ABSTRACT
There is plenty of talent all over the United States and in every level of society. Yet a narrow provincialism seems to be the hallmark of younger CIA officials. The CIA is screening out exactly the sort of person that it used to actively recruit: venturesome young Americans with as much foreign experience as possible. Because espionage is such a small part of the business of intelligence, as compared to the purely intellectual work of analysis, none of the above would matter very much if the CIA could still attract the smartest graduates of the best universities. The CIA could do much better if it pursued diversity in its recruiting, not the by-the-numbers diversity of so many women or Afro-Americans but rather a diversity of experience. The non-drinking, non-smoking, non-carousing, mostly-monolingual CIA officials do not have the vices of their more adventurous contemporaries, nor those of their flamboyant Ivy League predecessors.
