Spies in the Classroom: How Universities Are Training the Next Generation of Intelligence Officers

Chuppala Nagesh Bhushan

From the Paris suburbs to the banks of the Thames, a quiet revolution is reshaping how democratic nations develop their intelligence professionals.

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The Campus That Trains Spies

On a grey morning on the outskirts of Paris, a university professor takes attendance. It is, by most appearances, an ordinary ritual — except that several names on his list are almost certainly false. Professor Xavier Crettiez, a researcher specialising in jihadism at Sciences Po Saint-Germain-en-Laye, has grown accustomed to the uncertainty. "I rarely know the intelligence agents' backgrounds when they are sent on the course," he says, "and I doubt the names I'm given are genuine anyway."

Welcome to France's so-called 'School for Spies': the Diplôme sur le Renseignement et les Menaces Globales — the Diploma on Intelligence and Global Threats, or DiReM. Housed within the dour early-20th-century buildings of Sciences Po Saint-Germain's campus, behind large metal gates and on unremarkable suburban roads that might easily be mistaken for a municipal office, the programme is anything but ordinary. It is one of the most unusual academic experiments in contemporary Europe: a course where active intelligence officers and fresh-faced undergraduate students sit side by side, learning about radical Islam, organised crime, cybersecurity, and the geopolitical fault lines reshaping the world.

The setting may seem unlikely, but the logic is deliberate. France, like many Western democracies, is grappling with the challenge of professionalising its intelligence community while maintaining democratic legitimacy and civilian oversight. The DiReM represents one answer: bring academia and the secret services into the same room, and see what happens.

Origins: Terror, Recruitment, and a New Imperative

The DiReM did not emerge from thin air. It was born out of crisis. After the devastating terrorist attacks that struck Paris in 2015 — the Charlie Hebdo shootings in January and the coordinated massacres at the Bataclan concert hall and elsewhere in November — the French government launched a sweeping recruitment drive across its intelligence agencies. The services needed more bodies, and more expertise. Raw numbers alone, however, were not enough. Intelligence work, as Crettiez emphasises to his students, is far less about clandestine derring-do and far more about the painstaking work of analysis: collecting raw data, contextualising it, and converting it into actionable insight.

The French government turned to Sciences Po — one of France's most prestigious networks of institutes of political studies — and asked it to develop a course that could both attract and educate potential new recruits, and offer continuing professional development for experienced officers already in the field.

The result, launched in 2019, was the DiReM, created in partnership with the Académie du Renseignement (Intelligence Academy), an interministerial body established in 2010 whose mission is to foster connections between universities and the secret services, and to cultivate a shared professional culture across the French intelligence community. The Academy reports to the Prime Minister, underscoring its cross-governmental mandate, and actively monitors the DiReM curriculum to ensure its real-world relevance.

Inside the Classroom: Spooks, Students, and Selfie Bans

The DiReM's cohort is deliberately mixed. Each class typically brings together around 25 to 30 participants: some are conventional students in their early twenties, drawn by a fascination with security studies or international affairs; others are intelligence professionals aged 35 to 50, dispatched by their agencies for continuing education. The French agencies represented have included the DGSE (General Directorate for External Security, France's foreign intelligence agency), the DGSI (General Directorate for Internal Security, the domestic counterpart), and Tracfin, a financial intelligence unit specialising in money laundering. The intelligence officers attend under conditions of strict anonymity — signing the attendance register with first names only.

The rules for students are clear: no selfies with classmates ("I tell students to be very careful on social media," Crettiez says, invoking the image of someone declaring they are 'with James Bond'), and a general culture of discretion. The mix is intentional, however. For the civilian students, the course offers what one 21-year-old participant, Alexandre, described as a desire to understand the emerging economic rivalry between Europe and China. "Looking at intelligence gathering from a James Bond viewpoint is not relevant," he explained after a BBC visit to the programme in early 2026. "The job is analysing risk and working out how to counteract it." Another young student, Valentine, was inspired to enrol after watching Le Bureau des Légendes — the acclaimed French spy drama whose title gave the DiReM its informal nickname: the 'Malotru Diploma', after the show's protagonist.

