Jack Bauer wants you!

Sept. 19, 2006 | The first ad before the movie starts at Manhattan's Regal Cineplex shows a trio of cartoon kids awaiting orders. "Your mission, should you choose to accept it," booms the omnipotent "Mission Impossible" voice, "is to get yourselves a crunchalicious Nestle chocolate bar!" The next spot also has a spy theme, only this time it's from the real Mission Impossible gang -- the Central Intelligence Agency.

By now, moviegoers are familiar with the U.S. Army's superhero "Army of One" recruitment trailers. But this month marks the CIA's first purely pop moment with a 30-second whiz-bang short that urges "people of integrity and patriotism" who have a taste for "ambiguity" to join the agency in making the world a safer place. Of course, that may mean not only spying, analyzing data and wiretapping, but planting cigar bombs, and, if necessary, kidnapping, and running secret prisons, with perhaps a little aggressive interrogation on the side.

The movie ad, which started rolling out in 59 theaters nationwide in September, is the latest component of a broad, if somewhat bizarre, recruiting campaign tied to the new era of global conflict. The focus is the lack of Arabic and Asian language speakers in U.S. intelligence agencies, oft cited as a possible reason for the failure to detect the 9/11 terrorist plot, and for the lack of good human intelligence on the ground in the Middle East. President Bush's order in 2005 to increase the agency's staff by 50 percent, to the largest size in its history, seems to have inspired the CIA to come up with a whole new road show.

"We're essentially reaching out to as broad an audience as possible," said a CIA spokesperson, who declined to be identified when discussing the publicity campaign. "The ads are for analysts, as well as for field agents in the National Clandestine Service," she said, adding, "We are well on track to meeting our goals."

CIA spokespeople declined to comment specifically on their targeted demographic, instead offering a peculiar euphemism used by the agency to describe the people they're most interested in recruiting: "Heritage Communities." But the movie ad seems clearly aimed at people of Middle Eastern and Asian background. It begins with a voice talking about patriotism, and shots of clouds and a waving American flag. This morphs into a flickering montage of seemingly Islamic cities and secretive-looking interiors resembling scenes from TV's smash-hit "24," while a narrator with a hard-to-identify foreign accent -- presumably the handsomely suited Middle Eastern-ish fellow meandering through the ad -- urges moviegoers to embrace "a world of change and adventure" by joining the agency. The narrator's accent seems to transform as the ad progresses. Nine out of 10 actors in it appear to be Middle Eastern or Asian. It ends with the narrator trumpeting the CIA's new slogan, "The Work of a Nation, the Center of Intelligence," and a quick shot of the agency's spiffy new logo and Web address.

Selling America's enigmatic, powerful spy agency alongside chocolate kiddie treats is a stark departure from how the CIA has sought to fill its ranks in the past, according to the agency's former in-house historian, Gerald Haines. Since its creation after World War II, he says, the agency has recruited exclusively from Ivy League venues, college campuses, academic journals and blue-blood rags like the Economist.

"This is the first movie trailer they've done that I know of, and it's clear they're trying to move beyond the Anglo-white male image," said Haines, now a senior lecturer in history at the University of Virginia. "It seems like it's aimed at the language problem and overall I think it's a change for the good."

The intelligence community's lack of qualified linguists was documented in a flood of stories following 9/11. By one account, the CIA had only a single field agent who could pass for a native Arabic speaker in 2001. More recent statements by agency leaders to Congress suggest they are operating at 5 to 10 percent capacity in that area.

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