The Daily Telegraph reported that a university in southern France created the first chair and masters degree in intelligence specialization in the country, and this track will be launched next September with the start of the new academic year.
The British newspaper added that the Master of Intelligence program will be established at the Institute of Political Studies in Aix-en-Provence in southeastern France near the city of Marseille, and will be supervised by General Serge Chole, a senior military who led the military campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria that began in 2014, and included the campaign Dozens of intelligence missions and air strikes, some of which were shared by Paris with London.
The number of students for the first year of the Master of Intelligence is 15 students, and 15 are employed in the public and private sectors. The idea of this university path is reflected in the graduation of intelligence experts who have extensive skills in fields including culture and the environment.
Master's content,
students will receive lessons in diplomatic, military and economic intelligence, in addition to secret work literature and internal security work, and students will research and publish studies and articles.
"We want to make intelligence an available subject and not exclusive to the intelligence services," the Daily Telegraph newspaper quoted the director of the Institute for Political Studies, Rustan Mahdi, as saying, adding that his organization has developed an unprecedented program in France, which meets a large demand from a number of institutions.
French experts say that Paris seeks to correct its delay from Britain and the United States in the field of building strong bridges between the world of intelligence agencies and the university community, as teaching intelligence is a well-established and organized academic practice within British and American universities.
In 2018, the heads of the six intelligence agencies located in France participated in an unprecedented conference at the Institute of Science Po in Paris, and discussed the relationships between French intelligence and universities, and officials of those agencies have called on engineers, information technology specialists, linguistics and analysts to strengthen the ranks of these agencies.
A bridge between two worlds The
French National Intelligence Coordinator Pierre Bosquet de Florian says, "This academic chair will be a useful bridge between two worlds who often ignore each other: the world of intelligence in all its complexities, and the world of universities in all its diversity."
A number of eminent personalities of the French intelligence service will participate in the teaching of the masters, including Jean-Baptiste Carpentier, the former head of the "Trafain" commission charged with combating money laundering, in addition to an unnamed former intelligence chief.
The Daily Telegraph reports that the French intelligence services work requests doubled after the terrorist attacks that struck the country in 2015, and the demand for work at the General Directorate of External Security increased thanks to the success achieved by a French TV series that highlights the work of the spy agencies.