by Rigorous Intuition » Wed Sep 06, 2006 12:32 pm
Anderson Cooper has long traded on his biography, carving a niche for himself as the most human of news anchors. But there's one aspect of his past that the silver-haired CNN star has never made public: the months he spent training for a career with the Central Intelligence Agency. <br><br><!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Following his sophomore and junior years at Yale—a well-known recruiting ground for the CIA—Cooper spent his summers interning at the agency's monolithic headquarters in Langley, Virginia, in a program for students interested in intelligence work.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--> His involvement with the agency ended there, and he chose not to pursue a job with the agency after graduation, according to a CNN spokeswoman, who confirms details of Cooper's CIA involvement to Radar.<br><br>"Whatever summer jobs or internships our anchors had in college couldn't be less consequential," she adds. He has kept the experience a secret, sources say, out of concern that, if widely known, it might compromise his ability to travel in foreign countries and even possibly put him at greater risk from terrorists.<br><br>"He doesn't want to be any more of a target than he already is," says one Anderson confidante. On the other hand, as Bob Woodruff and others have learned, American journalists are already prime targets in the world's conflict zones, and are typically accused of having CIA ties even where none exist. And by not disclosing his training before now, Cooper has arguably made it into a potential issue. "It creates the appearance of something smelly there," says a former CNN official who knows Cooper. (Particularly in light of the period Anderson spent studying Vietnamese at the University of Hanoi after college. Soon after, Cooper apparently gave up his Bond fantasy to pursue a career in journalism—except for a brief period when he starred as host of ABC's reality show, The Mole.)<br><br>According to the spokeswoman, Cooper told his bosses at CNN about his time with the agency. But even if he hadn't, says <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>Walter Isaacson, who headed the network from 2001 to 2003 and is now president of the Aspen Institute, it's not the sort of thing that would automatically require disclosure, since the stint was brief and far in the past. "I think what he did was probably fine and cool, and I've got no problems with it," he adds. </strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br><br><br><!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://www.radaronline.com/exclusives/2006/09/anderson-coopers-cia-secret.php">www.radaronline.com</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--> <p></p><i></i>
