Counterterrorism agencies recruiting

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ASSOCIATED PRESS

Counterterrorism agencies are shopping for talent at job fairs, dangling generous scholarships and luring staff from each other in a race to overcome a shortage of analysts that may only get worse in the new intelligence overhaul.

The problem existed even before Congress and the White House approved an intelligence restructuring this month that creates positions for people whose skills already are in high demand.

There is no consensus across the nation's 15 intelligence agencies on where staffing needs are the most acute. But few dispute that many more analysts are needed, particularly in the departments and agencies created since September 11, 2001. The nearly two-year-old Homeland Security Department is a prime example.

"If you had a hundred, we'd take them," Pat Hughes, the Homeland Security Department's top intelligence official, said earlier this year. "We have to look, search, test, assess. You don't just get analysts off a tree. ... We need people, but we need good people."

To find them, Homeland Security and other agencies are heading to job fairs, often looking near military bases, where civil service is part of the culture and people may have security clearances. They're also trying to snag people from the private sector.

Congress also is offering sweeteners.

Senate Select Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, Kansas Republican, created the intelligence community's answer to the GI Bill and other military scholarships. Under the program, undergraduate and graduate students can receive up to $50,000 for two years of tuition if they agree to take needed jobs in an intelligence agency for up to three years.

This year, slots for 150 students were divided among the agencies, using $4 million from Congress. Some $6 million will be available next year.

Being an analyst is almost an academic profession -- part taught, part absorbed, part intuition -- that requires weighing volumes of information and boiling it down into reports for policy-makers in the executive branch and Congress.