Former CIA head describes agency as in a transition : marconews.com

A former head of the CIA demystified the role of the secret agency while assuring Forum Club of Southwest Florida members Friday that the agency isn't "lying flat on its back" despite media reports to the contrary.

John McLaughlin, who stepped in as CIA director after George Tenet resigned in June 2004, was the keynote speaker at the Naples Beach Hotel & Golf Club.

McLaughlin served as Tenet's deputy from 2000-04, a period when the CIA was under fire for the way it monitored terrorist activity before Sept. 11, 2001, and for intelligence failures leading to the Iraq War.

"(The CIA) is going through a transformation," said McLaughlin, who has served under eight presidents and briefed the last four. Former Southwest Florida Congressman Porter Goss is now at the helm of the agency.

Despite its secrecy and Hollywood's over-the-top portrayals, the agency's main mission is to "find the truth and report it back," McLaughlin said

He admits that the agency has made mistakes while investigating the possible presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but said the intelligence agency isn't in total disarray.

"We look at the mistakes we've made in the eye and we take from it lessons we've learned," McLaughlin said. "But I do not accept the generalization that the CIA is dysfunctional across the board."

In fact, McLaughlin cited an increase in recruitment after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. That year, he said, 138,000 candidates applied for 2,000 positions and now the agency gets about 10,000 applicants a week.

"There is an upwelling desire to work in national security in young people," McLaughlin said.

The rebuilding of the CIA is essential in keeping up with changes in population growth, international competition for energy resources and the lightning-speed development of technology, he said.

"We're experiencing tumultuous, kaleidoscopic change in every dimension of life right now," McLaughlin said.

About 90 percent of population growth increase will occur in countries that may not be prepared for it, such as Southeast Asia, he said.

Meanwhile, the fight for oil may require another OPEC to form in the coming years, he said. The U.S. needs to keep an eye out for China, India and Russia — all key global players that will need more natural resources in the near future, he said.

"The question that hangs over our head is: Will the 21st century be an American century just as it was during the last century?" McLaughlin asked.

The biggest threat to intelligence is the potential of surprise, he said. The United States had its share of surprises with the dropping of the atomic bomb, World War II and the emergence of Adolf Hitler.

"I have told analysts: Beware, there are the surprises; you can't take things for face value," McLaughlin said.

McLaughlin, a self-proclaimed amateur magician, demonstrated a trick to prove his point at the luncheon.

He took out the A section of Friday's USA Today and ripped it to shreds to demonstrate the "torn and restored trick," which gives the audience the illusion that the newspaper was ripped and later put back together.

After balling together the shreds, he unraveled it once more to show Forum members that indeed the paper was still in one piece.

"I told you I was going to fool you," McLaughlin said. "I told you exactly what I was going to do, so can you imagine when you have people not telling you what they'll do? You get fooled a lot in the (spy) business."