Scholar-in-Residence program
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The Scholar-in-Residence program is the Central Intelligence Agency's current channel for identifying and recruiting potential intelligence officers at American universities. Per John Kiriakou, it operates today at every major American university, with officers placed for several-year residencies as openly-identified "CIA Scholar in Residence" professors.

The 1993 break

Before the 1993 Equal Employment Opportunity Act, recruitment was direct and undisclosed: "They could just say, 'Hey, don't tell anybody, CIA, you want in? You want in?' And then you know you have to pass the test of course, but then you're in. Can't do that since '93, but they found a way around it recently."

How the program works

Per Kiriakou's example: "Let's say you're from Pittsburgh and you're going to retire in three years. They say, 'Listen, instead of retiring, why don't you move to Pittsburgh, we'll get you a professorship at the University of Pittsburgh. You teach a class in, you know, the history of KGB operations in Armenia. And if you see anybody on the QT, let us know and we'll reach out to them.' So that's the way they do it now. They have professors all over America at every major university and they're like CIA officer scholar in residence. So everybody knows you're CIA. They're still doing what they have always done, but now it's out in the open instead of a secret."

Spotting in plain sight (Judging Freedom)

John Kiriakou says that once the CIA could no longer covertly infiltrate American universities, it began doing so overtly through the scholar-in-residence program: a retired officer is placed at a university like Indiana to teach a "meaningless class like espionage in Soviet literature," but is really there as a spotter for potential CIA recruits.

Kiriakou has repeated the same core example in near-identical terms across several other appearances, a Pittsburgh-bound officer sent back to teach "the history of KGB operations in Armenia" at the University of Pittsburgh with instructions to flag promising students "on the QT", underscoring that the arrangement keeps the recruitment technically legal while doing the same spotting work as the pre-1993 system.

University recruitment beyond the professorships

Kiriakou says the CIA's university pipeline runs on two tracks at once: embedding retiring officers as intelligence fellows, he cites a friend at Indiana University, plus fellows at Cornell, Pitt, Harvard, and Princeton, while also sending CIA recruiters directly to job fairs at 200 to 300 colleges nationwide every year, screening for hard foreign languages and technical skill.

Why the covert method ended

Kiriakou's own recruitment, by a graduate adviser who was a CIA officer under academic cover and who wrote please see me after class in the margin of a paper, is, he says, no longer legal. The change came with the passage in 1993 of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act, which ended the old-boy network as a hiring channel.

The agency's answer was to do the same thing in the open. An officer with twenty-five or thirty years in who is planning to retire is sent back to his alma mater for two or three years to teach what Kiriakou calls some meaningless class, a friend of his went to Indiana University and taught espionage in Soviet literature, and students approach him after class to say they would love to get into the CIA, whereupon he makes a recommendation. What the scouts are looking for is unchanged: hard foreign languages or an aptitude for them, visible patriotism, and a fit with the agency's culture.

The soft landing

The programme has a second use Kiriakou describes as routine: parking a senior officer at the end of a career, or at the end of a career's usefulness. Speculating in 2019 about what would become of the Ukraine call whistleblower, whom he judged to be a GS-15 or an SIS-1 with his retirement time already served, he set out the standard mechanism.

"What they do for so many people as a reward for a good long career is you make him a scholar in residence at whatever college or university he graduated from, and you let him do two, three, four years there. Then he takes the full pension and he goes away quietly. They do that all the time, all the time."

See also

- Gerald Post, Kiriakou's recruiting professor; a 1980s example of the predecessor practice
- Asset acquisition cycle
- John Kiriakou
