In this video, I describe the precarious situation facing students, faculty, and staff at National Intelligence University.
It’s a school that dates back to the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1962. With campuses at the FBI in Quantico, NSA headquarters in Ft. Mead, and locations overseas, members of the government and military receive training on the government’s dime, as long as they can get in with top secret clearances.
“The most unique thing about NIU is it’s the only university that offers undergraduate and graduate programs that allow for classified work, with classified classes and students writing classified papers all the way up to highest level classifications,” former CIA Chief of Staff Larry Pfeiffer told me.
Another person familiar with the school, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said NIU’s full potential was never truly embraced but “100 percent there were cases where [students’] theses were used to change procedures or organizational processes,” especially in intelligence gathering and analysis.
The person saw potential problems with the Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s plans to move NIU to DOD’s National Defense University. For one, the SCIF at NDU “is a little bit larger than my living room,” and there is little space to build these facilities to consume highly classified information.
Second, there are foreign students. I found that Chinese students from the People’s Liberation Army’s own national defense university visited NDU in 2014.
More in the report.
