Four years after the mega-terrorist attacks of Sept.11, 2001, the agency is indeed being rapidly transformed into a leaner, meaner, more adaptable organization. But it is also being roiled by unprecedented internal dissension, bitterness and turmoil.

Not since the notorious endless mole hunts of James Jesus Angleton that turned the agency inside out in the 1960s and effectively paralyzed it for years has there been so much dissension in Langley.

And in a development that never occurred even during Angleton's long and futile witch hunts, some currently serving senior officers have been leaking stories critical of Goss to the media. Journalists and media outlets supportive of the Bush administration and Goss have retaliated in kind.

Goss, the former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, is determined to downsize the agency's traditionally massive bureaucracy and to get more agents out into the field developing sources among the Iraq insurgents and the Islamist terror groups worldwide who are now the agency's primary target.

The agency has traditionally been exceptionally weak in these areas. Many Langley veterans trace the problems back to the gutting of the agency's HUMINT, or human intelligence, assets under the directorship of Adm. Stansfield Turner during the Carter administration. President Jimmy Carter was a great enthusiast for high-tech espionage or ELINT, electronic intelligence.

During the Reagan administration, then Director of Central Intelligence Bill Casey lamented that his greatest failure was his inability to revive CIA HUMINT operations in any significant way.

However, it was under Reagan and Casey that the agency suffered its most catastrophic defeats in the Middle East, the kidnap, interrogation and torture to death of its Beirut station chief William Buckley by Iranian agents and their allies, and the slaughter of the agency's top Middle East experts in a car-bomb attack on the U.S. Embassy in Beirut.

The event was traumatic and had long-lasting consequences. To this day, the agency yet to recover the old confidence and �lan that marked its 1950s and '60s operations throughout the Middle East.

Today, the CIA benefits from vastly increased budgets after the lean years that followed the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War. It is actively recruiting a new generation of permanent staff and rapidly expanding its ground presence in crucial areas around the world, especially the Middle East.

Goss is also determined to cut down the agency's reliance on HUMINT from sister agencies, especially the British Secret intelligence Service, or MI6 and the Israeli Mossad that has marked much of its work since the Reagan-Casey era.

Negroponte has also confirmed and strengthened the CIA's old role as America's main source for HUMINT. Goss told a gathering of CIA employees at Langley on Sept. 22, "The DNI is doing is assigning to the DCIA, the community role as the National HUMINT Manager.

And the reason for this is actually quite simple. CIA is the gold standard when it comes to human intelligence collection. CIA will have the authority to set standards for the entire Intelligence Community on things relating to HUMINT. Thus, CIA remains the flagship of the IC (Intelligence Community) for HUMINT."

Goss in his speech also celebrated the agency's recent "substantial, but quiet success in our efforts in the Global War on Terror. We have provided intelligence support that has resulted in the capture or killings of dozens of high-level al-Qaida operatives, and our efforts have unquestionably saved American lives at home and abroad."

He also said the agency had "gotten more unilateral, though still not as much as I'd like. It's getting the right kind of people trained in the right places under the right cover against the right targets with the understanding that there is the right kind of political will and leadership to give them the time and the backing to do the jobs they need to do. This is breaking some molds."

However, Goss said, "We have been having great success recruiting agents on all the target sets. We have continued various initiatives to stock our asset pool for future anticipated needs and challenges."

However, there is another side to the picture, the CIA director is no longer the director of central intelligence. The job of coordinator and director for the entire vast, sprawling and overlapping bureaucracies of the U.S. intelligence community is now held by Negroponte, the first DCI.

And agency insiders say he is in many key respects overshadowing Goss by his decisiveness, force of personality and immense experience in government.

Veteran agency insiders in both operations and analysis fault Goss for being inexperienced, an amateur, and a know all. They say he ignores institutionalized expertise and operates in a closed circle of politically loyal aides who served him in his time as a congressman on Capitol Hill. They claim that he is show rather than substance.

Many of these criticisms may be unfair, and the natural blowback from long-established bureaucrats whose old ways of doing things are being shaken up. And the lack of any mega-terrorist attack against the U.S. Mainland or U.S. targets around the world outside Iraq and Afghanistan since Sept. 11, 2001, strongly suggests that the CIA and its sister agencies in the U.S. intelligence community have been doing quite a lot of things right since then.

In the secret world of intelligence and counter-intelligence, where nothing is ever as it seems and most of the truth never sees the light of day at all, it is always dangerous to rush to rash conclusions, especially positive ones. The CIA may be in far better or far worse state than anyone dreams, and quite possibly both at the same time.

The best metric to judge it remains the lack of major terrorist attacks on the U.S. mainland. Even the agency's fiercest critics must hope that is a tribute to its success.

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