With a series of US military operations underway over the past year, intelligence agencies have come under the spotlight again. Media coverage has tended to offer flattering narratives of their exploits, recounting the “critical role” played by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Nicolás Maduro’s kidnapping that makes it seem like a spy thriller. This fits into a wider tendency during the Trump era to repackage US power as a form of entertainment, drawing on action movies and video games to turn imperialist ventures into thrilling adventures.

At the same time, former intelligence practitioners and professional associations have lamented the politicization of intelligence under the Trump administration, warning of its disastrous consequences for US national security. Taken together, this combination of stories presents intelligence agencies in a sympathetic light, as highly capable institutions whose professionalism is being threatened by the executive power.

Reporting on Mossad’s pager operation against Hezbollah or the reputation of Britain’s MI6 follows a similar pattern. Such accounts steer clear of a more serious reckoning with the forms of violence that make up a large part of intelligence work: the expansive surveillance of suspect populations and other abuses that fit less neatly into the heroic storytelling.

In order to present intelligence agencies as if they were guardians of democracy, one must first make their role appear justified, necessary, and even respectable. A deeper and less visible dynamic also helps secure their legitimacy in the public imagination: the long-standing ties between academia and the US national security state. How we are taught to understand intelligence in the first place plays an important part in that process.

Breaking Down Barriers

For intelligence agencies, institutions of higher education and research do not merely offer pools of expertise but also sites where knowledge about intelligence can be produced and diffused. The CIA in particular has been quite effective in breaking down barriers between the national security establishment and academia in ways that serve both purposes. Since its creation in 1947, it has steadily extended its ties beyond the Ivy League to a wider range of educational institutions through a range of channels both overt and covert. The CIA, in particular, has been quite effective in breaking down barriers between the national security establishment and academia.

The CIA draws students into its graduate studies program by offering internships that can lead to employment after graduation as well as scholarships for students attending an accredited university. It also relies on a more discreet and entrenched referral system where scholars identify and recommend promising students to the agency. Whatever the arrangements may be, the objective remains the same: to boost CIA recruitment through programs and training tailored around its institutional needs.

This practice has been formalized in federally funded and staffed training centers involving the CIA and other US agencies. Established after 9/11, the Intelligence Community Centers for Academic Excellence have brought more than eighty institutions into the fold. The National Security Agency (NSA) has pursued a similar strategy through its National Centers of Academic Excellence in Cybersecurity, which accredit universities that provide expertise relevant to its priorities.

These centers promote “collaborative” educational projects in cybersecurity while also developing research partnerships with the agency. The result is not simply closer cooperation between universities and intelligence agencies but also a gradual alignment of higher education with the needs of the national security state. As degrees become increasingly professionalized and curricula become oriented toward careers in government, intelligence agencies play no small role in defining the educational options available in the academic market itself.

The economic and political context make intelligence incursion into academia easier. While conditions vary across universities, decades of cuts to public higher education, combined with neoliberal policies that have driven up tuition and operating costs, have left many institutions more receptive to intelligence money. At the same time, wealthy institutions can enroll students who are willing to pay substantial sums for degrees that promise an entry into the intelligence world. Johns Hopkins, for instance, charges no less than $62,880 in tuition fees for its graduate program in intelligence analysis.

Intelligence agencies can also harness patriotic sentiment. From World War II and the Cold War to the present, US military, foreign policy, and national security objectives have provided powerful incentives for students and faculty to contribute to what is presented as a necessary struggle against US enemies. Signing up for and teaching in intelligence-sponsored programs can thus be cast as serving one’s nation.

Knowledge Production

The second avenue of CIA influence in academia lies in the production of knowledge. The CIA has long cultivated collaborations with scholars who are ready to put their expertise at the agency’s disposal. It has brought in “scholars in residence,” who spend a year or two working inside the agency before returning to academia, while relying more broadly on scholars prepared to support its work in various capacities, from (unpaid) lecturers to consultants and regular contributors.

More often than not, however, the CIA has done what it does best: operate covertly. It has a long track record of funding university research through “pass-through” organizations and foundations it secretly controlled. One notable example was the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, a CIA front established in 1954.

This body awarded grants to institutions and scholars whose research served the agency’s infamous MKUltra program, which elaborated methods of coercion and torture. The research later informed the 1963 “Kubark” manual, the CIA’s main interrogation manual of the 1960s, whose influence appears to have extended well beyond that period.The CIA has long cultivated collaborations with scholars who are ready to put their expertise at the agency’s disposal.

Pooling expertise in this manner is only the tip of the iceberg. What is more significant is the ability to produce and control knowledge from within. The CIA can rely on an army of former employees who retool as academics, taking up an expanding share of intelligence teaching and research.

In the course of this career transition, they become what are known as “pracademics”: scholars who straddle the worlds of professional practice and academia at once. Hiring experts from defense, security, and diplomacy is an established practice across academia and the labor market more broadly, where professionals repurpose their skills to spy on employees and advance the interests of multinational corporations.

