Spy Schools

by Daniel Golden

  While the CIA can pull strings at top universities when it needs to, some informants ask for less selective colleges. A former CIA officer recalls that one source’s request was easily granted: his son wanted to attend for-profit Strayer University, which accepts anyone with a high school diploma.

  “We sent an awful lot of Arabs” to state universities in the Southwest, this ex-officer recalls. “They all wanted to study petroleum engineering. Those schools had a huge Arab population and they fit right in.”

  * * *

  THE COMPOSITION OF the professoriate is undergoing a sea change. Tenured faculty who rose through the academic ranks are giving way to adjunct teachers and “professors of practice” with government or business backgrounds. As a result, more faculty members have national security experience. Some act as talent scouts, recommending students who would make good analysts or agents.

  Dr. Jerrold Post was a pioneer among this growing breed. With a foot in both camps, he funneled a stream of prospects into U.S. intelligence.

  As a Yale medical student, Post enjoyed reading Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels in the library in his spare time. Then, as a resident in psychiatry at Harvard, he repeatedly made a Freudian slip on his typewriter, transposing the first two letters of the word psychiatrist to spell spychiatrist.

  Despite this portent, Post seemed destined for a traditional academic career, until his path took an unexpected turn. After accepting an offer from Harvard’s Department of Psychiatry, Post recalls, he received a call from someone he barely knew, who had been two years ahead of him at Yale medical school. His name was Herb.

  “I understand you don’t have a job for next year,” Herb said.

  “Actually, I do,” Post said. But he agreed to have lunch with Herb at the Hickory Hearth in Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood.

  The luncheon conversation mystified Post. It was like a job interview in which the interviewer never says what the job is. Herb clearly knew a lot about Post, and elicited more.

  Finally, Post asked, “Herb, are we here to talk about a job?”

  With his teeth clamped together, presumably to prevent anyone from reading his lips, Herb hissed, “I’d rather not talk about it here.”

  Post grasped a wooden shutter. “Look, there are no electronic bugs here,” he said.

  Herb smiled. “You like that sort of thing, do you? Why don’t you follow me in your car.”

  Herb crossed the Key Bridge to northern Virginia and parked at an overlook. Post followed him. So did a police car. Herb blushed. “This happened to me once before,” he said. Post wondered if Herb, unaware that he was happily heterosexual, was about to make some sort of overture.

  At the next overlook, they were alone. Herb reached into his pocket and removed a CIA secrecy agreement. “Before we talk, I want you to sign this,” he said.

  Post signed. Soon he agreed to start a pilot program to develop psychological assessments of world leaders for the president and secretaries of state and defense.

  That was in 1965. For the next twenty-one years, Post ran the CIA’s Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior, overseeing anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, social and organizational psychologists, and other psychiatrists. His achievements included preparing profiles of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin before the landmark Camp David peace agreements in 1978. Post cautioned U.S. president Jimmy Carter to avoid arguing about biblical history with Begin, since both men fancied themselves experts on the subject.

  Post enjoyed the intellectual adventure of crafting what he regarded as a new kind of intelligence, and presidents and cabinet members loved hearing about the personality quirks of their opposite numbers. Still, Post’s work was controversial, and CIA directors weren’t always receptive to it. “What he was doing wasn’t in the mainstream,” says Robert Jervis, a Columbia University professor of international politics and longtime CIA consultant. “A lot of people thought it was hocus-pocus.”

  In 1986, Post decamped to George Washington University, which was seeking closer ties with the federal government. As a professor of psychiatry, political psychology, and international affairs, he became a force unto himself. He founded a political psychology program, where he taught popular courses on leadership and the psychology of terrorism. Long frustrated by CIA secrecy, he relished the limelight bestowed by his frequent commentary on CNN, MSNBC, and other networks. After Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, he prepared a profile of Saddam Hussein at a newspaper’s request, and testified before Congress about the Iraqi leader.

  On the side, he consulted for intelligence agencies from his home office, where research assistants had to compete for space on the couch with his wire-haired dachshunds, Coco and Emily. His “hybrid world,” as former student and research assistant Laurita Denny calls it, came in handy when protégés aspired to federal service. “I don’t know another person who networks and maintains contacts as well as Jerry,” says Denny, who now holds a national security post in the U.S. government. “He opened doors for students.”

  She added in a September 2015 email: “Jerry has been a part of restoring that historical closeness between the academic community and the intelligence community. Jerry’s accessibility to students and his ability to network and retain connections with his prior colleagues definitely bridged an important gap.”

  Post told me that he only recommended students who knew about his CIA background and asked him for guidance. “I did not reach out to people as much as have people reach out to me,” he said. “I was just trying to be helpful to students who wanted a government career.”

  A former student’s memoir gives a different impression. John Kiriakou recalled that Post asked him to stay after class one day in 1988. Kiriakou, who was about to earn his master’s degree, had just taken a job with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. Post, who more than two decades earlier had withdrawn from another position to join the CIA, was about to persuade Kiriakou to do the same.

  “I’d heard he had a big reputation as an expert in his field,” Kiriakou wrote. “What I didn’t know was that he was also a former employee of the CIA.”

