Sumit Ganguly, who currently holds the Rabindranath Tagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilisations will soon be appointed the first National Intelligence Officer of the newly-formed South Asia Bureau in the National Intelligence Council, an appendage of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Ganguly, also a professor of political science and director of the Indian Studies Program at Indiana University in Bloomington, is the first Indian-American to serve in the NIC.
The NIC is the intelligence community's centre for mid-term and long-term strategic thinking.
Its National Intelligence Estimates on behalf of the Director of National Intelligence (the head of the CIA) are the most authoritative written judgments concerning national security issues.
The estimates also contain the coordinated judgments of the intelligence community regarding the likely course of future events.
The NIC claims that its goal is to provide the president and policymakers with the best, unvarnished, and unbiased information-- regardless of whether analytic judgments conform to US policy or not.
Although much of its work is for internal use, it also produces or commissions unclassified reports.
The primary functions of NIOs' are to advise the head of the CIA, interact regularly with senior intelligence consumers, produce top-quality estimative intelligence, engage with outside experts, help assess the capabilities and needs of the intelligence community's analytic producers and promote collaboration among them on strategic warning, advanced analytic tools and methodologies.
The GERP program, according to its website, 'enables senior government leaders to draw upon the best expertise the US has available, both inside and outside the intelligence community,' but contains the caveat that the program is 'not about being James Bond'.
Intelligence sources told rediff.com that Ganguly's name was on a short list along with some leading high profile South Asia experts but that the latter had declined the full-time job, which is said to be for a minimum of two years.
Ganguly, who returned only last week from a two-week trip to China and India, did not want to comment on his still to be formalised appointment.
Before joining Indiana University, Ganguly was on the faculty of James Madison College of Michigan State University, Hunter College of the City University of New York and the University of Texas at Austin. He has also taught at Columbia University in New York City.
He has been a Fellow and a Guest Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars in Washington, DC and a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University.
Ganguly's extensive research and writing focused on South Asia has been supported by grants from the Asia Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the W Alton Jones Foundation.
He is the author, editor or co-editor of some 10 books on South Asia ranging from The Crisis of Kashmir: Portents of War, Hopes of Peace to Fearful Symmetry: India and Pakistan Under the Shadow of Nuclear Weapons.
