It looks like a trailer for an espionage film. Everything is there : the plot at the headquarters of the CIA, the suspense, the mission clandestine, and of course a slew of pretty spies who manage to get a USB key with a foreign minister… Without forgetting the patriotism of rigour. “Most people will never see your work,” says an instructor of the agency to a class of new recruits. “Your greatest reward is knowing that your efforts will help ensure the safety of all Americans… The nation is counting on you to discover the truth. “

It is in fact a pub recruitment launched by the very discreet CIA and which is intended to be broadcast on the Internet. A great first. The film, very polished, is entitled : check out the CIA : your country is counting on you.

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The agency has never had difficulties to recruit new spies. It receives each year a multitude of applications. But it is facing various types of problem. First, while the enemies are focusing more and more on cyber-attacks, she is left to hunt on the same lands that the high-tech sector to hire engineers and specialists in computer security.

Then, the CIA, which traditionally recruits in the facs prestigious as Yale, suffers from a lack of diversity among its employees. According to a report in 2015, ” the top management of the Agency had become over the last twenty years less diverse “. In the clear : too much white. It is for this without a doubt that the tv spot showcases all kinds of players from minority groups, Asians, Indians, Blacks, including one that looks surprisingly like the president Obama, including the voice, which is probably not a coincidence.

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The constant use of social networks by the younger generation also complicates the recruitment. How to protect the cover of a spy who has shared on Facebook the intimate details since kindergarten ? How to send smuggled into another country when he posted pictures of him under all the seams on his account Instagram ? “From the point of view of an agent who tries to create and keep her coverage – perhaps the most basic element of espionage – it can pose a real challenge “, stated a few years ago David Cohen, deputy director of the agency. The latter has had to reject several candidates for the CV to be promising because they were touted on social networks have been recruited as spies !

A reputation to burnish

And then the agency’s reputation has taken a few hits recently. Donald Trump continues to attack the intelligence services. It came to power, he accused the FBI of having put illegally on listening during the campaign. On several occasions, it has ignored the recommendations of its own services. Last year, during a hearing in Congress, Gina Haspel, the patron saint of the CIA in particular, has been given a vision of the situation in Iran and North Korea to be the opposite of Donald Trump. Furious, he stated that the intelligence analysts were “naive” and should be ” back to school “.

above all, the CIA has been shaken by a scandal. In 2017, WikiLeaks has published dozens of secret documents detailing his techniques and his arsenal of piracy, among which its software is malicious, how to hack into cell phones, to turn television sets in micros… According to an internal report that has just been revealed, it is the biggest leak in the history of the agency and it has caused damage as ” catastrophic “. The most astonishing fact is that the CIA was aware of nothing then, however, that the documents had been stolen a year ago !

The report rejects the fault on the service culture of piracy, which ” is given as a priority to design cyberarmes at the expense of the security of their own systems “. The security procedures were ” woefully lax “.

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All this does not prevent the agency to do its promotion. It has already launched pubs recruitment on the radio and on his YouTube channel. In one, she uses Jennifer Garner, who has played a CIA agent in the series Alias, to praise its merits.

The CIA has also created a Twitter account that began with a message full of humour : “We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet. “In the spring of 2019, she opened an account in Instagram, in order to attract a younger generation of agents. It thus hopes to reach a larger audience.

“let Us go to meet Americans where they are, on the platforms of streaming, to give them an overview of exciting careers in the CIA,” says Sheronda Dorsey, one of the leaders. On his website, one can read : “One finds that the CIA almost every job imaginable, and some that go beyond your imagination. “

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