One group quickly zeroed in on “Zubida,” a British-born schoolteacher pictured wearing a niqab. Settled in different rooms in Hathorn Hall, the students got to work. Rostoum divided the students into three groups - such separations are common in intelligence work in order to avoid mutually reinforcing similar ideas, she said. In addition to identifying the mole, the students had to discern how the mole gathered information and use the documents to construct a narrative. Rostoum handed out pictures and biographical profiles of (entirely fictional) MI6 agents and their spouses, the suspects’ phone records and purchase receipts, and financial irregularities that the agency flagged. Now, she and her classmates had a much bigger exercise ahead of them. “So I got to embody at least a little bit of what a spy does just in this small exercise.” “I had to match the handwriting on the note to the handwriting she was writing on the board,” she said. The instructional note was anonymous, so Fano had to verify that it was indeed from Rostoum. (Because Fano could simply look up her classmate’s hometown on a student directory and act natural otherwise, she stayed well-hidden.) At the beginning of the term, she found a note in her bag telling her to figure out the hometown of one of her classmates as a sort of pre-simulation mole hunt, her classmates had to guess who was the spy among them. “We get to do lots of different things we wouldn’t normally get to do during the school year,” she said.įano was perhaps the best able to think like a mole, having been one herself. It’s all very hands-on, said Arianna Fano ’19 of Lincolnshire, Ill., a politics major.
The Short Term course includes learning about world geography, transforming disparate data into insights you can act on, and a series of simulations ranging from a doomsday planning scenario to today’s mole hunt. Rostoum, currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Massachusetts Boston, majored in politics at Bates and worked in management consulting in the oil and gas sector before serving on the National Security Council at the White House. In her Short Term course on intelligence and national security, Elly Rostoum ’07 walks students through a “find the mole” simulation, in which they have to find out which fictional MI6 agent is leaking information to a foreign government.