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.
In the February 2005 issue of Government Executive, author Lindsay Moran recounts vividly how poor management eventually drove her -- and many others -- away from the intelligence agency. Read the full story here.
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