“Pracademics” do not simply leave their old worlds behind when they enter the university. They have been remarkably successful at acting as a kind of double agent: laundering the know-how of insiders under the veneer of neutral and objective claims. Their influence goes unrecognized because they look no different from other faculty: they hold PhDs (with some exceptions), dress the same way, and work in the same spaces.

This art of concealment extends to the enrolment of undercover officers in university programs. Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, for example, has hosted such officers for many years as part of a long-established practice, allowing CIA officers to blend in as ordinary students while classmates are deliberately kept unaware.

Professors of Practice

Enabling them is an entire ecosystem of publications, degrees, academic positions, and like-minded scholars. This ecosystem lends intelligence work the authority of scientific knowledge. Known as intelligence studies (IS), it has accomplished what its founding father Sherman Kent — a Yale professor who crossed from academia into the CIA — had envisioned in the 1950s: a body of literature that would give intelligence an intellectual home while putting academic knowledge to work in the service of intelligence and national security.

The assumptions underpinning the field are visible in the wealth of books and articles that now serve as teaching resources. Much of the literature reproduces the ideas and stories originating from the intelligence agencies themselves: intelligence is understood primarily as a means of protecting the state by providing decision-makers with the knowledge needed to defeat global threats. This school of thought presents abuses that range from torture to detention and extrajudicial killings as unfortunate deviations rather than practices embedded in the historical and institutional structures of intelligence activities.Several former CIA officers with backgrounds in clandestine operations and overseas postings now hold ‘professor of practice’ positions.

The treatment of whistleblowers is another example. Figures such as Edward Snowden, who exposed the scale of illegal surveillance conducted by the NSA and its allies, are cast as insider threats rather than praiseworthy individuals. This stands in marked contrast to scholarship elsewhere that examines whistleblowing as a means of exposing state impunity and advancing democratic accountability.

Several former CIA officers with backgrounds in clandestine operations and overseas postings now hold “professor of practice” positions at institutions including Boston University, the University of Texas, and Johns Hopkins. Others have crossed the Atlantic to join the UK’s bastion of intelligence education: the Department of War Studies at King’s College London (KCL).

The KCL department has opened its doors to CIA officers in a range of capacities, from visiting professor and visiting fellow to seminar speakers. Under the auspice of the King’s Center for the Study of Intelligence, they mingle with their British counterparts, such as David Omand, former head of GCQH, the UK’s NSA equivalent.

The London campus has also welcomed high-profile visits by former CIA directors Leon Panetta and his successor, General David Petraeus, even as human rights abuses mounted in the course of the US-led war on terror. The CIA–KCL synergy runs so deep that war studies faculty have even used the agency’s journal to advertise KCL education, effectively steering CIA recruits toward the university.

Entanglement

Together with their UK counterparts, intelligence agencies have built a transatlantic network that exerts considerable control over how intelligence is taught and studied. This translates into power to shape generations of future professionals who will go on to work in the media, politics, and the security apparatus. But this comes at a cost for academic independence and freedom.

By actively fostering ties with scholars, intelligence agencies can co-opt research and steer it in directions relevant to their agendas. This unfolds in a broader context where universities are increasingly assuming the functions of security institutions, tasked with policing foreign threats and interference involving students, faculty, and research partnerships.

Federal funding is increasing becoming a coercive instrument used to impose this role. The Department of War has recently threatened to withhold funding from institutions that fail to sever partnerships with Chinese universities if it deems them inappropriate. Meanwhile, the presence of intelligence agencies largely passes under the radar, hardly seen as a form of state influence precisely because it is sheltered by the ordinary routines of academic life.Intelligence agencies have built a transatlantic network that exerts considerable control over how intelligence is taught and studied.

A number of scholars have exposed the deep entanglement between US intelligence and academia, as well as the colleagues who willingly play along with intelligence agencies. In particular, they have raised the alert about the kinds of ideas formulated and propagated in classrooms and beyond. Yet despite controversies, most notably in anthropology and its role in developing counterinsurgency strategies in Iraq and Afghanistan, this relationship largely continues unchallenged.

The other effect is a narrowing of the plurality of views available within the academic space. As the logic of national security becomes dominant, research agendas and teaching that cannot be justified in its terms are pushed to the margins of educational provision.

Yet such education is essential. It exposes students to knowledge about intelligence that is produced independently of intelligence agencies, helping to prepare informed citizens capable of critically assessing official claims. Much of this work is located in the social sciences and humanities — precisely the fields now under political attack from the Trump administration and far-right populists.

Developing education that examines rather than endorses intelligence is a form of democratic accountability. This matters because intelligence agencies are anything but innocuous. They have political agendas of their own. Far from simply informing policymakers, they provide the decisions through which governments go to war, enact security legislation, and arbitrate the life chances of individuals.

In choosing who is spied upon, detained, or killed, intelligence agencies are not the neutral, objective, and apolitical actors that they so often claim to be. Their worldviews are visible everywhere: in threat assessments, leaks to the press and, ultimately, in the knowledge they impart.

They are, in a sense, decision-makers, and an education that questions their power is therefore essential, not only for the kind of academia we want but for the kind of democracy we hope to have.

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