ASIO is putting young, inexperienced officers in senior jobs, as the domestic spy agency struggles to absorb an influx of recruits hired in an unprecedented expansion of the organisation.
Key positions in combating terrorism and detecting foreign spies are being left vacant as ASIO trains new officers, recruited in slick advertising campaigns targeting generations X and Y.
ASIO's staff has doubled in the past six years, but two-thirds have less than five years' experience, according to its unreported submission to the Joint Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee last month.
While the submission says it has benefited from the skills brought by new staff, it reveals the proportion of seasoned agents is falling, with ASIO struggling to maintain the number of officers in key intelligence roles.
As the organisation expands, officers have been rapidly promoted beyond their level of skill, at a time when the federal government's new counter-terrorism white paper warns the threat of terrorism is ''a persistent and permanent feature of Australia's security environment''.
''The need to fill critical senior officer vacancies, particularly in the intelligence-focused areas, has drawn heavily on officers with limited or narrow experience in the organisation and who may not have well-developed leadership skills,'' the submission says.
ASIO's workload has increased exponentially since the September 11, 2001, terrorism attacks in the US, and the Bali bombings in 2002.
Its budget for this year is more than $400 million, four times more than in 2003.
Under legislation introduced in Parliament last month, combating people-smuggling will be added to its responsibilities.
The organisation's $606 million headquarters being built on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin - dubbed the Lubyanka on the Lake by Canberra wits - will house a new multi-agency counter-terrorism control centre.
The submission reveals an organisation straining under huge expansion.
It is struggling to attract enough linguists and recruits from ethnic backgrounds, with skills critical to preventing home-grown terrorism and catching foreign spies.
It also reveals that coping with a massive influx of new staff - numbers have doubled since 2003 to 1609, and will peak at 1860 next year - has distracted the agency from its key functions, as it juggles its human resource management.
It says the growth ''has occurred at a time when there has been little, if any, relief in the rapid operational tempo'' - jargon for the growing pressure of its intelligence work.
The organisation is overwhelmingly young: half the staff have been in the agency three years or less, their median age is 36, while only about 300 have more than 10 years' experience. Only about 18 per cent of ASIO staff are intelligence officers - the people who detect evidence of terrorism or espionage - and the proportion is ''growing slowly'', with the area ''difficult to grow and sustain''.
At the same time, it appears ASIO staff are happy in the service - only 4.5 per cent of staff left last year, a dramatic fall on the previous year.
The expansion has created other problems: checking the background of potential recruits means ASIO officers are diverted from their intelligence and security roles.
A $2 million advertising campaign last year attracted 12,550 applicants. Of those, 564 underwent ''Top Secret (Positive Vetting)'', a detailed examination of their background to ensure they can be trusted with secrets.
ASIO aims to vet applications within 16 weeks, but sometimes it can take more than six months, ''particularly for applicants who have complex backgrounds, or when there are matters that need to be resolved''.
''The long lead times associated with the recruitment and vetting process result in critical vacancies remaining unfilled for extended periods.''
Recruiting linguists remains a ''challenge''. While it has recruited ''a larger number'' of staff from ethnically diverse backgrounds, ''a range of cultural and other factors'' mean the ethnic diversity of ASIO's workforce is below Australian Public Service levels.
A younger workforce, in which women account for 45 per cent of the total, creates other issues. They are in an age group that has families, leading to an increase in the number taking parental leave and working part time.