For the intelligence professionals, the academic environment offers something different: fresh perspectives, cross-pollination with other agencies, and in some cases, a pathway to promotion. One officer, speaking anonymously, described the course as "a fast-track stepping stone from the office to field work." Another said he valued being exposed to new ideas that he would not encounter within the insular world of his agency.

The curriculum spans 120 hours spread across the academic year and covers an ambitious range of topics: the economics of organised crime, political violence and radicalisation, cybersecurity governance, geopolitics of conflict, information warfare, and intelligence tradecraft. Lecturers include both academic researchers and active or retired practitioners from the intelligence and security community. The programme is open to both continuing professional development students and to those holding the equivalent of a four-year undergraduate degree (bac+4). The 2024–2025 cohort achieved a 96% pass rate, with 97% of participants reporting satisfaction with the course.

Tuition costs for civilian external students stand at approximately €5,000 — and the programme is eligible for the French government's CPF continuing professional development fund, making it accessible to working professionals seeking to retrain or upskill. The next intake is due to begin in October 2026, with applications open until 30 June.

A Wider French Ecosystem

The DiReM is part of a broader ecosystem of intelligence education that has taken root across the Sciences Po network and beyond.

Sciences Po's Paris School of International Affairs has since 2010 offered a course titled 'Intelligence for democracies, intelligence in a democracy', led by Philippe Hayez and Jean-Claude Cousseran, both former senior officials at the DGSE. The course examines the relationship between intelligence services and the democratic societies they serve — a question that has acquired renewed urgency in an era of mass surveillance, algorithmic decision-making, and debates about the boundaries of legitimate state power.

Meanwhile, Sciences Po Aix-en-Provence, in partnership with the French Air and Space Force Academy, launched a Specialised Master's (Mastère Spécialisé) in Intelligence in 2021 — described as the first of its kind in France. The programme is co-directed by Walter Bruyère-Ostells, a contemporary history professor at Sciences Po Aix, and Air Force General Serge Cholley, a seasoned intelligence officer. The course has attracted support from major institutional partners including the Académie du Renseignement, the Ministry of Defence's Directorate General for International Relations and Strategy (DGRIS), and the Institute for Strategic Research at the Military School (IRSEM), as well as private sector firms in defence, cybersecurity, and intelligence. Graduates are destined for roles in public security, national defence, diplomacy, and private sector risk management.

Britain: A Longer Tradition

France's emerging intelligence education ecosystem is, in some respects, catching up with Britain, where the academic study of intelligence has deeper roots.

Intelligence studies took hold at several British universities in the 1990s, pioneered in large part by historians and former practitioners who recognised that intelligence — long dismissed as too secret to study and too sensitive to discuss — deserved the same rigorous academic treatment as diplomacy, military strategy, or international law. King's College London's world-renowned Department of War Studies was among the early leaders, and in 2023 it established the King's Centre for the Study of Intelligence (KCSI), a dedicated research hub that brings together scholars, practitioners, visiting fellows, and doctoral researchers from four continents.

The KCSI's flagship offering is an MA in Intelligence and International Security, which examines the trends shaping intelligence and international security in the 21st century. The programme combines academic rigour with practitioner insight: Sir David Omand, former Director of GCHQ (the UK's signals intelligence agency) and a visiting professor in War Studies since 2005, is one of its leading figures. Omand is the author of several widely-read books on intelligence practice and ethics, including How Spies Think (2020) and How to Survive a Crisis (2023). Madeleine Alessandri, chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee — the body that assesses and coordinates intelligence assessments across the UK government — is also associated with the centre, reflecting the seriousness with which the British intelligence establishment now engages with academic research.

