Case Officers for Rent?

CIA Allows Agents to Moonlight
The CIA is allowing operatives to moonlight by selling their espionage expertise to financial firms, according to a new book.

By Toby Harnden in Washington

Telegraph
Published: 6:20PM GMT 02 Feb 2010

Officials said the policy was needed to stop top CIA officers from leaving the spy agency, where the millions spent on their training can help command very high salaries. In recent years, there has been an exodus if CIA officers at a time when the US is fighting two wars and leading international efforts against al-Qaeda.

In one instance, agents worked at a New York hedge-fund consulting firm that wanted to draw on their skills in "deception detection" - the art of picking up clues in body language and conversation to ascertain when executives might be lying.

Details of the policy appear in Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy: The Secret World of Corporate Espionage by Eamon Javers.

Officials said that the out-of-hours work did not compromise national security and was only allowed once CIA officers had submitted full details of the work and been granted permission.

It is not known how long the policy has been in place or how many CIA officers work for outside organisations. The policy is an indication of the attractiveness of CIA techniques to financial institutions.

In an article for Politico.com, Javers highlighted a Boston-based firm called Business Intelligence Advisors (BIA) that was founded by retired CIA officers and specialises in deception detection.

Its clients included one of the world's leading investment banks and a hedge fund. BIA has previously employed active-duty CIA officers in the past but the company said that has not that happened for some time.

One person who attended a 2006 presentation to hedge fund managers by BIA in Stamford, Connecticut said that one of the briefers had 20 years in the CIA and specialised in the polygraph lie detector and interviewing while another was a former interrogator.

The two women were so intense that they reminded the person of Clarice Starling, the FBI agent played by Jodie Foster in the film The Silence of the Lambs. "You could tell they knew exactly what they were doing," he said.

George Little, a CIA spokesman, said: "If any officer requests permission for outside employment, those requests are reviewed not just for legality, but for propriety."

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