The office of the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency sits on the seventh floor of the old headquarters building at Langley. The seventh floor feels a little like the Metropolitan Club in Washington: a lot of wood panelling, heavy carpets, and, in the director’s dining room, a disconcerting number of waiters. It smells like men. The director has a suite with a view of the woods— pleasant on autumn days, but otherwise not the most breathtaking view that Washington has to offer its ascendant class.

During the past two decades, the suite has turned over like a fifteenth-century European throne room. It has been a period of great importance for intelligence work—there’s been the end of the Cold War, the emergence of Al Qaeda, the rise of China, the development of the Web and social media (and with it the transformation of intelligence collection and analysis), and the advent of cyber threats, plus nuclear proliferation, ethnic war, and revolutions in the Middle East. Yet the C.I.A.’s top leadership has often been in transition. With the resignation of David Petraeus, it is in flux again.

At the Federal Bureau of Investigation, directors can stay for seven years after Senate confirmation and can’t necessarily be tossed out when a new Administration comes in. At the State Department, the past five Secretaries have each served a four-year stint that coincided with a full Presidential term. At the C.I.A. during the past two decades, the longest-tenured director—George Tenet—stayed for seven years, longer than he should have. But since 1993, no one else has lasted even three years, and John Deutch, Porter Goss, and, now, David Petraeus each held the office for less than two. All three departed in tumultuous or unhappy circumstances. Even some directors who left on good terms, such as Michael Hayden and Leon Panetta, were gone before three years was up.

Intelligence work is a snake pit, and the C.I.A. is a lightning rod, so perhaps unusually high rates of turnover at the top should be expected. Yet the leadership instability at the agency has been reflected not just in short tenures but also in the diversity and incoherence of the outlooks and backgrounds of the men—all white men, ever since the C.I.A.’s founding—who have been appointed to lead.

During the past two decades, some directors were generals. Some were elected politicians. Some were academics or bureaucrats. Very few came to the seventh floor with a feel for the C.I.A.’s vast civil-service bureaucracy and culture or with a deep, long-range vision about how intelligence should change in the coming decades. None articulated convincingly—or was around long enough to see through—how the C.I.A. should evolve to account for, say, the Asian Century or the digital revolution. Many directors have seemed to regard their job as a kind of high-stress operational joy ride: secrecy-laden meetings at the White House, followed by flights on unmarked planes that land at exotic airports around the world under cover of darkness, followed by cigars and blunt talk with fellow spy chiefs. The hubris embedded in this way of leading has surely contributed to the high failure rate, including in the case of Petraeus.

The agency could use a leader who will stay for a good while. It would be a bonus if it were a woman with a big brain and some fresh ideas about the future of secret intelligence collection and global instability. It would be an additional bonus if she had the toughness to face down the C.I.A.’s paramilitary chiefs and the testosterone-amped veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, whose door-kicking, target-hunting work at forward-operating bases from Kurdistan to Khost is winding down—not ending, but destined to return to a smaller proportion of the agency’s work as the wars the Obama Administration inherited also wind down, at last.

Iraq and Afghanistan transformed the C.I.A. into a kind of branch of the Special Forces; that influenced who got promoted and whose offices got funded. The torture protocols of the Bush years and, more recently, the steady killing rhythms of the drone programs have changed the agency’s culture, mainly by militarizing it. Terrorist hunters ascended; scholarly analysts of Burmese politics rarely lunched on the seventh floor. The reforms that established an independent-analysis and coördination tsar, the director of National Intelligence, also contributed to confusion. When Petraeus was appointed, in 2011, he had been commanding wars in one capacity or another for more than four years. He held a doctoral degree and had an eclectic Rolodex, but the intellectualism he represented was that of West Point, and when he arrived at Langley, having just retired with four stars and a chest full of medals, the message was clear: the war fighters are in charge.

A reset is unlikely to occur without a different sort of director, one who can command the respect of the operators but also step out of the bunker and lead the entire bureaucracy—not only the counterterrorism specialists, the hard-target case officers at the Directorate of Operations and the ex-SEALs at the paramilitary Special Activities Division but also the analysts and the science and technology specialists, who may have more impact on the future of American security and the C.I.A.’s credibility than any of its gunmen.

The United States has never had anyone but white men run the agency, the Pentagon, or the F.B.I.—an increasingly absurd and shameful record. There are ample qualified candidates. Both of the past two Secretaries of State, Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice, could also have led the C.I.A. And, of course, there are plenty of men of color who could do the job, too.

It is impossible to say where the Petraeus-Allen-Broadwell-Kelley mess is headed; the first law of Washington scandal is that first impressions are almost always wrong. The matter doesn’t seem likely to entangle the C.I.A., but it’s too early to be sure. It’s not even clear that Petraeus should have had to resign. Yet the status quo at the agency has been shattered temporarily, and there is an opportunity to signal change.

It’s tempting for Presidents to appoint C.I.A. directors only on the basis of whether they are likely to cause the White House trouble or screw things up in the field. For Obama to do so now would hand Langley a prescription for more of the same. Surely there are less conventional candidates who can oversee the operational work with a team of career C.I.A. veterans, such as the current acting director, Michael Morell, while offering something else besides—a vision of the future of intelligence, a different life story, some sort of signal to the outside world that the Obama Administration is not just business as usual.

Intelligence work can be distasteful, but it is an aspect of self-defense. Since the shock of September 11th, Americans have, for the most part, rallied to the C.I.A. Liberal Hollywood adores the agency (“Argo,” “Homeland,”), as does conservative Hollywood (“24,” although it wasn’t set at the C.I.A.). Yet the real-life turnover, petty scandal, and dysfunction on the seventh floor seem like they’re from a different sort of movie—“Groundhog Day,” with a little of the old British serial “Yes, Minister” thrown in. It couldn’t hurt to break the mold. Find us a Carrie without the bipolar issues.

Illustration by Ed Nacional.