Weaponizing Anthropology. David H. Price
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and even the mainstream Boards of the Social Science Research Council and American Council of Learned Societies expressed deep concerns over scholars’ participation in the NSEP. And though the NSEP continues funding students despite these protests, there was some solace in knowing so many diverse academic organizations condemned this program.
But while many academics and professional associations openly opposed the NSEP’s entrance onto American campuses, there has been little public reaction to an even more troubling post-9/11 funding program which upgrades the existing American intelligence-university-interface. With little notice Congress approved section 318 of the 2004 Intelligence Authorization Act which appropriated four million dollars to fund a pilot program known as the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program (PRISP). Named after Senator Pat Roberts (R. Kansas, then Chair, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence), PRISP was designed to train intelligence operatives and analysts in American university classrooms for careers in the CIA and other agencies. PRISP now operates on an undisclosed number of American college and university campuses, and after the pilot phase of the program proved to be a useful means of recruiting and training members of intelligence agencies, the program continues to expand to campuses across the country.
PRISP participants must be American citizens who are enrolled fulltime in graduate degree programs with a minimum GPA of 3.4, they need to “complete at least one summer internship at CIA or other agencies,” and they must pass the same background investigations as other CIA employees. PRISP students receive financial stipends ranging up to $25,000 per year and they are required to participate in closed meetings with other PRISP scholars and individuals from their administering intelligence agency.
In 2003, the Lawrence Journal World (11/29/03) describing plans for developing this new program claimed that, “those in the program would be part of the ROTC program specializing in learning how to analyze a variety of conditions and activities based on a thorough understanding and deep knowledge of particular areas of the world” (Simons 2003). Beyond the similar requirements that participants of both programs commit years of service to their sponsoring military or intelligence branches there are few similarities between ROTC and PRISP. ROTC programs mostly operate in the open, as student-ROTC members register for ROTC courses and are proudly and visibly identified as members of the ROTC program, while PRISP students are instructed to keep their PRISP-affiliations hidden from others on campus.
The CIA’s website describes PRISP and lists sought academic specialties; these include experts on: China, the Middle East, Asia, Korea, Russia, the Caucasus, Africa and South America, and seeking language training or proficiency in: Chinese, Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Pashto, Dari, Turkish, Korean, or a Central Asian or Caucasian language such as Georgian, Turkmen, Tajik, or Uzbek (https://www.cia.gov/careers/opportunities/analytical/pat-roberts-intelligence-scholars-program-prisp.html, 12/15/10). PRISP also funds Islamic studies scholars and scientists with expertise in bioterrorism, counterterrorism, chemistry, physics, computer science and engineering. When PRISP was first launched in 2005, it was advertised on intelligence recruiting web sights (such as www.intelligencecareers.com or the National Ground Intelligence Center; these links have long since been removed) and was pitched on select university campuses in small, controlled recruiting sessions. In the years since its first funding, PRISP developed a low profile and an individualistic approach to finding candidates for PRISP funding.
When I made initial inquiries about PRISP to Senator Roberts’ staff in 2005 concerning the size and scope of PRISP I was given little useful information, but in response to my inquires Senator Roberts’ staff referred me to Mr. Tommy Glakas at the CIA. Mr. Glakas was reluctant to discuss many specific details of PRISP, but he did confirm that PRISP then funded about 100 students studying at an undisclosed number of American universities. When I asked Mr. Glakas in 2005 if PRISP was already up and running on college campuses, he first answered that it was, then said it wasn’t, then clarified that PRISP wasn’t the sort of program that was tied to university campuses-it was decentralized and tied to students, not campuses. When pressed further on what this meant Mr. Glakas gave no further information. He said that he had no way of knowing exactly how many universities currently have students participating in PRISP, claiming he could not know this because PRISP is administered not just by the CIA, but also through a variety of individual intelligence agencies like the NSA, MID, or Naval Intelligence. He stressed that PRISP was a decentralized scholarship program which funds students through various intelligence agencies. Mr. Glakas told me that he didn’t know who might know how many campuses had PRISP scholars and he would not identify which campuses are hosting these covert PRISP scholars. PRISP’s organizational structure is reminiscent of the sort of limited contact “cells” used by intelligence agencies, where an individual within an intelligence cell has only limited knowledge of other individuals in this same chain of connections — most commonly only knowing their individual “handler,” but not knowing the identities of others in the greater chain of connections.
PRISP was largely the brainchild of University of Kansas anthropologist Felix Moos-a longtime advocate of anthropological contacts with military and intelligence agencies. During the Vietnam War Moos worked in Laos and Thailand on World Bank-financed projects and over the years he has worked in various military advisory positions. He worked on the Pentagon’s ARPA Project Themis, and has been an instructor at the Naval War College and at the U.S. Staff and Command College at Fort Leavenworth. For years Moos taught courses on “Violence and Terrorism” at the University of Kansas. In the months after the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon Moos elicited the support of his friend, former CIA DCI, Stansfield Turner to curry support in the senate and CIA to fund his vision of a merger between anthropology, academia, intelligence analysis and espionage training.
Professor Moos initially proposed that all PRISP students be required to master two foreign languages, and to enroll in a battery of university anthropology and history courses to learn the culture history of their selected regions (Kansas University Radio 2003). Moos’s vision for PRISP was more comprehensive than the program that eventually developed. Moos proposed having an active CIA campus presence where PRISP students would begin training as freshmen and, “by the time they would be commissioned, they would be ready to go to the branch intelligence units of their choice” (Kansas University Radio 2003).
It is tempting to describe Felix Moos as an anachronistic anthropologist out of sync with his discipline’s mainstream, but while many anthropologists express concerns about disciplinary ties to military and intelligence organizations, contemporary anthropology has no core with which to either sync or collide and there are others in the field who openly (and quietly) support such developments. Moos is a bright man, but his writings echo the musty tone and sentiments found in the limited bedside readings of Tom-Clancy-literate-colonials, as he prefers to quote from the wisdom of Sun Tzu and Samuel Huntington over anthropologists like Franz Boas or Laura Nader.
In 2002 I joined Moos (and anthropologists Robert Rubenstein, Anna Simons, Murray Wax and Hugh Gusterson) on one of the first post-9/11 American Anthropological Association panels to examine American anthropologists’ contributions to military and intelligence agencies. Moos acted incredulous that all anthropologists would not join his crusade, and he rhetorically asked, “Have anthropologists learned so little since 9/11/2001, as to not recognize the truth-and practicability, in Sun Tzu’s reminder that: ‘unless someone is subtle and perspicacious, he cannot perceive the substance in intelligence reports. It is subtle, subtle.” From the dais I could see not so subtle anthropologists in the audience employed by RAND and the Pentagon nodding their heads as if his words had hit a secret chord. Moos was clearly onto something, though at the time it was difficult to imagine just how far reaching these new connections between anthropologists and military and intelligence agencies would become.
Moos became the early post-9/11 leader publicly pushing for more open connections between anthropology and the CIA, but he was rotated out of the public spotlight pretty early on in this discourse. I’ve heard several different reasons suggested, ranging from the off-putting media effect of his faintly lingering German accent and his penchant for speaking in what has been described as “1940s sound bites.” After I published my initial PRISP exposé in CounterPunch, other media picked up the story (e.g., Willing 2006) and David Glenn wrote a story on PRISP in The Chronicle of Higher Education and later had a live online interview (3/23/05) with Professor