The revelations of George Tenet were the talk of the Sunday morning political shows this week. Despite Tenet’s defense of his own work and the work of the rest of the Central Intelligence Agency, there is still the widespread impression that our primary intelligence gathering agency is broken. The causes of the CIA’s problems are widely debated—some say it is too centralized, others that it is overstaffed by professional bureaucrats, others that it is still built around a defunct Cold War model, to name a few favorites. But Steve Sailer has recently contributed a new idea: Wall Street broke the CIA.
“CIA agents get paid like normal government bureaucrats, so the Agency gets normal government bureaucrat-quality workers,” Sailer writes. “Meanwhile, the pay at its natural competitors for the best and the brightest, such as Wall Street firms, has rocketed upwards.”
But we’re not sure it’s merely a problem of the CIA being unable to recruit the brightest college graduates. We personally know a couple of graduates from top schools—two of whom had at least a working knowledge of Arabic when they graduated—who never even got a call back interview at the agency. We can’t help but suspect that the agency isn’t even trying to recruit the “best and the brightest” these days.
Posted by opd, May 07, 2007 4:26PM
Many of the "best" colleges even make it difficult for the CIA to recruit.
I studied Chinese at one of the best damn schools in the world and they wouldn't let the CIA on their campus (granted this was several years ago, before the Solomon Ammendment, so things may be different).
Then I went to Asia and came back after several years. I looked into applying but they say a background check for someone who has been overseas for several years will take a very long time ... what am I supposed to do, sit on my ass and wait for them to give me a call? Ah, no!