[Reuters - 4/22/98] WASHINGTON -- The CIA has unveiled a Web site aimed at introducing the spy game to the kindergarten set.
The CIA's Home Page for Kids, features geography quizzes, interactive disguise games, and thumbnail sketches of cloak-and-dagger figures dating back to the Revolutionary War.
It also showcases "Who We Are and What We Do," a very basic primer on intelligence-gathering and analysis.
"What we're really trying to do is encourage kids to use computers, explore geography, and give them an understanding of what the CIA does," said Anya Guilsher, an agency spokeswoman.
"We're also putting a human face on the people who work here," she said.
The section on those behind the scenes opens with a shot of a woman possibly meant to personify the CIA's vision of the American James Bond for the late 1990s.
Slender, smiling, and black, she is conservatively dressed in a white blouse and smartly tailored outfit. Other pages give a glimpse of an espionage operation, complete with a man wearing dark glasses and a trench coat.
"If you worked in the Directorate of Operations, you would like to travel and have a great curiosity about the world and its different cultures," reads the text in the People section.
"You would like to work with people from all over the world, be able to adapt to any situation (especially dangerous ones!), be well educated, know other languages, be good at working at with other kinds of people, and be courageous, well disciplined, and able to accept anonymity," it says.
The text goes on to explain that such undercover operatives--whose job typically includes recruiting foreigners to steal secrets for the United States--know they will toil chiefly in the twilight.
"The rewards for the officer are the knowledge that he or she contributed to the security of our country and is recognized by his or her peers," the text adds.
The site lays out the work of the CIA's other three branches as well--those analyzing intelligence for policy-makers, solving science and technology challenges ("To work beyond the state of the art every day is normal in this directorate"), and administering the CIA's estimated 16,000 full-time U.S. employees and its $3 billion budget.
One fringe benefit of the site, which went online last month, is that it helps CIA personnel explain their jobs to their kids, said Karen Gilbert, an agency public affairs specialist who was part of the four-woman design team.
"Finally people who work here now have a way to talk to children about what they do here," she said in an interview at CIA headquarters in the Washington suburb of Langley, Virginia.
To appeal to children as young as six, the designers picked the CIA's bomb-sniffing canine corps of black labradors and Belgian shepherds to conduct "first-person" tours of the CIA's leafy campus. The site will be updated regularly.
The Web site, which the agency said has been receiving as many as 950 visits per day, contains links to the CIA's signature World Factbook and the agency's main Web page, said to get almost 2 million "hits" per month.
The kids' page has nothing to do with recruiting future spies, the agency said. But job-seekers can read about pay and benefits by clicking on the employment tab on the main site.
It stems from an executive order last April in which President Clinton told federal agencies to match White House efforts to put more educational material online for children.
The CIA effort, hardened against would-be hackers and housed on computers separate from those used for its sensitive work, was done on "a real shoestring budget," said Gilbert.
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[posted 10/1/99]
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