Nyet: CIA’s recruitment hits snag with bad Russian grammar

The CIA’s new recruitment campaign just experienced a little Russian interference — sort of.

The government agency, on the prowl for a few good patriotic men and women fluent in Russian, was apparently a little too clever in its mobilization bid when Russian-language posters, plastered on Washington subway stations, failed to pass grammatical muster.

Words were botched during the translation from English to Cyrillic, and the syntax was incorrect.

The mistake dealt with a subject-verb agreement issue as the poster sentence under scrutiny, written partly in English and Russian, was a dud.

According to RT, the first clause, written in Russian, translated as “Your mastery of foreign languages,” which should be followed by a singular verb. But the rest of the sentence reads “are (instead of is) vitally important to our national security.”

The posters are the CIA’s latest effort to expand its reach in America and its Twitter account has nearly 2.6 million followers.

“Our office of public affairs is getting ready,” said CIA Director Gina Haspel recently, regarding the recruitment of potential new hires. The agency’s Twitter bio reads, CIA operatives “go where others cannot go.”

But this story ends happily as the posters were apparently corrected.

One Twitter user, known as @RussiawithoutBS, posted with glee, “They fixed it!”