THE CIA is taking advantage of the financial meltdown to recruit a new generation of financially literate spies with a series of job ads targeting Wall Street workers.

Economics has always been an area of interest for the CIA, and former senior agent David Gordon said financial knowledge had come to the fore during the global crisis. Since February, the CIA has been producing a daily economic intelligence briefing for President Obama in addition to his regular intelligence reports.

“Economics, finance and business professionals — if the quest for the bottom line is just not enough for you, the Central Intelligence Agency has a mission like no other,” one radio advertisement says. “Join CIA’s directorate of intelligence and be a part of our global mission as an economic or financial analyst. Make a difference in your career and for your nation.”

Gordon, formerly national intelligence officer for economic issues and now director of global research at the Eurasia Group, said: “The global financial crisis involves a series of national security challenges to the United States.” He added that the CIA needs analysts who can understand the world’s financial markets and gauge their impact on the US.

The CIA was particularly interested in two areas, he said. The first is assessing how countries respond to financial pressures and the risks they generate internally — “how to follow arcane financial flows that will be important to the US”, Gordon explained. “Legitimate ones like how China deploys its financial assets.” Second, there is huge interest in how “less benign actors” such as drug gangs, terrorists or enemy states, such as North Korea and Iran, are acting financially.

With jobs hard to come by, the CIA is expecting a record number of applications this year. Recruits will have to pass a battery of background and medical checks, including a lie-detector test. Starting salaries are low compared with Wall Street at about $80,000 (£50,000) for graduates.

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