The CIA’s recent public drive to recruit informants in North Korea, Iran, and China on the internet and dark web has been met with mainly positive reception in Western strategic circles. Announced a year after similar public efforts by the US intelligence community to attract disillusioned Russian citizens, the initiative reflects a new phase in the world of intelligence.
In today’s increasingly competitive and globally connected age, espionage services are embracing newer modes of transparency, from expanding the scope for strategic intelligence disclosure as a means of coercive statecraft to the online recruitment of agents in adversary States.
Amid these changes, however, India’s intelligence apparatus remains characterised by its decades-long opacity in relation to recruitment and stasis vis-à-vis the changing global intelligence business. Such a posture is unsustainable and incompatible with India’s position as a rising power with significant bearing on world affairs.
Adapting to new world order
Today, geopolitics—the setting within which global intelligence activity operates—has been ontologically reconfigured. Volatility is heightened by the growing fluidity of interstate allyship as a principle, even as the miniaturisation and ubiquity of advanced technologies reshape how global power is envisioned. This geopolitical fluidity allows for greater additionality in international politics, characterised by the growing salience of small, middle, and regional powers, even as contests over subsequent redistributions of global power make for a more competitive security landscape internationally.
In such circumstances, it is incumbent upon intelligence services to expand their linkages with less traditional sectors of security, technology, and policy, characterised above all by a focus on a widened recruitment pool. This has been reflected in the steps taken by some of the world’s most powerful intelligence services in recent years.
Both British (MI6 and MI5) and US intelligence services (CIA, FBI, and other agencies) advertise internships for students and the wider civilian community on public websites. This allows them to attract a wide pool of talent, from experts in cyber technologies and policy to area and issue specialists beyond the bureaucracy.
Israel’s Unit 8200, the country’s primary signals and cyber intelligence agency, recruits directly from high schools and universities through its Magshimim initiative, hiring young mathematical and scientific talent to work on its projects. Many former Unit 8200 officers have later established tech startups while continuing to maintain individualised, informal relations with the strategic community.
Likewise, China recruits top talent in key scientific sectors of national security importance, both domestically and overseas, under the Qiming programme. In 2018, the programme seemingly succeeded the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) ‘Thousand Talents Plan’ to attract global technological talent and better serve China’s geostrategic and intelligence objectives.
In comparison, India’s intelligence posture remains anachronistic. Like other departments within the government bureaucracy, Indian intelligence recruits primarily within civil service silos. This results in a lack of specialisation and groupthink, which may hamper broader processes such as intelligence analysis.
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India’s intelligence recruitment
From what may be gleaned, Indian intelligence agencies—specifically the foreign intelligence service (R&AW) and the domestic/counterintelligence service (IB)—remain police-centric organisations, recruiting mainly from the Indian Police Service (IPS), particularly the latter. In the R&AW’s case, this is partly supplemented by a dedicated recruitment cadre called the Research and Analysis Service (RAS), set up in the 1980s and staffed by Indian Administrative Service (IAS) and Indian Revenue Service (IRS) officers, with some lateral deputation from armed forces or civil service personnel.
There is certainly merit in hiring from some of these departments—IRS, IPS, and military officers bring valuable insights into security and financial intelligence that can help guide operations. However, overreliance on internal hiring risks losing out on some of the best talent the country has to offer. This includes people working at the cutting edge of deep tech and scientific policy as well as those within academia and other spheres of the civilian world specialising in specific geopolitical issues.
The dangers of such an approach are obvious. Eschewing direct recruitment from civilian and scientific talent pools risks a ‘failure of imagination’—a lack of cognitive imagination required to creatively ideate, contextualise, and pre-empt previously unanticipated threats.
The US discovered the consequences of such failure during 9/11. Many (famously the 9/11 Commission itself) linked the tragedy to the CIA and FBI’s inability to forecast an attack of such scale, despite indications from intelligence sources at the time. The same happened in the case of Israel when it failed to anticipate the 7 October 2023 attacks by Hamas.
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Decolonising intelligence apparatus
India’s tight internal recruitment and its aversion to civilian recruitment into the intelligence community have strong inflections of pre-Independence intelligence structures. British officials, suspicious of ‘native’ loyalty, emphasised tightly controlled recruitment patterns within the imperial bureaucracy and the police services.
At a time when India seeks to truly decolonise its national identity in line with a dynamic, globally-facing, and civilisationally-oriented self-image, it is worth considering whether this colonial legacy holds water anymore. In more concrete terms, India’s limited pool of intelligence talent remains incommensurate with its growing influence in world politics.
India currently straddles the line between great and middle power, and has been ranked third in terms of comprehensive national power in Asia by the Lowy Institute Asia Power Index. In the future resources measure, it has been pipped to the top position only by China and the US. A limited intelligence pool risks confining India’s geopolitical ascent in the years to come.
Moreover, a lack of specialisation may ultimately lead to poor and generalised intelligence analysis, diminishing its value for policymakers, who remain its ultimate consumers.
It does not have to be this way. It is widely recognised in India that the country must rapidly widen recruitment pools at various levels within key government departments, from the sphere of diplomacy and intelligence. Notably, Vikram Sood, former chief of R&AW, has advocated for the widening of India’s intelligence recruitment to include specialists from various strategically important sectors. According to him, the current apparatus lacks “the domain expertise that we will need 30 years from now”.
Indeed, given the growing reputation of India’s intelligence community on the world stage owing to a string of recent successes—from anti-piracy operations in the Red Sea to (alleged) kinetic operations against anti-India terrorist organisations—it is hoped that South Block will diversify its pool of intelligence talent in line with its major power ambitions.
Historically, intelligence has provided the hidden impetus to a nation’s rise to power in the world order. India is no different. Therefore, amid shifting global dynamics, it is incumbent upon India’s policymakers to break the shackles of the past and arm the next generation of its security agencies with the talent required for New Delhi to truly realise its global ambitions.
Harsh V Pant is Vice President for Studies at Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi. Archishman Goswami is a postgraduate student in the MPhil International Relations programme at the University of Oxford.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)