks, In-Q-Tel Inc., the CIA's
venture-capital arm, sponsored a brainstorming session in a New
Jersey conference center between CIA researchers and another
70 academic computer scientists.
"The exchange was like, 'You guys in the agency ought to be aware
that the leading edge of technology in this realm is about eight
years ahead of where you thought it was,' " says Mr. Crow, the
In-Q-Tel vice chairman, who was then an administrator at Columbia
University and organized the gathering. "Notwithstanding what we
may think about the agency, it's attempting to fulfill a mission."
Modeled after the collaboration in the early 1950s between the
intelligence community and academia that spurred development of
the U-2 spy plane, the conference has spawned half a dozen
projects. For instance, Kathleen McKeown, chairwoman of
computer science at Columbia University, says In-Q-Tel may fund
her research into computer-generated summaries of foreign-
language Internet text.
Since Sept. 11, the CIA has increased its hiring goals by 85%, and
it's looking to colleges to replenish its ranks. The agency boasted
the most popular booth at RIT's annual job fair last October.
Robert Rebelo, chief of the recruitment center, says he receives
2,000 to 3,000 resumes a week, about double what he was seeing
before the terrorist attacks.
Most applicants who turn up at job fairs qualify only for entry-level
jobs. To attract people with linguistic or technical expertise, the
CIA is sending intelligence officers to lecture at professional
schools such as Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy at Tufts
University. It is also encouraging key faculty to steer promising
graduate students its way.
On Sept. 12, for instance, the agency hosted a lunch at a Tucson
hotel for University of Arizona faculty members in specialties such
as engineering, East Asian studies and Near Eastern studies. About
30 faculty members listened to agency recruiters outline the jobs
and salaries available and the skills they're looking for. People
with
advanced degrees and linguistic or technical expertise start off at
$42,000 to $48,000 a year. Each professor was rewarded with a
magnifying glass/paperweight that tells the time in cities around
the world and is embossed with the CIA seal.
"We're reaching out to key departments and individuals," Mr. Rebelo
says. "I've given standing orders to all my recruiters, if there's a
university with a Middle East Studies program, you should begin to
look into it, begin to develop relations with it. We have to debunk a
lot of myths."
Faculty and students at the Rochester Institute of Technology have
a higher stake in the debate than most, because this was the scene
of one of the most controversial episodes of CIA influence on
campus. With its emphasis on photography, a treasured tool of
spycraft, RIT had long turned out students who made careers at
the CIA. There are currently 75 alumni at the agency. In 1985,
prodded by Robert J. Kohler, an RIT alumnus and then-CIA director
of development and engineering, the agency agreed surreptitiously
to underwrite an expansion of the school's imaging-science program.
In return, the university pledged that curriculum would be
"responsive" to the CIA.
The CIA funded 39 projects at the school's off-campus research
corporation, including experiments with forging documents and
planting bugs in woodwork. Students employed on the projects were
often unaware of the CIA's sponsorship, and the projects were only
sketchily disclosed. Two CIA officers taught at RIT as visiting
faculty and informally recruited students, according to a later
investigation.
Confidential Assignment
In February 1991, RIT President M. Richard Rose announced he was
taking a four-month leave of absence for a confidential assignment.
Two months later, he acknowledged he was actually developing
educational strategies for the CIA. The Rochester Democrat and
Chronicle then exposed the 1985 agreement and the school's other
previously hidden links to the agency.
In the ensuing furor, most of the CIA projects were terminated.
The university adopted policies requiring disclosure of all funding
sources and research topics, as well as faculty review of visiting
scholars. Its last CIA contract ran out two months ago.
The faculty voted no confidence in both Mr. Rose and Mr. Kohler,
who had become a trustee in 1988. Mr. Rose quit, but Mr. Kohler
stayed on the RIT board of trustees and pushed for restoring the
CIA alliance. "I've been trying to get these guys back together for
years," says Mr. Kohler, who heads the board's subcommittee on
government relations.
Mr. Kohler's breakthrough was persuading CIA Director George J.
Tenet, an old friend, to speak to the RIT board at a lunch in
Washington in July 2001. After Sept. 11, RIT President Albert J.
Simone and Mr. Kohler followed up. At their invitation, Mr. Tenet
delivered the commencement address in May and was awarded an
honorary degree over the opposition of liberal arts faculty.
The next step was Mr. Phillips's visit this summer. He outlined his
research goals to faculty and administrators, and encouraged the
university's National Technical Institute for the Deaf to apply its
technology to helping the agency comprehend garbled radio
transmissions. He was impressed to learn that an engineering
professor, Raghuveer Rao, is already making strides on another
problem of interest to the agency -- using imaging equipment to
see through walls.
Physicist Ryne Raffaelle, who develops energy sources for small
devices, is eager to power up Mr. Phillips's minirobot, despite
worries that such technology could be misused someday -- say, to
spy on Americans. "When our teachers made us read 'Brave New
World' " -- the Aldous Huxley novel that details a world of complete
scientific control -- "they knew what they were doing," Prof.
Raffaelle says. "But by and large, these CIA guys are people whose
primary goal is to keep the rest of us safe."
Most students and faculty endorse Mr. Simone's overtures. Still,
critics say Mr. Simone is too quick to compromise -- and forget
history. "It is inevitable that the educational process is going to
be corrupted," says Monroe H. Freedman, a Hofstra University law
professor who was called in to investigate the 1991 controversy
for RIT. Wade Robison, an RIT professor of applied ethics, says, "I
don't want a relationship such that, when people think RIT, they
instantly think CIA."
For RIT, troubled by the sinking economy, a reconciliation is
financially tempting. RIT has a $451 million endowment but is
worried about the struggles of longtime patrons Xerox Corp. and
Eastman Kodak Co. The CIA offers a chance to diversify. President
Simone envisions a full-fledged "partnership," including CIA-endowed
professorships and scholarships, courses and training for CIA
officers, faculty sabbaticals at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.,
and collaborations on classified and unclassified research. He
anticipates that "two or three dozen faculty" would work on CIA
contracts, and the agency would have input into senior projects and
graduate theses.
Mr. Simone, an economist, contends that academia and the
intelligence community need to join forces now as they did during
World War II. During this national crisis, he says, concerns about
academic freedom and civil liberties should be secondary. "We may
have to suspend some freedoms for a little while," he says. "I'm
less afraid of losing freedoms due to loss of democracy than of
losing freedoms because we're all dead due to terrorist attacks."
He even says he doesn't have a problem with secret research on
campus, if it's the most convenient site. Mr. Simone argues that
even unclassified research is often closely guarded, and calls the
very concept of an open university a "nice fiction."
Write to Daniel Golden at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1033680816635838193.djm,00.html
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