WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A former CIA counterterrorism officer who tracked Osama bin Laden through the mountains of Afghanistan says the U.S. spy agency could need a decade to build up its clandestine service for the U.S. war on terrorism.Gary Berntsen, a decorated espionage officer who led a paramilitary unit code-named "Jawbreaker" in the war that toppled the Taliban after the September 11 attacks, said CIA Director Porter Goss faces an uphill battle to fill the agency's senior ranks with aggressive, seasoned operatives. "He's probably more aggressive than most of the senior officers in the clandestine service. So I think he's having to pull them along a bit," Berntsen said in an interview.
"(Goss) is trying to improve the situation. But it's going to be tough. The rebuilding is going to take years. A decade, at least," he told Reuters late last week.
The CIA, widely criticized for lapses involving prewar Iraq and the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, has seen its clandestine staff dwindle to less than 5,000 employees from a peak of over 7,000, intelligence sources say.
Experts blame a post-Cold War downturn in recruitment for a current lack of seasoned clandestine operatives that has been exacerbated by a rush to lucrative private sector jobs in recent years. "We have a smaller number of really, really aggressive, creative members of our leadership in the senior service," said Berntsen, who recently published a book about his exploits in the war on terrorism, titled "Jawbreaker".
Former CIA Director George Tenet told the September 11 commission in April 2004 the CIA would need five years to produce a clandestine service fully capable of tackling the terrorism threat. Goss later said at his September 2004 Senate confirmation hearings that rebuilding the clandestine operation would be "a long build-out, a long haul."
President George W. Bush issued an order last year that called for a 50 percent increase in CIA clandestine officers and analysts to be completed "as soon as feasible." "The CIA is moving aggressively to rebuild and enhance its capabilities across the board," CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said.
But intelligence sources say the rebuilding process has been complicated by disaffection for Goss' leadership within the clandestine service.
Years of double-digit growth in federal spending on intelligence that followed the September 11 attacks may also be about to end. John Negroponte, the new U.S. director of national intelligence, has endorsed an intelligence budget for fiscal year 2007 that is relatively flat, with current spending levels believed to total about $44 billion for the 15-agency intelligence community.