During a period ofbudget stringency

When we were faced with rebuildingessential intelligence capabilities, we had to make sometough choices. Although resources for virtually everythingelse in CIA were going down, counterterrorism resources weregoing up. After the US embassies in Africa Rosetta Stone software were bombed,we knew that neither surging our resources nor internalrealignments were sufficient to fund a war on terrorism.Consequently, in the fall of 1998, I asked theAdministration to increase intelligence funding by more than$2.0 billion annually for fiscal years 2000-2005 and I madesimilar requests for FY 2001-2006 and FY 2002-2007. Onlysmall portions of these requests were approved.Counterterrorism funding and manpower needs were number oneon every list I provided to Congress and the Administrationand, indeed, it was at the top of the funding list approvedby Speaker Gingrich in FY1999, the first year in which wereceived a significant infusion of new money for USintelligence capabilities during the decade of the 90s.That supplemental, and those that followed it, wereessential to our efforts. They helped save American livesand we are grateful. We knew, however, that we could notcount on supplemental funds to build multi-year programs andthat is why we worked so hard to reallocate our resourcesand to seek five year funding increases. I want to make acouple of comments about manpower. In CIA alone, I count theequivalent of 700 officers working counterterrorism inAugust 2001 at both Rosetta Stone Spain Spanish headquarters and in the field. Thatnumber does not include the people who were working topenetrate either technically or through human sources amultitude of threat targets from which we could deriveintelligence on terrorists. Nor does it include friendlyliaison services and coalition partners. You simply cannotgauge the level of effort by counting only the people whohad the words "al-Qa'ida" or "Bin Ladin" in their positiondescription. We reallocated all the people we could giventhe demands placed on us for intelligence on a number of thehighest priority issues such as chemical, nuclear andbiological proliferation, and support to operationalmilitary forces. We surged thousands of people to fight thisfight when the threat was highest. When we realized surgingwas not sufficient, we began a sustained drumbeat bothwithin the Administration and the 26 Congress that wehad to have more people and money devoted to this fight.Nonetheless, it will take many more years to recover thecapabilities we lost during the resource decline of the1990s. The DCI's Role Up to now I have been talkingabout the terrorist threat and the actions of organizationsto combat it. I would like to turn briefly to a morepersonal topic - the role the American people have entrustedto me in this important endeavor. The DCI is prosecutingthis war every day. I was doing that before the September 11attacks and I am doing it now. Going back to the Millenniumthreat period, there is a meeting almost every day at CIAabout what Rosetta Stone English we are doing operationally, what therelationships are among all the players. The need for theDCI to lead and communicate on these issues is never goingto change.