NewsMax.com
Wednesday, May 12, 2004

With surprising candor for a seasoned spy, Pavitt, who has spent more than 30 years at the CIA, wrote in testimony to the 9/11 Commission, “We cover a terrorist target around this globe using a cadre of case officers that is smaller than the number of FBI officers who work in New York City alone.”

According to the Times report, an FBI official disclosed that only about 1,100 agents are assigned to the New York field office, which includes the city's five boroughs, Long Island and six counties north of the city.

Explaining how the clandestine service has evolved from a focus on the Soviet Union since the ending of the Cold War, Pavitt said in April 9/11 testimony that 50 percent of the funding in the directorate of operations and 30 percent of personnel within the clandestine service are now focused on terrorism.

"Every station in the clandestine service has counterterrorism as its top priority," Pavitt explained, adding the chilling proviso: "I worry immensely that there are people who are trying to kill us as we sit here and talk. It is an extraordinary threat."

Meanwhile, Pavitt’s boss George Tenet is on record saying it will be an additional five years before his agency’s rebuilding is complete and the U.S. has the network it needs to adequately confront a global threat posed by terrorist groups and hostile foreign governments.

Furthermore, Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former C.I.A. officer, has pushed the window out even farther when speaking in terms of collecting the expanded cadre of deep undercover agents the agency needs.

"Ideally, within 10 years, 50 percent of case officers should be under nonofficial cover," Gerecht said, referring to an arrangement in which overseas case officers assume identities as bankers, consultants or other professionals.

Gerecht has been critical of the tradition of having the spies work from U.S. embassies, arguing that such a scenario hampers the recruiting of operatives capable of penetrating terrorist groups.

But even with the post-9/11 impetus and the CIA in recruitment overdrive, intelligence officials concede that the agency's success in hiring case officers fluent in critical languages and comfortable in foreign cultures has been limited by the system.

Part of that bureaucratic hurdle requires that new officers be no older than 35 and that they qualify for a top secret security clearance. Such a clearance adds a background check that takes at least six months.

However, a top secret clearance may be anathema to the process.

Pavitt says, "I'm not going to succeed against terrorism unless I recruit terrorists. I'm not going to succeed in terms of the tough issues in this business unless I'm right in the middle of it."

The clandestine agency wants to move quickly ahead of where it was before the invasion of Iraq, a top intelligence target for more than a decade. At that time, the CIA had just four human sources of intelligence in the Iraqi government, senior intelligence officials now acknowledge.

Editor's note: