Personality test on Web looks humorously for next great secret agent man.
The Central Intelligence Agency has lightened up. A little, online anyway.
The agency is tasked with preserving American security, and its Web site proudly proclaims: “In pursuit of our country’s interests, we put Nation before Agency, Agency before unit, and all before self. What we do matters.” The CIA has put up a decidedly humorous, sort of James Bondish Web site replete with a amusing personality test to attract job seekers.
The package is designed to show the unstuffy side of the agency and dispel a few myths, all while encouraging job applications.
First of all, “you don’t have to know karate or look good in a tuxedo to work at the CIA,” the personality quiz says. And everyone who works at the CIA does not drive a sports car with machine guns in the tailpipes, though the site does ask what form transportation you prefer: Jet pack, submarine, horse and buggy, hot-air balloon or amphibious sports car. The test also asks what superpower you’d like to possess.
The site goes onto say that while you may expect some sort of glamorous lifestyle as a secret operative, in reality the agency depends on administrative managers and staff for its operational success at home and abroad.
That’s only part of the truth, of course. The CIA has been under pressure to increase operatives and recruit more scientists and others to help it combat terrorism.
An Associated Press story says one in seven of the CIA’s current employees joined the agency in the past year, and nearly 40% of its employees began working at the agency after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks — statistics at once helpful and troubling.
“This is the youngest analytic workforce in the history of the Central Intelligence Agency,” CIA Director Michael Hayden said at his confirmation hearings earlier this year. “In more disappointing language, this is the least-experienced analytic workforce in the history of CIA.”
Inexperience aside, however, proponents see the agency as stocking the farm system and that the agency is targeting a younger crowd. Last month the CIA and others noted members of the U.S. government’s intelligence community were using a Wikipedia-like community networking Web site to share information across agency boundaries and open dialogue about disagreements over assessments such as those that led to the war in Iraq, project leaders said.
Intellipedia, based on the open source software that powers Wikipedia, allows free-flowing discussion about intelligence on topics such as terrorism and Al Qaeda, creators of Intellipedia said. Intellipedia, launched in April, was officially unveiled during a conference in Denver in August, but members of the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and the CIA used a fall briefing to highlight the growth and uses of the new tool.
Since DNI and the CIA launched Intellipedia, the site has had more than 13 million page views, 3,300 registered users and 28,000 pages created, said Don Burke, with the CIA’s directorate of science and technology. The site, generally restricted to government employees with security clearances, has grown faster than Wikipedia did in its early days, Burke said.
