“We worked to develop our own operations to advance U.S. counterterrorism objectives by penetrating terrorist safe havens and collecting intelligence that would inform policy and enable our own operations.”
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I was an intelligence officer, not a policy-maker.
Al Qaeda is not the organization now that it was before. It is under stress organizationally. Its leadership spends more time trying to figure out how to keep from getting caught than they do trying to launch operations.
The plan we developed to deal with al Qaeda depended on developing sources of human and technical intelligence that could give us insights into his plans at the tactical level. This is easy to say but hard to accomplish.
The National Intelligence Director needs the authority to do the job we are asking him to do. That means power over the intelligence budget. And to be effective, to be allowed to do his or her job, they must have authority over the budget.
