France creates first university intelligence chair and masters course on the dark arts of espionage

A university in southern France has created the country's first university chair in "intelligence" and a masters degree in the dark arts of espionage.

The political sciences university of Aix-en-Provence will start with an intelligence certificate this September followed by its first masters degree next year.

The course will be run by General Serge Cholley, a military heavyweight who commanded France’s operation Chammal against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq starting from 2014, which involved dozens of reconnaissance missions and airstrikes, sometimes backed by UK forces.

“We want to make intelligence a subject that is no longer restricted (to spy services) but academic,” said Rostane Mehdi, head of Aix’s institute of political studies, IEP.

“For that we’re putting in place a programme that is unprecedented in France and which meets a strong institutional demand.”

Gallic experts say France is playing catch-up with Britain and the US in forging strong links between the intelligence community and academia.

In 2018, the heads of France’s six main intelligence agencies convened for an unprecedented seminar at Sciences Po Paris on the “links between intelligence and university”, issuing a plea for engineers, IT specialists, linguists and analysts to join their ranks.

“This academic chair will be a useful bridge between two universes that ignore each other too often - that of intelligence in all its complexity and that of the academic world in all its diversity,” said France’s national intelligence coordinator, Pierre Bousquet de Florian, cited by the university.

The new chair and course are supported by France’s intelligence academy, a school for intelligence agents working for the French state.

The new course has a brochette of senior intelligence figures as teachers, including Jean-Baptiste Carpentier,  former head of Tracfin, the state body that fights money laundering, as well as an unnamed former intelligence chief.

Demand to work for France’s intelligence services doubled after the 2015 terror attacks and the work of its Directorate-General for External Security, DGSE, has been in the spotlight thanks to the huge success of The Bureau, the hit television series on the spy agency starring Mathieu Kassovitz.

The first undergraduates will comprise 15 students and 15 professionals from the public and private sector.

The idea is not just to train future secret agents but intelligence experts with a wide skills set, including in culture and the environment.

Mr Cholley told Le Figaro: “While students can join the civil and military intelligence services, most of the opportunities will come from strategic management of businesses and administrations, security and safety sectors, services in charge of economic intelligence or the protection of heritage."

Aix will also hook up with a top engineering "grande école" to ensure technical training in areas such as cybersecurity.

Students will take classes on diplomatic, military and economic intelligence along with clandestine action and home security. They will also conduct research and publish studies and articles.

Philippe Hayez, a former DGSE agent who teaches “informing democracies, informing in democracy” at Sciences Po's Paris school of international affairs, PSIA, said: “In American and British universities, intelligence studies are a very familiar topic of study and well structured."

"In France, we have a lot of catching up to do in this area. We maintained for a very long time a culture of distance regarding intelligence that fed all sorts of fantasies. Today mentalities are changing."

Sir David Omand, former director of GCHQ, also gives classes at PSIA, on digital intelligence.

Mr Hayez said the new Aix course was partly in response to a French government drive to improve general "intelligence culture" in France.

"But it's not just a French or European movement. There is a general realisation of the need for wider intelligence training."

Speaking to the Telegraph, Joel Brenner, the former head of US counterintelligence policy and senior research fellow in MIT's Center for International Studies, said: "I'm pleased to see that Sciences Po-Aix recognizes that intelligence and the place of intelligence agencies in society are worthy of academic study.

“This is a welcome development and will make it easier to nourish links between French universities and their counterparts in the US and UK.”