The CIA tweets for recruits

The CIA’s first tweet on June 6, 2014 stated: “We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet.” As an attempt at humour it could have fallen flat but it provoked 300,000 retweets. Today, inside the social media unit of the Central Intelligence Agency, the dozen staff members have been celebrating a remarkably successful mission. Since bringing the secret world of America’s primary espionage service out of the shadows into the modern era of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, the team at Langley in Virginia has helped to generate one of the largest and most diverse recruiting periods for a decade. The CIA’s outreach to the public could even go one step further with the agency joining Tik Tok, the burgeoning video-sharing social networking service owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. However, while considering the option, it might be a step too far for an agency, one of whose priority clandestine missions is to keep abreast of what Beijing is up to in its strategic rivalry with the United States. “With Tik Tok, obviously, there’s the Chinese risk. We currently have no plans to join,” a CIA official told the Politico website. The principal aim of the social media revolution at the CIA is to make the secret agency more transparent and more attractive to recruits across a broad spectrum of talents and abilities, a spokesman told The Times.“We don’t see social media as a way to improve the image of the CIA, it’s more about transparency and demystifying ourselves as a government agency. It’s about who we are and what we do,” he said.The CIA has always had to battle with what it calls “reel versus real” – the Hollywood movie version of the James-Bond style undercover operator shooting his or her way to victory over the enemy (Carrie Matthison in Homeland) as against the real-life, lower-key clandestine intelligence officer serving overseas. “We don’t carry guns, we’re not a law enforcement agency,” the CIA spokesman said. The CIA joined Facebook and Twitter seven years ago and now has a substantial following. The latest figures from all the social platforms used by the agency include 3.2 million Twitter followers, 398,000 followers on Instagram, 993,000 likes on Facebook and 60,000 YouTube subscribers. The CIA may insist it’s not focusing on improving its image. But the negative publicity the agency has received since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, especially the waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” used against captured terrorist suspects in “black prisons” in the Far East and Europe, are not dwelt on in the social media charm offensive. “We want to get across that the agency is not just about the work of intelligence officers, there is a whole range of job opportunities that including managers and lawyers, graphic artists, historians, museum staff and we even run a small general store that sells CIA mugs and sweatshirts,” the spokesman said.