The CIA's critics have made much of the fact that the agency's clandestine service is still basically a bunch of English-speaking white men who couldn't infiltrate an al Qaeda cell if they tried.

     I happen to agree that the Directorate of Operation's lack of racial, ethnic and linguistic diversity remains a huge problem, and I don't fully understand why the CIA can't do better, given the incredible diversity of the United States.

     But the question remains: Even if the CIA had Arab American case officers who were fluent in idiomatic Arabic and skillful enough to talk their way into Osama bin Laden's terror network, would--or should--the CIA let them do it?

     Two agency veterans give very different answers.

     "It's never going to happen. Never. And furthermore, it never should happen," says Frederick W. Rustmann Jr., a former CIA station chief who retired in 1990 after 24 years in the DO, writes in the Central Intelligence Retirement Association's Fall 2002 Newsletter.

     "No matter how much money and personnel are thrown at the CIA to help it defeat the terrorists and assure that another 9/11 never happens again, the CIA would never risk one of its case officers (even if they had one with the qualifications to do the deed--which they don't) to personally infiltrate al Qaeda or any other Muslim terrorist organization," Rustmann says. "This is not a question of personal courage or institutional commitment--it's a matter of common sense. This is not how the real world of intelligence works--it's the stuff of Hollywood fiction."

     Typically, CIA case officers recruit and then handle foreign "agents" whom they task to do things Americans cannot, like infiltrating al Qaeda cells. Most critics, Rustmann contends, don't understand the difference.

     "They don't know that the CIA employs thousands of people in virtually every country on earth who are indeed natives and who can blend into the societal woodwork because they actually are a part of it," writes Rustmann, now chairman of CTC International Group, Inc., a business intelligence firm. "And if the agent is savvy enough, he or she can be trained in the arcane art of clandestine tradecraft, put through a rigorous vetting process including the polygraph, to become what is known in the trade as a 'principal agent.' So on the one hand we have the case officer who must fit into the U.S. diplomatic environment at home and abroad, and who has total loyalty to the U.S., and on the other hand we have the principal agent who is a trusted native of a particular foreign country who can be trained and vetted to the extent that he can be given the responsibility to perform specific compartmented tasks within an operational and cultural environment totally familiar to him."

     Then there is Robert D. Steele, a former CIA case officer who has become Washington's leading proponent of open source, or publicly available, intelligence.

     He says Rustmann knows the DO only too well. "The clandestine service has become a joke," Steele contends, "and we need to break the mold."

     For him, breaking the mold means getting case officers out of embassies and shelving their "official cover" as State Department officers for "non-official" cover as businessmen, academics, aid workers and the like. The new case officer should also have native or near-native language fluency and years of experience abroad, he believes, which means the CIA needs to start hiring older, mid-career individuals, not young adults in their late 20s. And given the level of experience mid-career cases officers should have, he says, they should be required to think in part like analysts and understand what kind of intelligence is out there from open sources so they can better focus on what it is they really need to acquire from foreign agents.

     "You don't send a spy where a school boy can go," says Steele.

     But if there's a mission a spy needs to perform, like infiltrating an al Qaeda cell, Steele believes the CIA should have spies who can do it. The kind of case officer he envisions should be able to do so, or at least be in much better position to get close and understand the kind of agent who could actually penetrate the wall.

     But he agrees with Rustmann on this much: "It's my opinion that there is no one in America who is qualified to be a case officer and capable of penetrating a terrorist organization," he says.

     I think it's time the CIA removes many, if not most, of its case officers from embassies and gives them cover that really makes them clandestine.

     But it shouldn't end there. I agree with Steele that hiring mid-career professionals with real language skills and overseas experience makes sense. And given the devastating nature of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, it may be for the CIA to start taking the risk of using its own case officers to do the riskiest jobs. Undercover cops, after all, infiltrate drug gangs that are just as violent as al Qaeda. I certainly think there are Americans out there who would volunteer for the job.