Inquiry | This is the kind of people Puolustusvoimat is looking for for its intelligence course

Defense forces military intelligence published an announcement on Monday in which it is looking for personnel for personal intelligence for the course. It said that the course trains information acquisition from personal sources and the special skills needed for it.

Attention was guaranteed. In the media, the announcement was described as mysterious and a search for agents, among other things.

“We hope for versatile applications from people of different backgrounds and age groups and of different genders. The requirements for admission are Finnish citizenship and excellent Finnish language skills, as well as being of legal age,” the brief announcement listed, and that was about the end of the requirements.

The Defense Forces refused to comment further on the matter. Therefore, you should ask a university teacher for expertise Jyrk from the big screenwho teaches intelligence at the University of Jyväskylä and is a colonel evp.

He comments on the matter at a general level and reminds at the beginning that the Finnish Defense Forces has organized courses in personnel intelligence in the past. They have been intended for people working in various crisis management positions, but now the recruitment base is much wider.

“Personal intelligence is a way of inquiring, where the collector and source is a person. This kind of training can mean choosing suitable people who know how to acquire information from other people,” Isokangas says.

Isokangas draws attention to the fact that the advertisement is looking for people of different ages, different backgrounds and different genders. Such is the need for inquiry in general.

“If you recruit similar people from the same backgrounds, the end result is a narrow view of the matter being investigated. Good posture and hedgehog hair can reveal a military background.”

Similarly, if the requirement had been to perform military service, it would have eliminated a large part of the female applicants. Now that’s not a requirement.

Isokangas cannot say what tasks Puolustusvoimat has thought of assigning to applicants who have passed the course. The announcement only says that “those who have completed the course can be used in various normal and exceptional tasks of personnel intelligence”.

“Typically, personal intelligence has been used in various crisis management forces and it is also needed in wartime forces,” he says.

One it will certainly benefit the Finnish intelligence world. He is clear that the course creates a recruitment basis for the intelligence services, i.e. also for the security police. He considers it possible that those who succeed in the course could also succeed in the search for actual intelligence positions. Haku gathers a crowd that at least has a strong interest in the field.

“A course like this gives you the opportunity to get to know people and learn their strengths and weaknesses. That way you can see if they are suitable for such positions,” he says.

“Recruitment requires the selection of suitable people for the task, as well as long-term and at least partly customized training. “

According to the announcement, the course trains information acquisition from personal sources and related special skills. According to him, such could be, for example, identifying suitable sources of information based on the intelligence task, making contact with the source of information, recruiting and processing the source of information, and reporting on the information obtained.

He reminds that personal inquiry is not suitable for everyone. It requires a certain kind of personality, you can’t be introverted or afraid of social situations.

“You have to get along with people,” he characterizes.