No, Monsieur Bond . . . I expect you to study

French intelligence officers are to be invited to take a degree course in spying, in an attempt to draw upon academic knowledge in the fight against terrorism and other crimes.

The country’s secret services are trying to recruit bright graduates to work on forestalling the sort of Islamist attacks that have killed 246 people in the country since 2015.

Intelligence agencies have been criticised for failing to keep track of people they have identified as Islamists who have later become killers. Intelligence chiefs say that with about 10,000 on their watch lists, they cannot keep constant attention on them all.

L’Academie de Renseignement (The Intelligence Academy), a government body set up in 2010 to provide training for spies, is to award undergraduate and postgraduate degrees for intelligence officers, whose diplomas will be recognised by French universities. The academy also plans to create an annual prize for academic work of benefit to the intelligence services.

There is also a proposal to establish an entrance examination for people seeking posts as analysts in France’s intelligence agencies.

Francois Chambon, the academy’s director, said: ‘‘Not only do agents need to know about subjects like law, political science and history, they also need to be familiar with cognitive sciences like anthropology and social sciences.’’

He said French secret services were also seeking to develop the sort of links with academia that Britain’s MI5 and MI6 have long had with Oxford, Cambridge and other British universities.

Jean-Dominique Merchet, a journalist specialising in intelligence issues, quoted an official as saying that French spies needed to emerge from their ‘‘closed culture’’ to draw upon academic talents if they were to be effective in preventing crime. – The Times