  Post asked Kiriakou whether he had considered working for the CIA. Kiriakou said he hadn’t. “It turned out that Dr. Post, because of his love for the agency, tried to identify potential CIA candidates among the undergraduate and especially graduate student body at GW. He told me he’d been impressed by my analytical and writing skills in his class, and it seemed clear, he added, that I had a great interest in foreign affairs and international power politics. He didn’t know whether the CIA and I would be a fit, but … the work at the agency might appeal to me. At a minimum, it couldn’t hurt to have some preliminary conversations with CIA people.”

  Kiriakou agreed, and Post called the CIA then and there. Within half an hour, Kiriakou “was ringing the buzzer to an unmarked office in an unmarked building in suburban Virginia” for an interview. After his hiring, he expressed his gratitude to Post by sending him a bottle of scotch.

  Two years later, when Post gave a talk at the CIA, Kiriakou and several other young officers thronged the podium to thank him. “We all owed our budding careers to this wonderful man,” Kiriakou wrote.

  Kiriakou would spend most of his CIA career in the clandestine service, including heading the counterterrorism team in Pakistan that captured Abu Zubaydah, who was then believed—wrongly, as it turned out—to be one of Osama bin Laden’s top lieutenants. Disillusioned by the CIA’s use of waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” on prisoners such as Zubaydah, Kiriakou resigned in 2004. He later served almost two years in federal prison for confirming the name of a covert CIA officer to a journalist.

  Post continued placing students with intelligence agencies until he retired in 2015. When two young women received offers from the FBI in 2013, he congratulated them in front of the class.

  “I just want you to remember that I wrote very st
rong letters for you,” he told them. “At this point, I’ve had twenty-eight students who have gotten jobs with the intelligence community. I think I’m just about at critical mass. When I give the signal, it’s time for the coup.” As the honorees paled visibly, Post hastened to add, “Only kidding.”

  A generational shift also underlies the increasing ties between the intelligence community and academia. Baby boomer professors who grew up protesting the CIA-aided misadventures of the 1960s, from the Bay of Pigs to the Vietnam War, began to retire, replaced by those shaped by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the first Gulf War, and 9/11. Younger faculty are more likely to regard the collecting and sifting of intelligence as a vital tool for a nation under threat and a patriotic duty compatible with—even desirable for—academic research.

  Barbara Walter considers it a public service to educate the CIA. The University of California, San Diego, political scientist gives unpaid presentations on her specialty, civil wars, at think tanks fronting for the agency, sometimes for audiences whose name tags carry only their first names. When CIA recruiters have visited UCSD, she has helped them organize daylong simulations of foreign policy crises to measure graduate students’ analytic abilities—and even role-played a CIA official. “I played one of the leads,” she says proudly.

  She’s aware, though, that some older faculty colleagues frown on these activities. “One interesting thing for me is that my more senior colleagues would absolutely not be comfortable consulting with the CIA or intelligence agencies,” she says. “Anybody who remembers or had exposure to the Vietnam War has this visceral reaction.”

  * * *

  GRAHAM SPANIER WAS the exception to Walter’s dictum. The Vietnam War didn’t prejudice him against intelligence agencies.

  As an undergraduate and graduate student at Iowa State University, Spanier told me, he had been an “establishment radical.” Spanier, who didn’t serve in the war because of student and medical deferments, led peaceful, law-abiding demonstrations against it but disapproved of more confrontational tactics, such as taking over administration buildings. Once, when a march threatened to turn unruly, he borrowed a police loudspeaker to urge calm.

  “I had the greatest respect for law enforcement,” he said. “I was always in the forefront of change, but I believed in working through the system. I wanted to be at the table, making change, rather than outside the building, yelling and having no effect.”

  As he advanced in his career, gaining a seat at the table of administrators who hammered out academic policy, he paid little heed to the Church Committee or to CIA and FBI activities. Then, in 1995, he was appointed president of Penn State. Because Penn State conducts classified research at its Applied Research Laboratory, Spanier needed a security clearance.

  While he was being vetted, Spanier read newspaper accounts linking University of South Florida professor Sami Al-Arian and adjunct instructor Ramadan Shallah to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, an Iran-backed terrorist group. (Another foreign-born South Florida professor, Dajin Peng, then a newcomer to the faculty, would later be of interest to the FBI.) Spanier was struck by USF president Betty Castor’s lament that she had no idea of Al-Arian’s alleged fund-raising for terrorists and that the FBI had not given her “one iota” of information.

  The soft-spoken Shallah had been named head of Islamic Jihad and vowed war against Israel. The director of the international studies center at USF was quoted as saying, “We couldn’t be more surprised.”

  Spanier made his own vow: never to be surprised. As president, he thought, “I want to be the first to know, not the last.”

  He convened a meeting in his conference room of every government agency that might conduct an investigation at Penn State, from the FBI and CIA to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (the university does Navy research) and state and local police departments. “What I said to them is, ‘If there is a significant national security or law enforcement issue on my campus, you can trust me. I understand the importance and sensitivity of such matters. I would like you to feel comfortable coming to me to talk about it, rather than sneaking around behind my back.’”

