CIA can`t retain trained staff

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.

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.’