WASHINGTON, Oct. 24 (UPI) -- U.S. spy agencies cannot retain the people they are recruiting and training for the toughest jobs of all -- collecting human intelligence on al-Qaida and other terrorist groups.
Thomas Waters, a former CIA officer who was a member of the agency's first post-Sept. 11 training class, told United Press International that the agency's clandestine service -- which recruits agents who spy for the United States -- had special problems retaining those like him, who had joined mid-career.
"You start doing the math and thinking about when you're going to retire and you can't get the numbers to add up," he said, adding that he had left the agency because he could not afford to stay there.
"You don't want to end up working at Wal-Mart (after retirement) to put your kids through college," said Waters, who has written a book about his experiences in CIA training called "Class 11," and who is now an intelligence contractor for the Department of Defense.
Waters also said that U.S. agencies faced enormous challenges creating air-tight cover for its officers in the Internet age, and in penetrating the low-tech security employed by terrorist groups.
"They don't Google you," he said. "They call someone who knows the neighborhood you say your family is from and they go there and ask around about you."
He said that although al-Qaida and other terror groups were very tech savvy, they tended to rely very much on personal relationships as their way of doing business. "The vetting process goes on for years," he said of anyone who managed to gain access to the senior levels of a terror groups. "It can take a decade (of building relationships) before you get any level of trust in the inner circle."
His observations echo concerns expressed in a recently released "five-year strategic human capital plan" for all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies drawn up by the office of the new Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte.
"We find ourselves in a war for talent, often for the most arcane and esoteric of skills, sometimes between ourselves and/or with our own contractors," says the plan.
"Confronted by arbitrary staffing ceilings and uncertain funding," it continues, agencies "are left with no choice but to use contractors ... only to find that ... those same contractors recruit our own employees, already cleared and trained at government expense, and then 'lease' them back to us at considerably greater expense," the plan notes.
The situation is complicated because intelligence agencies have tended to adopt a "grow our own" approach, the plan says, recruiting at entry level and nurturing talent through a 30-year career.
Speaking earlier this month to reporters after the release of the plan, Negroponte's Chief Human Capital Officer Ron Sanders said of the agencies, retrenched at the end of the cold war: "By design or default, we were gutted in the 1990s and we didn't replace the human capital we lost."
But skipping a generation in that way, the plan says, made the age and experience profile of the workforce "bimodal" -- 40 percent hired since Sept. 11, and 20 percent becoming retirement eligible within the next five years -- "two 'humps' with a deep and disturbing valley in between ... with serious ramifications for our overall capacity and leadership succession."
Moreover, the plan continues, "the career patterns of today's new hires will not resemble this traditional model, and we must devise effective alternatives to this closed-system paradigm."
The plan lays out several of them, including boosting recruitment of exactly the kind of mid-career professionals Waters represents, by adopting a banded pay system with more flexibility to lure outside talent and using a new Senior Presidential Management Fellows program devised by the White House Office of Personnel Management. "If necessary," the plan concludes, the intelligence agencies will "design our own similar program."
New, more flexible pay scales, which reflect management performance evaluations rather than simply seniority, have long been the holy grail of federal workforce reformers. But both at the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security, labor unions have fought the changes, saying they effectively strip staff of their right to bargain collectively and create the risk of crony culture, in which management is able to reward their favorites via subjective measures of performance.
Sanders said the new system in the intelligence agencies would be a "kissing cousin" to the Pentagon's National Security Personnel System, but will be the first such effort where the bands envisaged will apply across departmental lines -- since the agencies are scattered across six cabinet departments.
The new system will be "a great laboratory for (the Office of Personnel Management) when they get around to doing (this) government-wide," said Sanders.
The plan also identifies "a safety net of support for their loved ones," as a duty to employees, and Waters says CIA management "went out of their way to help" him and fellow trainees and later employees when they had health problems in their family or other personal issues.
"Did I make less (money than in the private sector)? Yes. Did they look after me and my family? Absolutely."
Waters said a new generation of CIA employees were much better suited to work in the broadband age, and seemed to have a natural affinity for the post-Sept. 11 information-sharing regime adopted by the agency. He said they took easily to the agency's new multi-disciplinary, mission-oriented centers, like the new one dedicated to stopping weapons proliferation, in which operatives and analysts sit side-by-side, "bouncing ideas off one another."
"When a decision has to be made," he says of the new generation, it will be preceded by wide-ranging discussion. "They tend to move it around and mash it up," said Waters.
