CIA Tries to Get Collegians to Perform Intelligence Jobs : Research: Students would help out during international crises by helping agency analyze classified information.

WASHINGTON — The CIA has quietly begun a new effort to have U.S. university personnel, including college undergraduates, help out during international crises by performing some of the classified intelligence work now carried out by the agency’s Washington headquarters staff.

The idea, prompted by the CIA’s current budgetary squeeze, is to arrange for students to be trained to help analyze intelligence about particular countries for which the agency is short of staff. These students would then serve as a kind of reserve force that could be called to Washington in emergencies.

“There are areas we just can’t cover in the world,” David Cohen, the No. 2 official in the CIA’s Intelligence Directorate, said last week. Until recently, “we had maybe a third of a person, maybe from the knees down, working on Somalia.” The Intelligence Directorate does not engage in field-operation spying but assembles and interprets information for U.S. policy-makers.

Cohen said the CIA hopes that universities can provide what he called some sort of “surge capacity” to help out intelligence analysts at the headquarters near Washington when the agency suddenly faces a crisis in some previously quiet, obscure nation.

Using students as a reserve pool of specialists on some countries or areas--an idea agency officials insist is merely an experiment--would mark a new element in the already complex relationship between the CIA and American university campuses.

In the past, those ties have aroused controversy, such as two years ago, when the Rochester Institute of Technology was found to be doing classified research on campus for the CIA, and in 1967, when it was disclosed that the CIA was giving funds to the National Student Assn. CIA officials claimed that the student association funding was aimed at offsetting Communist financing of other international student groups.

Cohen described the CIA’s new effort in a speech at the Smithsonian Institution last week delivered as part of a public lecture series on “The CIA and the Cold War.” Although more than 200 people were in the audience, CIA officials later said Cohen had not believed that his remarks would be open to press coverage.

In his lecture, Cohen said he had talked recently to officials at Florida A&M; University, a mostly African-American school in Tallahassee, about the possibility of a contract for work with the CIA.

Through a spokesman Tuesday, A&M; President Frederick S. Humphries noted that the university had accepted a $1.7-million Defense Department grant in November to teach students African and Asian languages. Intelligence officials “are helping us in that way and we are helping them,” Humphries said.

But, he emphasized, “we are definitely not involved in any clandestine activities” for the CIA.

A CIA spokesman, asked about Cohen’s remarks, maintained this week that Florida A&M; is the only school in the nation with which agency officials have discussed ideas for crisis work.

“We have no such program with any institution,” said Gary Foster, CIA director of public affairs. “This isn’t worked out . . . . This is not a program that’s in place. It’s still in the works.”

Foster said the CIA for years has operated what it calls a cooperative program with a number of American universities in which students arrange to work full time at CIA headquarters for half a year and attend school for the other half. Each year, a few hundred students take part in this program.

“The ‘surge capacity’ part of this is the only part that’s different from the normal program,” Foster said. Like others in the cooperative program, the students would be paid for their work.

All students who take part in the cooperative program get security clearances so they can deal with classified information.

However, students in the program do general work throughout the CIA’s several divisions and are not specifically trained to do intelligence analysis on specific countries.

Foster said the CIA has not allocated any new money for the “surge capacity” effort. “It’s old money, used in a new way,” Foster said. The benefit to the CIA, he explained, is that “we’d have a body of cleared kids who could come back” during crises.

Underlying the CIA’s attempt to make new use of college students are two problems that have confronted the agency since the end of the Cold War.

One is a financial pinch caused by budget cuts. Last year, Congress cut more than $1 billion from the estimated $30-billion budget for the U.S. intelligence community, and further reductions over the next few years are probable.

The other is the effort to provide more intelligence analysis about problems such as ethnic conflict and weapons proliferation in countries which, in the past, got little attention from the CIA unless they were the scene of conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. CIA officials point to Somalia and the former Yugoslavia as examples.

CIA officials also asserted that the students would not be doing any intelligence analysis while on campus and would do so only after going to Washington.

Those who have studied the relationship between American campuses and the CIA say that, from the standpoint of academic freedom and independence, the most troublesome problems have occurred when scholars performed classified work at a university and when the CIA has secretly funded research work on campus.

The controversy at Rochester Institute of Technology arose when the school’s president acknowledged that he had secretly worked for the CIA and that the school had a secret agreement giving the CIA influence over the university curriculum.

John H. Shattuck, Harvard University’s vice president for government affairs, said at the Rochester school two years ago that, if a university becomes a research arm of the CIA, it “would be yielding a considerable amount of academic freedom and openness, which are the heart of what a university should stand for.”

Like other leading universities, Harvard has guidelines that prohibit all research on campus that is classified or that cannot be openly published and criticized for any other reason. The school also requires that sources for the financing or scholarship of all research must be publicly disclosed.

CIA officials acknowledged that one of the purposes of the program is to help the agency’s recruitment efforts on campuses. The agency pays part of the college tuition and fees for students who take part in the program. About 70% of those who participate later become regular staff employees of the CIA.

A school such as Florida A&M; would be of particular interest to CIA recruiters because its students could help the agency in its effort to increase the number of minorities on the agency’s staff.

CIA officials acknowledged that there are some inherent problems in the idea of turning to college campuses to provide a pool of personnel to be called on during an international crisis.

Not the least of them, said Foster, is “how to work out a (world) crisis that is not during mid-terms and final exams.”