The CIA is openly recruiting foreign spies in other countries

Secrecy and security are hallmarks of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), but the organization has now started performing one of its key duties out in the open: recruiting foreign spies. The agency has now released instructions in non-English languages for people in other countries who want to work as CIA informants.

The instructions are an attempt by the CIA to solicit information from authoritarian countries without putting American spies at risk or jeopardizing the lives of people living in these nations. But the success of this recruiting program could depend on a variety of international factors.

What are the CIA's new recruiting instructions?

The agency provided online instructions on "how to securely contact CIA via our public and Dark Web sites," the CIA said in a press release, advising people to use either a virtual private network (VPN) or the anonymous browser Tor. The instructions are available in Farsi, Mandarin and Korean. The agency is posting these instructions on Telegram, a social media network often used in authoritarian countries, as well as Facebook, X, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube. It asks for people to send any useful information to the CIA, though it also cautions not to use any names associated with real identities.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

These instructions are "just one way in which CIA is adapting to a new global environment of increased state repression and global surveillance," the agency said. Recruiting efforts of this nature have been "successful in Russia, and we want to make sure individuals in other authoritarian regimes know that we're open for business."

The instructions' three languages are widely used in countries under authoritarian regimes; Farsi is "spoken by more than 100 million people in Iran and nearby countries, while Mandarin, with more than 1 billion speakers, is the majority language in China," according to NBC News. Additionally, providing the instructions in Korean will potentially allow people in North Korea to contact the CIA.

How could this affect authoritarian regimes?

The United States' push for foreign intelligence is unsurprising as China "expands cooperation with Russia and Iran and flexes its regional military muscle," said Reuters. In particular, Russia, Iran, North Korea and China — countries that are all being targeted by the CIA's recruiting efforts — are "known within the U.S. intelligence community as 'hard targets' — countries whose governments are difficult to penetrate." At the same time, the U.S. is "grappling with Iran's conflict with Israel, its nuclear program, its growing links with Russia and its support for militant proxies."

The most notable of the intelligence-gathering efforts might be in China, where the "CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies have faced questions about their broader collection capabilities," said Bloomberg, citing a 2017 report from The New York Times claiming that China had broken up several CIA spying operations. China has "ramped up efforts in recent years to warn the public, government workers and even university students about foreign espionage efforts," practices that have also been seen in Russia.

It is unclear how useful these U.S. efforts will be in all of these authoritarian countries — particularly North Korea. The CIA is "basing this off the success they had in Russia — but I would question how effective this will be considering most North Koreans don't have access to the internet," Mason Richey, an international politics professor at South Korea's Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, said to the BBC.