Washington, Oct 3 (Agency) China, Iran, and North Korea are the target of a fresh recruitment effort by the US Central Intelligence Agency which is seeking informants in these countries, media reports said. On Wednesday, the group posted messages in Mandarin, Farsi, and Korean on social media, providing people with safe contact information, reported BBC. This most recent attempt comes after an enlistment drive for Russians following the CIA-deemed successful invasion of Ukraine. A CIA spokesman said in a statement, “We want to make sure individuals in other authoritarian regimes know that we’re open for business.” The recruiting letters requested people’s names, locations, and contact information. They were posted on the dark web and social media sites like X, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Telegram, and LinkedIn.
Users were instructed to utilise trustworthy encrypted Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) or the Tor network, an anonymous web browser that is frequently used to reach the dark web, to contact the CIA via its official website. The instructions were rather detailed. “I can’t remember any sort of recruitment effort like this, using YouTube or social media in this way, at least in Korean,” said Mason Richey, associate professor of international politics at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul. “It seems like they’re basing this off the success they had in Russia — but I would question how effective this will be considering most North Koreans don’t have access to the internet,” he told the BBC.