Stressed out office worker.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) posted an article on its website recently called: “A day in the life of a CIA Operations Center Officer”, which raised some serious red flags over how the CIA operates and pushed its workers to work 12 hour days in some cases.
In the piece the agent called “Bradley” (probably not his real name) explained a little bit about his duties in operations as well his “choice” to serve within the “operations center.”
According to the CIA website the “operations center” is really the Information Operations Center’s Analysis Group (IOC/AG).
It mission is to “evaluate foreign threats to US computer systems, particularly those that support critical infrastructures. They provide analysis to the President, his senior advisers, high-level officials on cyber issues in the Departments of Defense, State, and Treasury, and to senior private-sector officials responsible for operating critical infrastructures:
IOC/AG analysts consider potential threats from state and nonstate actors and evaluate a wide array of information, including foreign intentions, plans, and capabilities.”
(source: CIA https://www.cia.gov/offices-of-cia/intelligence-analysis/organization-1/ioc-ag.html).
According to the article:
“While many CIA officers become subject matter experts on specific topics, Ops Center officers address world-wide political, military and economic issues daily, and they use a wide range of analytic and operational knowledge to support the Agency’s mission at home and abroad.”
Within this context what “Bradley” says is quite interesting as well very revealing of how the center operates:
“I was given a few choices on which job I could take, and the Ops Center position appealed to me,” Bradley said. And since beginning his work in the Ops Center, Bradley said, “It’s everything I imagined it would be and more.”
“There is no substitute for juggling multiple classified time sensitive projects, 12 hours a day, over and over again outside of actually doing it,” said Bradley, an officer serving in the CIA Operations Center (Ops Center).
Bradley indicated he works 12 hour days – which raises serious health concern which could effect performance on the job. However he maintains “I’m not burned out yet,” he said. “I will continue to work long days for the sake of our country as long as I’m able.”
According to numerous articles including one published by Forbes magazine called “Why working more than 8 hours can kill you” – if your working in excess of 8 hours a day you need to seriously “rethink your routine”. Because it could lead to “stress, high blood pressure, unhealthy diets and lead to thousands of serious health problems.”
The research is apparently based a study by the American Journal of Epidemiology called: “Long Working Hours and Coronary Heart Disease: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis” (source: http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2012/09/04/aje.kws139.abstract).
The study combined results from different studies done over a 50 year period which found that spending too long in the office resulted in a 40 – 80 % higher risk of heart disease as compared to a regular 8 hour day.
We contacted the CIA for comment on why they ever allow there officers to work such long hours despite the health risks involved and received “no answer” (stone silence) from the super secretive agency, which apparently published this article under the premise it would be an example of its dedicated work force.
It did not foresee or anticipate that people might criticize the practice within the agency which otherwise allows workers to obsess and engage in such unheathly practices as to exceed of 11.5 hours a day – especially within the “Operations Center” itself – which is deemed critical in terms of serving the national security interests of the Nation.
As usual in such cases our telephone calls and email inquires went unanswered by the agency which chose to ignore this situation. We also tried to contact the CIA Inspector General but again our communication went unanswered.
The CIA Office of Inspector General (OIG) is an independent office of the CIA that is headed by the Inspector General and promotes economy, efficiency, effectiveness and accountability in the management of CIA activities by performing independent audits, inspections, investigations, and reviews of CIA programs and operations.