Flushed Out

A former undercover operative explains how bad management drives out the CIA's best and brightest.

The CIA traditionally has boasted one of the lowest attrition rates among government agencies, about 4.5 percent. But this figure-like almost everything else about the agency-is deceptive. It lumps retirees, analysts, administrative workers and information technology specialists in with the agency's bread and butter: spies. Anyone who has worked at the Directorate of Operations, otherwise known as the clandestine service, knows that attrition among young clandestine officers is much higher than elsewhere in the CIA.

When I was a clandestine service trainee, we used to joke about people who were on the "five-year plan"- recruits who would join, undergo two to three years of highly specialized and costly training, serve a two-year overseas tour, and promptly quit upon returning to the United States. Sometimes these officers left for personal reasons, but more often they came to the disheartening realization that the operations directorate was poorly managed to the point of near dysfunction.

When I joined the CIA in August 1998, I never thought I would end up on the five-year plan. But I did. After one tour overseas and a lot of soul searching, I resigned in May 2003, almost five years after I had joined. An inside look at the clandestine service convinced me that the CIA was no place to make a meaningful career, or any significant contribution to my country.

Perhaps the most deceptive element of the CIA's attrition rate is that it doesn't account for quality versus quantity. Many officers stick it out, but do so in large part because the agency makes it inordinately difficult to resign after an officer has invested a certain amount of time and the organization has invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in training. Another inside joke among spy trainees in the late 1990s was that the agency suffered from reverse Darwinism: The best left early, while mediocre officers stayed and inevitably were promoted.

Operations directorate case officers live undercover, usually overseas, and are responsible for recruiting foreigners and stealing state secrets from other nations. Increasingly, they are expected to infiltrate terrorist networks and recruit those with access to terrorists in the hope of preventing another Sept. 11. The officers who make up the CIA's clandestine service are inarguably its most valuable resource. Yet the agency is unwilling to release data that would show how much money is invested in each officer's initial training, or how many of these officers opt to leave after just one or two tours.

CIA spokeswoman Anya Guilsher says the clandestine service attrition rate is exceptionally low, but she admits the agency doesn't keep separate statistics for mid-career officers and recruits. And like the overall intelligence budget, unofficially estimated to be more than $40 billion annually, the actual amount of funding allocated to clandestine service trainees either is unknown or classified. "To get into something like that would really be getting into the weeds," Guilsher says.

Maladroit Management

I am not authorized to reveal either the size of my training class, or how many among us have quit, but I can say the quit rate is more than 10 percent. What's more, the officers who became fed up and left were, in my perception, the best and the brightest, and they quit for reasons that better management could have prevented.

An Ivy League graduate who resigned from the agency in 2003 after a single tour explains it this way: "The agency is able to attract bright and creative and generally patriotic people, because it has that mystique and you come in with the idea that you can do something good. But it can't retain any of these people because it's so poorly managed," he says. "And the culture, once you're on the inside, is one of laziness and conformity. After a while, you realize that not only are you not doing anything good, you're not doing anything at all."

A former Marine turned CIA officer who resigned after less than five years' service says that a large part of the CIA's problem is endemic to government. "The bottom line is that good leaders are rare at the agency and a lot of idiots are promoted into management positions simply by default," he says.

"The agency needs to compare how companies that do it right-General Electric for example-identify high-quality people early and take care to keep them energized, committed to the company and well trained to the company's process for selecting managers," the former officer says. "The problem is that GE can tell folks to hit the road [but] the government can't fire anyone without getting sued. . . . This makes it very hard to reward your superstars, because you can't raise the pay of a few overachievers without an act of Congress. You end up not being able to get to the sharp end of the pyramid, which frustrates the good managers that you do have and leaves subordinates disillusioned because they are stuck being led by knuckleheads."

Nearly all the former colleagues and operations directorate officers with whom I spoke for this article cited poor management as the primary reason they quit. An officer who resigned shortly after finishing training described how turf protection trumps even the most urgent missions. By way of background, every clandestine service officer is assigned a home base, either a geographic division such as Central Eurasia or the Near East, or a specialty component such as the Counterproliferation Division or the ever-burgeoning Counterterrorist Center. Before 9/11, these divisions were territorial, and until late 2001, CTC was viewed as a dumping ground for second-rate officers who had been shunned by the geographic divisions. Post-9/11, a number of officers from geographic divisions were "surged" into CTC in order to confront the ever-increasing terrorist threat.

The officer had been assigned to a geographic division in 2003 and was told he would commence a two-year overseas tour in one of its low-profile countries. "I approached the personnel officer and told him that, frankly, I would rather serve in Baghdad or Afghanistan, where I knew there was a need and where I could be sure I was contributing to the overall mission," he says. "I was told, 'There's no longer a need over there. You should just go where you're told.'

"I couldn't believe that there wasn't a need for officers in the Middle East, so I approached the CTC personnel office myself," the officer says. "Of course they wanted me, because they're in dire need of people to serve in Baghdad and Afghanistan. I realized that the personnel officer within my [division] had just outright lied to me. They cared more about maintaining their own turf, even at the cost of the mission." When the officer again confronted his personnel official, he was told that he was getting a "bad hallway reputation" and promptly was dismissed from the division. "The funny thing is, had they been reasonable about it, I would have served a meaningful CTC tour and then perhaps come back to the division," the former officer says. "But their ridiculous behavior led me to quit."

