"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.

Waters also said that U.S. agencies faced enormous challenges creating air-tight cover for its officers in the Internet age, and in penetrating the low-tech security employed by terrorist groups.

"They don't Google you," he said. "They call someone who knows the neighborhood you say your family is from and they go there and ask around about you."

He said that although al-Qaida and other terror groups were very tech savvy, they tended to rely very much on personal relationships as their way of doing business. "The vetting process goes on for years," he said of anyone who managed to gain access to the senior levels of a terror groups. "It can take a decade (of building relationships) before you get any level of trust in the inner circle."

His observations echo concerns expressed in a recently released "five-year strategic human capital plan" for all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies drawn up by the office of the new Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte.

"We find ourselves in a war for talent, often for the most arcane and esoteric of skills, sometimes between ourselves and/or with our own contractors," says the plan.

"Confronted by arbitrary staffing ceilings and uncertain funding," it continues, agencies "are left with no choice but to use contractors ... only to find that ... those same contractors recruit our own employees, already cleared and trained at government expense, and then 'lease' them back to us at considerably greater expense," the plan notes.

The situation is complicated because intelligence agencies have tended to adopt a "grow our own" approach, the plan says, recruiting at entry level and nurturing talent through a 30-year career.

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."

The plan lays out several of them, including boosting recruitment of exactly the kind of mid-career professionals Waters represents, by adopting a banded pay system with more flexibility to lure outside talent and using a new Senior Presidential Management Fellows program devised by the White House Office of Personnel Management. "If necessary," the plan concludes, the intelligence agencies will "design our own similar program."

New, more flexible pay scales, which reflect management performance evaluations rather than simply seniority, have long been the holy grail of federal workforce reformers. But both at the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security, labor unions have fought the changes, saying they effectively strip staff of their right to bargain collectively and create the risk of crony culture, in which management is able to reward their favorites via subjective measures of performance.

Sanders said the new system in the intelligence agencies would be a "kissing cousin" to the Pentagon's National Security Personnel System, but will be the first such effort where the bands envisaged will apply across departmental lines -- since the agencies are scattered across six cabinet departments.

The new system will be "a great laboratory for (the Office of Personnel Management) when they get around to doing (this) government-wide," said Sanders.

The plan also identifies "a safety net of support for their loved ones," as a duty to employees, and Waters says CIA management "went out of their way to help" him and fellow trainees and later employees when they had health problems in their family or other personal issues.

"Did I make less (money than in the private sector)? Yes. Did they look after me and my family? Absolutely."

Waters said a new generation of CIA employees were much better suited to work in the broadband age, and seemed to have a natural affinity for the post-Sept. 11 information-sharing regime adopted by the agency. He said they took easily to the agency's new multi-disciplinary, mission-oriented centers, like the new one dedicated to stopping weapons proliferation, in which operatives and analysts sit side-by-side, "bouncing ideas off one another."

"When a decision has to be made," he says of the new generation, it will be preceded by wide-ranging discussion. "They tend to move it around and mash it up," said Waters.

Analysis: Need for terror experts queried
by Kristyn Ecochard
UPI Correspondent Washington (UPI) Oct 19, 2006 Some security experts would like to pour money into teaching about counter-terrorism, but others are skeptical of such an investment.

Looking at what works and what doesn't, as well as the factors and root causes of terrorism, would allow a better understanding of what needs to be done to counter it, Yonah Alexander, director of the Inter-University Center for Terrorism Studies and editor of "Counterterrorism Strategies: Successes and Failures of Six Nations," told a conference at the Hudson Institute, a conservative Washington think tank, last week.

"The key to the challenge we are facing is learning from the past to know the future," he said.

The United States has done a lot of defensive planning but little implementation and not a lot on the offense, said Frank Cilluffo, associate vice president for Homeland Security at George Washington University.

Cilluffo said the solution did not lie in military force, but in shifting the focus to intelligence. He called for more investment into studying networks through social and biological sciences -- even on an animal level to marginalize and isolate terrorists.

However, Veronique de Rugy, an adjunct scholar at the CATO Institute, a libertarian Washington think tank, said that although the current U.S. counter-terrorism strategy needed to be changed, studying and training are not the way to go.

"That would be creating an industry with invested interest, and it's very unlikely that creating a career field would accomplish anything," de Rugy told United Press International. "Only intelligence will lead us to find out who the enemy is and catch them."

She suggested that the enemy and the actual risk -- as opposed to the perceived risk -- should be more clearly identified.

Currently intelligence officers receive little in the way of formal instruction, said Peter Leitner, president of the Higgins Counterterrorism Research Center and George Mason University professor. Terrorism and counter-terrorism will be a long-term issue, and investing in programs that educate and train experts would be well worth the money, he said.

"Investing in security experts will mean more money spent on another interest group. Security experts and defense contractors have been misguided ever since they got a new lease on life after Sept. 11," de Rugy said. "We have to invest more money in real intelligence."

"Counterterrorism Strategies," which came out in September, looks at a number of case studies in terrorism in the United States, Italy, Germany, France, Egypt and Sri Lanka, and how successful each country has been in quelling the threats.

Several European nations have longstanding experience with terror, but it only became real to the United States after Sept. 11, said Kersi Shroff, chief of the western law division at the Law Library of Congress.

During the 1970s in Italy and the 1980s in France existing laws were expanded to tighten security in response to terrorism, Shroff said. Harsher interrogations, phone surveillance, warrantless searches, preventive detention and extended prison sentences were allowed through emergency legislation.

Just like in the Unites States, the constitutionality was questioned and the public cried out that civil liberties were being stepped on. In both countries, said Shroff, the tightened control and deals offered to terrorists who disassociated with their groups led to the conviction and harsh sentencing of many who were involved in violent acts.

But some experts, such as de Rugy, believe that learning the history of terrorism won't help

"Little effort has been put into getting to know our enemies properly," she said. "Are we fighting people who got lucky once or twice and are in a cave now, or are the threats more serious?"

While swift action may be efficient, Matthias Sonn, director of the task force on international cooperation on counterterrorism at the German Federal Foreign Office, warned that policy makers must be careful not to harm their own countries by overreacting. As an example, Sonn talked about the United States limiting the acceptance of students on academic visas after Sept. 11, 2001.

"We need to think about the effect that has on the future academic leadership in America," Sonn said.

Experts argued that al-Qaida was hard-pressed to cause major problems, as they have become decentralized, but that doesn't mean there isn't imminent threat from other terrorist groups.

Critics like de Rugy disagreed.

"We think they're filled with resources, and that they could do anything they want, when it's highly possible they just got lucky with the big attacks," de Rugy said.

Related Links
Learn about Cyberwar Systems and Policy Issues at SpaceWar.com
News and analysis about the Global War Against Terror at SpaceWar.com