"This has got to be about ideas. We have to sell people on the ideas."
Sixty percent of US intelligence analysts have five years of experience or less on the job. In the larger intelligence community of about 100,000 employees, which includes clandestine operatives and support staff, those young workers are about 40 percent of the rolls.
By and large, these newer members of the community are optimistic and, like Wertheimer, believe that the intelligence community is dangerously broken.
"I am threatening the status quo," Wertheimer says. "And that's a hard pill to swallow for anybody."
Wertheimer says that a colleague once told him, "You will have succeeded when you become really hard to manage."
Wertheimer compared the government's attempts at collaboration to the Borg ... who "assimilate" whole societies by stripping people of individual character traits ...
Wertheimer says that the intelligence agencies could be compared to the record companies.
Lowenthal told him, "I think, unfortunately, a lot of this is pandering to a bunch of commissions that have no understanding of what we do for a living, or the nature of our work, and to a workforce. And I don't think that's a sufficient ground for a transformation. And so I'm left here wondering, what's the end state? For what reason?"
