CIA OPENLY BACK ON CAMPUSES : NEW CROP OF COLLEGE STUDENTS EXPRESSES PUZZLEMENT ABOUT AGENCY JOBS.

Byline: Tim Weiner The New York Times

Back in the CIA's halcyon days at the height of the Cold War, recruiting on college campuses was hardly a chore.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, there was always someone - a crew coach at Yale, a history professor at Harvard or a dean of students at Princeton - who could take a promising young man aside and suggest that a wonderful life of adventure awaited him in the secret world.

Then, in 1993, with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the CIA shut down its 13 recruitment centers in the United States and reassigned or retired half its recruiters.

Now the agency is once again going around to colleges and introducing itself to the fresh-faced future leaders of America. With some exceptions, the reaction is a far cry from the ``CIA, get off campus!'' demonstrations and denouncements of the 1960s. This time, the CIA is not encountering placards and sit-ins, just some puzzlement.

``I was shocked'' that the CIA was coming to Clemson University in South Carolina, said Steven Dixon, a 22-year-old accounting major who met with two recruiters. ``Isn't this kind of unusual for them? Are they serious about hiring us - fresh out of college, no master's degree?''

Frankly, probably not, a recruiter told a reporter. Of the few hundred people the agency will hire this year, most will have an advanced degree or experience more esoteric than having achieved a grasp of generally accepted accounting principles.

But the agency wants it known that it is talent hunting. The CIA is openly back on campus.

``Universities like Brown weren't particularly open to us five, six, seven years ago,'' said Dick Calder, the CIA's deputy director for administration. ``That environment has changed a little bit. There are very few universities now that do attempt to keep us out.''

One is the University of Colorado at Boulder, where students have made it clear that the agency is not welcome. The CIA circumvents the barrier by renting a video-phone and hooking up applicants from Boulder with a recruiter in Dallas.

But the contact is face to face at Clemson, where the face of the CIA belongs to Clay Burton, a former Marine with a shaved head and a handlebar mustache. He has worked out of Los Angeles and San Antonio, as well as Atlanta, as a college recruiter.

Burton said demonstrators poured red paint, symbolic of blood, on the ground before him at Berkeley and Stanford five years ago. But in recent months, on his visits to Southern schools like Emory, Morehouse and Tulane, there has been nothing of the sort.

He found all quiet at Clemson one recent day as 10 students - four women and six men - filed into a humid room on campus. Most were engineering or accounting majors. None knew exactly what the CIA is or does until Burton and a CIA man, using only the name Bob, addressed them for nearly two hours.

The students went slightly goggle-eyed as Bob, a senior analyst of Chinese politics, told them that he had to read 100 or more documents before 9 a.m. each day and crank out 30-page papers on professionalism in the Chinese military on short notice. He said the agency's analytical directorate looks for talented people with graduate degrees in economics, fluency in foreign languages, depth in political science or international relations, a hunger for information, a certain creative twist of mind, the ability to write a supple paragraph and the sang-froid to pass a lie-detector test.

He explained that the CIA's directorate of science and technology hires engineers and scientists to build state-of-the-art gadgets for stealing, processing and transmitting secret information. The covert-operations side of the house has the job of persuading foreigners to betray their countries and work for the CIA.

``Some of these people are operating from noble motives,'' Bob said, ``and some of them are scum.''

The wide eyes grew wider.

``Any questions?'' Burton said.

The students were speechless.

To join the CIA or its programs for student trainees, undergraduate scholars, summer interns and graduate students, Burton said, all applicants must fill out a 21-page form, which, among other things, requires them to write a 500-word essay on a current event and answer personal questions about drug use and the like. To be hired, they will have to submit to the lie detector and a thorough background investigation, including interviews with former boyfriends or girlfriends. The whole thing may take nine months or more, and the pay is not good.

Nevertheless, ``this is a great organization to work for,'' Burton said enthusiastically.

Mary C. Younginer, a 22-year-old accounting major from Florence, S.C., thought she might love it. Younginer, whose father is the FBI special agent in charge in Florence, had come into the meeting thinking of the CIA as ``all James Bond types with little pens that explode.'' Now she thought there might be a job for her in tracking the flow of money in foreign lands.

After meeting with Burton the next morning, Younginer said, ``I would love to work there.''

Perhaps three of the 10 students at the meeting have a chance of receiving the 21-page application, Burton said. He called Younginer a good prospect.

``Good grade-point average, great attitude, fantastic interpersonal skills,'' Burton said. ``I think she has a good fighting chance.''