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Comment by cushychicken | Hacker News Reader

Turns out having firsthand experience living abroad, plus airtight foreign language skills, is quite valuable to intelligence agencies. (The fact that they don’t really drink or do drugs makes them a nice cultural fit, too.)

Paraphrasing a sarcastic comment from Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character in Charlie Wilson’s War: “What a wild fucking idea: our spies should probably speak the same language as the people they’re spying on.”

Lest anyone hammer on the LDS for this: missionaries as spies is not a novel concept nor exclusive to Mormons.

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Yes, I don't have a reference immediately available, but I've read that the DoD has studied this and found that LDS kids join the military at a disproportionately high rate and turn out to be better than average troops. Anecdotally, I've found this to be true too. The Utah Army National Guard also has the 300th Military Intelligence Brigade of linguists which is pretty unique.

Yeah, but back when there was actually an ethos of morality, there were certain lines which weren't crossed:

- no use of religious/academics/medical practitioners as cover identities

- no high-level clearances to people who had ties overseas and might be vulnerable to blackmail/coercion

Somehow that all went out the locks during the "War on Terror" and I would gladly vote for and donate to a candidate who would make an issue of instances where the above moral considerations were ignored and operations which I would view as war crimes were perpetrated.

It's not worth winning any war at the cost of the moral high ground.

> when there was actually an ethos of morality, there were certain lines which weren't crossed

Uh, what? Could you perhaps tell this to the Catholic Church, who DEFINITELY used their capacity as religious leaders to spy on the Japanese on behalf of the Portuguese around, I dunno, the year 1600?

This is simply the easiest answer I could recall because I just watched Shogun.

This limit you’re describing only exists in your head.

The context was the CIA, which used to have such guidelines.

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