  They agreed to stay in touch. From then on, an FBI or CIA agent—or usually both—would drop by once a month to brief him or ask his advice, typically about counterintelligence or cybersecurity issues involving foreign students or visitors.

  In 2002, David W. Szady became the FBI’s assistant director for counterintelligence. A quarter century before, he had gone undercover at the University of Pittsburgh, posing as a chemist to befriend Soviet students. Now, like Spanier, he wanted to smooth relations between intelligence agencies and academia. Soon FBI and CIA officials asked Spanier to expand the Penn State experiment nationwide.

  The result was the National Security Higher Education Advisory Board (NSHEAB), established in 2005 with Spanier as its chairman. It consisted, then as now, of twenty to twenty-five university presidents and higher education leaders, though some initially were nervous about their membership becoming public, fearing a campus backlash that never materialized. Spanier, conferring with the FBI and CIA, chose the members, primarily from prestigious research universities.

  At the FBI, “nobody thought we could get it up and running,” because academia was perceived as hostile turf, Szady says.

  NSHEAB members receive security clearances and come to FBI and CIA offices periodically for classified briefings. The agenda for an October 2013 meeting at FBI headquarters, for example, included the investigation of Edward Snowden for leaking classified National Security Agency documents; the Boston Marathon bombing; Russian threats to laboratories and research; and Department of Defense–funded students abroad “being aggressively targeted” by Iranian intelligence. Afterward the FBI hosted a dinner for NSHEAB members at a gourmet Italian restaurant in downtown Washington.

  “There’s a real tension between what the FBI and CIA want to do and our valid and necessary international openness,” says one NSHEAB member, Rice University president David Leebron. “But we don’t want to wake up one morning and find out that there are people on campus stealing our trade secrets or putting our country in danger. We might be uneasy bedfellows, but we’ve got to find an accommodation.”

  * * *

  THE FBI’S LEADERS impressed Spanier. “They are very familiar with the FBI’s history and reputation going back to Hoover,” he says. “What I observed was almost the opposite. They emphasized to the people out in the field and throughout headquarters to be very sensitive” to issues such as profiling students of a particular religion or nationality.

  The FBI and Spanier reached an understanding that it would notify him or the board about investigations at U.S. universities. The bureau lived up to its word when it noticed Internet postings by a Penn State student urging Islamic jihadists to “write their legacy in blood” by attacking police stations, post offices, Jewish schools and day care centers, and other targets. “The FBI came to tell me that they had their eye on someone,” Spanier says. “They were picking up chatter on the Internet. There were things that were pretty threatening.” When agents tried to question the student in a parking lot in January 2011, he reached for a loaded handgun in his jacket, and was arrested. He was sentenced to 102 months in prison for soliciting terrorism and assaulting the FBI agents.

  In return for being kept in the loop, Spanier opened doors for the FBI throughout academia. He gave FBI-sponsored seminars for administrators at MIT, Michigan State, Stanford, and other universities, as well as for national associations of higher education trustees and attorneys. Many of them arrived at his talks “with a healthy degree of skepticism,” Spanier told me. Displaying his American Civil Liberties Union membership card to prove that he shared their devotion to academic freedom, Spanier would assure them that the FBI had changed since J. Edgar Hoover’s henchmen snooped in student files. After reviewing “challenges” for FBI-university relations, such as their different cultures and views of authority, he would describe how the advisory
board was providing a forum for communication and understanding. Then he would delve into the bureau’s concerns about foreign students and foreign visitors, which were “initially a harder sell to an academic audience” worried about the FBI nosing around their classrooms.

  He also acted as a go-between for the CIA with university leaders who weren’t on the national security board. “What a CIA person can’t do is call the president’s office, and when the secretary answers, say, ‘I’m from the CIA and I want an appointment.’ It doesn’t work, and it’s not credible. Before anybody would do that, I would call the president. The presidents all knew me. They would take my call.… I would say, ‘Someone from the CIA would like to come, there’s no issue on your campus now’—occasionally there was an issue—most often it was a get-acquainted meeting. Sometimes I would just give the first name. ‘Someone will call your assistant, it’s Bob.’ … That worked one hundred percent of the time.”

  Spanier facilitated CIA introductions to the presidents of both Carnegie Mellon and Ohio State universities. A Pittsburgh-based CIA officer began visiting Jared Cohon, CMU’s president from 1997 to 2013, once or twice a year. “I know there was direct activity with selected faculty,” Cohon says. “They were interested in what the faculty might have observed when they went to foreign conferences. My impression, what I heard from the CIA, was that it was more defensive than offensive. Trying to make sure those faculty weren’t recruited by a foreign power.

  “I was uneasy about it, and I am uneasy,” he adds. “I’m a kid of the sixties, and I remember all the protests on campus. The idea of the CIA being on campus would have turned people crazy. Things have changed dramatically in that regard.”

  At Spanier’s instigation, the FBI special agent in charge of southern and central Ohio brought a guest to see Ohio State’s then president, E. Gordon Gee, in 2010. The stranger handed Gee a business card with only a first name and a phone number. “Tell me what you do,” Gee said.