The KCSI hosts regular seminars, workshops, and public lectures, giving students a front-row seat to conversations involving former intelligence directors, serving analysts, and leading scholars. Alumni have gone on to careers in government, NATO, the EU, the armed forces, investigative journalism, think tanks, and international NGOs — suggesting that intelligence education equips graduates for a remarkably wide range of roles beyond the secret services themselves.

The Paradox at the Heart of Intelligence Education

The growth of intelligence studies as an academic discipline raises a fundamental tension that its practitioners are acutely aware of. Intelligence is, by definition, a secretive business. Its methods, sources, and operations depend on confidentiality. How, then, can a university course teach it without either sanitising it into uselessness or inadvertently revealing things that should remain hidden?

Programmes like the DiReM navigate this tension by focusing on context rather than tradecraft. The goal is not to teach students how to run agents, break cover, or conduct signals interception — but to give them a sophisticated understanding of the threat landscape: who the adversaries are, how radicalisation works, what financial crime looks like, why cybersecurity matters, and how intelligence feeds into policy decisions. This is, in essence, the analytical and strategic layer of intelligence work — the part that can be openly discussed, taught, and debated.

The presence of active intelligence officers in the classroom adds another dimension. Their anonymity preserves operational security, but their participation enriches the course in ways that no purely academic curriculum could replicate. When a DGSE officer and a 21-year-old politics student discuss the geopolitics of the Sahel together, both learn something the other could not have taught themselves.

There is also a recruitment dimension that no one involved is entirely coy about. Céline Braconnier, Director of Sciences Po Saint-Germain, has noted that the DiReM gives students "a unique opportunity to meet professionals, to learn more about these careers, to have information about recruitment. Some have been spotted during training to join one service or another." The classroom, in other words, is also a talent pipeline.

A Global Trend

France and Britain are not alone. Across the Western world, universities are increasingly engaging with the intelligence community as a legitimate subject of academic inquiry and a partner in professional education.

In the United States, dozens of universities — from the American Military University to Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and Texas A&M — offer degree programmes in intelligence studies, with concentrations in cyber intelligence, counterintelligence, geospatial intelligence, and regional and terrorism studies. Recent data points to a 12% rise in employer demand for professionals skilled in cyber intelligence and data analysis, reflecting the growing complexity of the threat environment and the corresponding need for trained analysts.

At Cambridge University, the Cambridge Security Initiative (CSI) — whose advisory board includes two former GCHQ Directors, Sir David Omand and Sir Iain Lobban — offers a course co-convened by academics who have spent years seconded to government intelligence bodies. The line between academe and the secret world, once clearly drawn, is becoming increasingly porous — not because universities are becoming arms of the state, but because the challenges of the modern security environment have grown too complex and too multidisciplinary for either side to navigate alone.

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The Bigger Picture

The emergence of university-level intelligence education reflects a broader shift in how democratic governments think about security. The threats facing Western societies in the 2020s — terrorism, cyberattack, economic espionage, disinformation, hybrid warfare — are not primarily military problems amenable to purely military solutions. They require analysts who understand economics, sociology, history, technology, and political science. They require, in other words, exactly the kind of broad, critical, interdisciplinary thinking that universities are best placed to cultivate.

The DiReM's approach — mixing academic researchers with intelligence practitioners, civilian students with serving officers — embodies this logic. It treats intelligence not as a black art to be practised in the shadows, but as a profession with intellectual foundations that can be studied, debated, and improved. That is a quiet but significant development in the relationship between open societies and their secret services.

As Professor Crettiez noted with a wry smile when asked about teaching people whose names he isn't sure of: the constraints are unusual, but the work is anything but standard. In a world of accelerating and converging threats, perhaps that is exactly the point.

Sources Used: Sciences Po Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Sciences Po Aix, King's College London / KCSI, BBC, IntelNews, Ministère des Armées (Intelligence Academy), Research.com.