Not recruiting from civilian and scientific talent pools risks a ‘failure of imagination’, hindering India’s ability to pre-empt previously unanticipated dangers.
The CIA’s recent public drive to recruit informants in North Korea, Iran, and China on the internet and dark web has been met with mainly positive reception in Western strategic circles. Announced a year after similar public efforts by the US intelligence community to attract disillusioned Russian citizens, the initiative reflects a new phase in the world of intelligence.
In today’s increasingly competitive and globally connected age, espionage services are embracing newer modes of transparency, from expanding the scope for strategic intelligence disclosure as a means of coercive statecraft to the online recruitment of agents in adversary States.
Amid these changes, however, India’s intelligence apparatus remains characterised by its decades-long opacity in relation to recruitment and stasis vis-à-vis the changing global intelligence business. Such a posture is unsustainable and incompatible with India’s position as a rising power with significant bearing on world affairs.
Today, geopolitics—the setting within which global intelligence activity operates—has been ontologically reconfigured. Volatility is heightened by the growing fluidity of interstate allyship as a principle, even as the miniaturisation and ubiquity of advanced technologies reshape how global power is envisioned. This geopolitical fluidity allows for greater additionality in international politics, characterised by the growing salience of small, middle, and regional powers, even as contests over subsequent redistributions of global power make for a more competitive security landscape internationally.
Volatility is heightened by the growing fluidity of interstate allyship as a principle, even as the miniaturisation and ubiquity of advanced technologies reshape how global power is envisioned.
In such circumstances, it is incumbent upon intelligence services to expand their linkages with less traditional sectors of security, technology, and policy, characterised above all by a focus on a widened recruitment pool. This has been reflected in the steps taken by some of the world’s most powerful intelligence services in recent years.
Both British (MI6 and MI5) and US intelligence services (CIA, FBI, and other agencies) advertise internships for students and the wider civilian community on public websites. This allows them to attract a wide pool of talent, from experts in cyber technologies and policy to area and issue specialists beyond the bureaucracy.
Israel’s Unit 8200, the country’s primary signals and cyber intelligence agency, recruits directly from high schools and universities through its Magshimim initiative, hiring young mathematical and scientific talent to work on its projects. Many former Unit 8200 officers have later established tech startups while continuing to maintain individualised, informal relations with the strategic community.
Likewise, China recruits top talent in key scientific sectors of national security importance, both domestically and overseas, under the Qiming programme. In 2018, the programme seemingly succeeded the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) ‘Thousand Talents Plan’ to attract global technological talent and better serve China’s geostrategic and intelligence objectives.
In comparison, India’s intelligence posture remains anachronistic. Like other departments within the government bureaucracy, Indian intelligence recruits primarily within civil service silos. This results in a lack of specialisation and groupthink, which may hamper broader processes such as intelligence analysis.
This commentary originally appeared in The Print.
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Professor Harsh V. Pant is Vice President – Studies and Foreign Policy at Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi. He is a Professor of International Relations ...
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Archishman Ray Goswami is a Non-Resident Junior Fellow with the Observer Research Foundation. His work focusses on the intersections between intelligence, multipolarity, and wider international politics, ...
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