The CIA’s Thinning Blue Line

http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?parm1=5&docID=hsnews-000003200933
According to informed sources, a leading candidate to run the CIA’s huge Kabul station has no experience in the Middle East or South Asia.

Now, firsthand familiarity with a region, not to mention an ability to speak the local language, is not the alpha-and-omega for running a station with as many as 250 case officers (the men and women who recruit spies), plus support staff.

A good feel for, and deep experience in, the spy business can be just as important, or more important, than speaking Urdu.

But if my tipsters are correct, it would indicate that the CIA’s bench remains thin, eight years after the 9/11 attacks. Is it still so hard to find good senior managers who know Sunnis from Shia?

Sources say the attrition of talented, experienced operatives from the CIA’s Clandestine Services Division remains high, though not as severe as during the second Bush term, when the doors spun full time with the gold rush for contractor jobs.

The reasons are not easy to pin down.

The lure of doubling a salary with one of the intelligence contractors remains high, of course.

Then there’s the stress on family life.

And then there are the pencil-headed bureaucrats common to any government agency, including the CIA, who drive good people out — or prevent them from coming back.

Recently an experienced former case officer who’d grown restless with a job in private industry and wanted to come back was told he was welcome — but the agency wouldn’t pick up the expense of moving his family back from the West Coast. He told them to hell with it.