CQ HOMELAND SECURITY
Oct. 17, 2008 – 9:27 p.m.
CIA’s Loss of Top Spies ‘Catastrophic,’ Says Agency Veteran
By Jeff Stein, CQ Staff
Only a few months ago, Sam Faddis was running a CIA unit charged with preventing terrorists from getting nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
Today, only 50, the equivalent of a full colonel at the top of his game, he has quit.
Scores more like him, Faddis says, spies with years of working the back alleys of the world, have walked away from the CIA’s Operations Directorate at the top of their careers, at a time when the agency needs their skills the most.
The directorate is losing “25 or 30 chiefs of station” — the top CIA representative in a country or major city — “or their equivalent” at headquarters, every six months, Faddis estimates.
That’s out of an estimated thousand or fewer case officers — the men and women who recruit and manage spies — worldwide.
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The CIA has said that money is luring away its best old hands. And it’s true that a large number come back as private contractors, doing virtually the same jobs at twice the pay. Some say there are more contractors filling desk in the directorate now than career officers.
But many don’t return, Faddis maintains. And, theoretically, he and other operations veterans say, contractors can’t take leadership positions that have been emptied.
The CIA flatly denies there’s a hemorrhage of senior personnel.
“Last year, for example, it was in the neighborhood of 7 percent of GS-15s in the National Clandestine Service,” spokesman Paul Gimigliano said.
“And that’s somewhat below what it had been in previous years,” he continued. “It’s all quite modest. The notion of dramatic losses at that grade, or any other, is simply incorrect.”
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Virtually none of the team chiefs and case officers who led the first CIA units into Afghanistan and Iraq remain with the agency, said Faddis, who recently authored a memoir, “Operation Hotel California: The Clandestine War Inside Iraq.”
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Gary Berntsen, a former station chief who led one of the first CIA teams into Afghanistan after 9/11, agrees. He left in disgust over management.
In a new book, “Human Intelligence, Counterterrorism & National Leadership,” Berntsen writes that the agency’s personnel problems predated the Bush administration, but the president waited too long to double the size of the Operations Directorate.
Two more authors critical of CIA Management
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