WASHINGTON - The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has unveiled a World Wide Web site aimed at introducing the spy game to the kindergarten set.
The CIA's Home Page for Kids features geography quizzes, interactive disguise games and thumbnail sketches of cloak-and-dagger figures dating back to the Revolutionary War against Britain.
It also showcases "Who We Are and What We Do," a very basic primer on intelligence-gathering and analysis.
"What we're really trying to do is encourage kids to use computers, explore geography and give them an understanding of what the CIA does," said Anya Guilsher, an agency spokeswoman.
"We're also putting a human face on the people who work here," she said.
The section on those behind the scenes opens with a shot of a woman possibly meant to be the American James Bond for the late 1990s.
Slender, smiling and black, she is conservatively dressed in a white blouse and smartly tailored outfit. Other pages give a glimpse of an espionage operation, complete with a man wearing dark glasses and a trench coat.
The site also lays out the work of the CIA's other three branches -- those analyzing intelligence for policymakers, solving science and technology challenges ("To work beyond the state of the art every day is normal in this directorate") and administering the CIA's estimated 16,000 full-time US employees and its US$3 billion budget.
One fringe benefit of the site, which went online last month, is that it helps CIA personnel explain their jobs to their kids, said Karen Gilbert, an agency public affairs specialist who was part of the four-woman design team.
"Finally people who work here now have a way to talk to children about what they do here," she said in an interview at CIA headquarters in the Washington D.C. suburb of Langley, Virginia.
To appeal to children as young as six, the designers picked the CIA's bomb-sniffing canine corps of Black Labradors and Belgian Shepherds to conduct "first-person" tours of the CIA's leafy campus.
The Web site, which the agency said has been receiving as many as 950 visits a day, contains links to the CIA's signature World Factbook and the agency's main Web page, said to get almost two million hits a month.
The kid page has nothing to do with recruiting future U.S. spies, the agency said. It stems from an executive order in April 1997, in which President Clinton told federal agencies to match White House efforts to put more educational material online for children.
