The choice of these four languages does not mean they are newly identified intelligence priorities. The DGSE already has an established foreign-language recruitment and training structure.
France’s foreign intelligence service, the Directorate General for External Security (DGSE), is creating a new recruitment route aimed at bringing highly specialised academic and technical expertise into the agency, with a newly issued government order identifying fields ranging from artificial intelligence and quantum physics to cybersecurity, nuclear science and four specific foreign languages. The move is part of a broader overhaul of DGSE recruitment that will, for the first time in 2027, allow the agency to recruit attachés and specialised controllers through competitive examinations based on academic qualifications rather than solely through conventional competitive examinations.
The DGSE says the reform is intended to diversify recruitment and attract candidates with specialised expertise. Selection under the new route will involve screening of applications followed by an interview. An order signed by the Director-General of External Security, Nicolas Lerner, provides the clearest indication yet of the expertise the agency wants to bring in. For the new external qualification-based competition for the attaché corps, candidates with at least a Master’s degree or an engineering qualification can apply if their degrees fall within a specified list of disciplines.
The technical fields include aeronautics, aerospace, automobiles and transport, bioinformatics, biotechnology, fine chemistry, molecular chemistry, organic and inorganic chemistry, cloud computing, cybersecurity and cyber defence, energy and processes, renewable energy, infrastructure and systems, the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, biological engineering, chemical engineering, geology, fundamental mathematics, nuclear physics, quantum physics, networks and telecommunications, nuclear safety, embedded systems and information system security. The same order creates a separate language category for candidates with a Master’s degree in foreign and regional languages, literature and civilisations.
It names Turkish, Persian, Hebrew and Korean specifically. Master’s degrees in translation and interpreting are also eligible. The choice of these four languages does not mean they are newly identified intelligence priorities. The DGSE already has an established foreign-language recruitment and training structure. Its recruitment material says linguistic expertise and knowledge of cultural codes are essential to its missions, and that rare-language expertise is particularly valuable. Current vacancies include experienced translators in Russian, Persian and Arabic, and a Persian-language instructor. Korean is not new either. The agency’s February 2026 rules already list it, alongside Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Turkish and Farsi, among languages available for optional examinations in the existing competition system.
What’s new in the September order is that Turkish, Persian, Hebrew and Korean have been specifically selected as Master’s-level qualifications for the new specialist attaché route. Hebrew stands out here, since it was not part of the broader language list in the older competition framework. For the 2027 competition, France has authorised 14 attaché posts: four in geopolitics, two in administration, two in data analysis, one in geography, one in business management, two in Arabic, one in Russian and one in Chinese. Arabic, Russian and Chinese have not been dropped. They remain part of conventional recruitment. The new qualification-based system is an additional route for people with specialised academic backgrounds. The four languages cover an unusual geographical spread: Turkish and Persian give access to Turkey and Iran, Hebrew to Israel, and Korean to the Korean Peninsula.
The DGSE order invites a comparison with how India’s intelligence services recruit for the same kind of specialised expertise. India’s external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), does have a lateral-entry mechanism, the Research and Analysis Service (RAS), that runs alongside deputation from the Indian Police Service, the armed forces and other Group A central services. Various recruitment-guidance sources describe lateral entry for cybersecurity experts, linguists and geopolitical analysts through dedicated drives. India’s technical intelligence agency, the National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO), also recruits specialists in signals, cyber and related technical fields. RAW’s recruitment rules are largely undisclosed, and where NTRO does advertise technical recruitment, it is typically done through subordinate-office-level notifications rather than a Cabinet Secretariat-level published order of the kind DGSE’s director-general has now signed. That absence is not, by itself, evidence that India lacks comparable specialised-recruitment channels. Classified agencies routinely conduct processes that never reach the public record.
But it does mean that, unlike in France, there is no publicly verifiable account of how, or how systematically, India’s intelligence services are recruiting for fields such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing or rare-language expertise. The two approaches also reflect a trade-off. An open, qualificationbased route of the kind France has adopted widens the pool of candidates beyond people already inside the civil-service or military pipeline, reaching specialists in AI, cyberdefence, nuclear physics or Korean-language academia who might otherwise never encounter an opening at all. Against that, agencies that keep recruitment closed argue that publishing categories of technical need can itself signal operational priorities or invite scrutiny they would rather avoid. France’s order suggests the DGSE has judged that trade-off worth making, at least for categories of expertise rather than individual roles or postings. Whether India’s services would make the same calculation is, on current evidence, an open question rather than a settled one.