Stubbornly Shortsighted

Poor management doesn't just come in the form of turf wars. The agency also is maladroit at handling problems that plague many workplaces. A colleague told me of his frustration with a boss overseas who routinely showed up to work inebriated, if he showed up at all. "In any other agency, there would be some kind of recourse for dealing with management like this," says the officer, who since has left the agency. "But at the CIA, there is no one to go to. If you complain, it adversely affects your career, and incompetent managers are rarely, if ever, removed. They're just shuffled to another location."

Sexual harassment is another constant at the CIA. I never was a victim, but several female colleagues complained to me of instances of either subtle or blatant harassment. One woman's manager called her into his office in the middle of the workday and asked if he could kiss her. "At least he asked," was the comment of another female officer who also had suffered sexual harassment. Another female colleague approached the directorate's Equal Employment Opportunity official to lodge a complaint of harassment, only to be told nothing could be done. "They only pay us lip service here," the EEO official said. The officer who lodged the complaint resigned a few months later.

Resigning from any job is often a wrenching personal decision, but the nature of the CIA makes it significantly more difficult. "They make you feel as if you can never leave," says a former spy who resigned in 2004, "like there's going to be this big gap on your résumé and if you ever tell anyone you worked at the agency, they'll deny it and possibly even come after you."

I was fortunate enough to successfully lobby the agency to "roll back" my cover, meaning that I can now reveal to potential employers that I used to work at the CIA. Some of my former colleagues were not so lucky. A colleague was told that he had worked on "too many sensitive issues" to ever get his cover lifted. The officer had just finished training, however, and had never even traveled overseas. "It was like they were going to do whatever they could to keep me from quitting," the former officer says, "even though they knew that ultimately I'd be miserable in the job."

When the officer wanted to apply for a job with another government agency, the CIA still resolutely refused to allow him to reveal his true place of employment for the previous five years. Lying on an application for a federal job is a criminal offense, so the officer ended up missing the opportunity to enter another form of public service. He left the CIA anyway and was lucky enough to land a job in the private sector, notwithstanding the inexplicable gap on his résumé.

This sort of shortsightedness is common at the CIA. When I initially was contacted about joining in 1997, I coincidentally was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to Bulgaria. I asked the agency if I could defer my start date in order to fulfill the Fulbright. My logic, which proved faulty, was that the CIA would welcome the valuable experience I would gain during a year spent overseas while obtaining fluency in another language. But the CIA recruitment officer was petulant and discouraging, informing me that my desire to fulfill the Fulbright was causing the agency to question my commitment. Though I did fulfill the scholarship before entering the CIA, it inexplicably was viewed by the agency as a liability, rather than as an asset.

Another colleague was working at the operations directorate while attending law school at night. His bar exam conflicted with a routine training meeting, one that was deemed mandatory, although the information could have been relayed to the officer by a colleague or supervisor. He was told that if he missed the meeting to take the bar exam, he would be expelled from the training program. Again, agency management failed to see the officer's effort to obtain a law degree, or the degree itself, as valuable to his CIA service. Instead, he was viewed as an upstart.

Daring to Quit

Another source of frustration among young spies is the overriding sense that much of the CIA's clandestine officer training is irrelevant. Even before 9/11, a number of us questioned the tactics of the agency's multimillion-dollar spy school, known as "the Farm," near Williamsburg, Va. There, we relied on tactics and a "syllabus" of sorts that had been put in use during the Cold War and likely had not been modified in several decades. We were taught to troll the embassy cocktail circuit in foreign countries in search of likely sources, and how to schmooze characters of questionable value, such as the third secretary at the Embassy of Tajikistan. We all harbored the disquieting suspicion that these training methods might be terribly outmoded. It was not likely that Osama bin Laden and his cohorts would be hanging out by the hors d'oeuvres table at an embassy Chinese National Day reception. The tragic events of Sept. 11 would bring home for many of us just how misguided the training was.

Though 9/11 should have forced changes to training for CIA recruits, my conversations with recent spy school graduates revealed that the archaic training program remains in place. As a result of inadequate training, poor management and faltering morale, the CIA's best and brightest officers still appear to be the most likely to cut short their careers. Many of those who remain also are disillusioned and desperately desire change. They stay the course only because they see no other choice.

When I resigned, I was made to feel that life "on the outside" would be tremendously difficult for me. "We've trained you with a particular skill set that you'll find nearly impossible to apply in any other career," a higher-up told me. It was, of course, an absurd claim. Fortunately, I wasn't so far removed from my former life to forget that prior to joining the agency I had been an accomplished and hard-working person.

Curiously, when I finally did quit, no managers or personnel officials bothered to ask why I was leaving. That said, countless veteran operations officers came out of the woodwork to confide, "I wish I had done what you're doing years ago."

"I feel like I've been here so long, I'm just stuck," one female case officer said to me. "It takes guts to quit," said another colleague who since has resigned. That's the problem with the CIA: Those who are daring enough to take initiative often take the initiative to get out.