New Year, New Challenges for CIA

CIA ops veteran Glenn Corn on the agency's millenials, Israel, Ukraine, Russia and more in the latest SpyTalk podcast

“Young people today!” You won’t hear that around the CIA (at least not out loud), and not just because it’s such a shopworn cliché comedians junked it decades ago. It’s because yesterday’s young person, including the much derided millenial, is today’s rising employee, a 25-to-30 year old entrusted with critical national security secrets, fraught operational duties, hazardous missions or somber managerial responsibilities.

CIA operations veteran Glenn Corn (photo ©Jeff Stein 2023)

Two years ago, America’s premier spying-and-analysis agency realized that it had to go with what it got, so to speak, and began to wade more agressively into the pool of people born between the mid-1990s and early aughts, from all sorts of racial, cultural and sexual backgrounds, to restock its workforce and compete on the espionage playfields of the world.

Some barstool pundits mocked that as “woke.” The agency took exception.

“We had to go where the talent is," Sheronda Dorsey, the CIA’s deputy associate director for talent, explained to the Wall Street Journal two years ago this month. CIA veterans began telling me a decade ago that the latest generation to sign up was just as smart and capable as their predecessors—even more so, some said, especially in the digital realm—but they were…different. They wanted things like a better work-life balance, continued (if limited) social media participation, and (annoyingly) faster tracks to the agency’s more glamorous posts.

The state of the current workforce wasn’t the point of my SpyTalk podcast interview last week with Glenn Corn, a decorated former Army, State Department and CIA operations officer, but with the new year looming and many urgent crises afoot, I couldn’t resist it.