http://www.iht.com/articles/519637.htmlWASHINGTON Even now, 30 months after the Sept. 11 attacks, America's clandestine intelligence service numbers fewer than 1,100 case officers posted overseas, fewer than the number of FBI agents assigned to the New York City field office alone, according to government officials. Since George Tenet took charge of the CIA seven years ago, rebuilding the service has been his top priority. This year alone, more newly minted case officers will graduate from a yearlong course at Camp Peary, in Virginia, than in any year since the Vietnam War. They are the products of aggressive and targeted new recruiting efforts aimed in particular at attracting more Arabic-language speakers and others capable of operating in the Middle East and South Asia.
But it will be another five years, Tenet and others have warned, before the rebuilding is complete and the United States has in place the network it needs adequately to confront a global threat posed by terrorist groups and hostile foreign governments.
In an interview, James Pavitt, who as the CIA's deputy director for operations oversees the clandestine service, said he still needed 30 percent to 35 percent more people than those now in its ranks. "I need hundreds and hundreds, thousands," Pavitt said. At a time when the United States is fighting a war on terrorism and a war in Iraq, he said, "we are running hard to get the resources we need.""The question is, should you require better before you get bigger?" said a senior congressional official, describing a question that he said had been prompted by inquiries now underway into intelligence failures involving Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks. The size and scope of the clandestine service, whose case officers overseas recruit and supervise spies and work with foreign intelligence services, but rarely try to infiltrate foreign targets themselves, has always been among the government's most closely guarded secrets. But as the dimensions of the intelligence failures on Iraq and Sept. 11 have begun to come to light in recent months, so too has a new picture of American spying operations stretched thin through the 1990s and only now recovering.
In the interview, Pavitt said it would be wrong to regard the agency as risk-averse. But he also described as "unnecessary" the directive that was issued by Deutch, and rescinded under Tenet in 2002, after being relaxed immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks. Pavitt said the CIA was only now "turning around" what he called a mistaken perception among some officers that they were prohibited from dealing with criminals and other unsavory individuals. "I'm not going to succeed against terrorism unless I recruit terrorists," Pavitt said. "I'm not going to succeed in terms of the tough issues in this business unless I'm right in the middle of it."
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