US intelligence chief goes public

Mr McConnell is in charge of a $44bn-per-year operation

The new US director of national intelligence, Michael McConnell, has made an appearance in public at a convention - a relatively rare thing for someone in that job to do, reports the BBC's Security Correspondent Frank Gardner.

In a cavernous hall in the Washington convention centre, a slight, inconspicuous man walks up to the podium, watched by 1,000 delegates.

He is wearing glasses, a two-tone shirt and a strangely dated comb-over. He looks in fact, like a country bank manager.

But Michael McConnell's job is far from mundane. He is in charge of 16 government agencies and a $44bn (£23.3bn) budget.

'Devastating impact'

Every morning, six days a week, he goes to the White House to brief the president. So what keeps him awake at night?

What's still waiting to happen is a fundamental change in mindset Bruce Hoffman, professor of security studies, Georgetown University

"If someone were to have a sophisticated attack on our financial services system, let's just say cyber network broadly, at the same time that they mailed, through the US mail, FedEx and UPI, the equivalent of letters sprinkled with anthrax, it would have a devastating impact," Mr McConnell says.

"If they chose the right place, right time, right season, it would have an even more overwhelming devastating impact."

America's counter-terrorism and intelligence community is in a dangerous state of flux. The CIA has been haemorrhaging experienced officers, lured to outside consultancies for double the salary.

The new national counter-terrorism centre is supposed to pool everyone's knowledge, but agencies are still reluctant to share what they know.

Mr McConnell is just two months into his job and already pushing for greater collaboration, but according to Bruce Hoffman, professor of security studies at Georgetown University, he faces an uphill challenge.

President Bush asked Mr McConnell to steer the spy agencies

"What's still waiting to happen is a fundamental change in mindset," he says.

"We're still talking about an intelligence agency, or a collection of intelligence agencies that is oriented very much towards targeting other states - in other words stealing secrets from other nation states.

"Whereas what we see now as the main challenge are dealing with terrorists, insurgents, individuals where even the organisation may not be as important as the network, or even the people that comprise the network."

Phone tapping controversy

One of the areas Mr McConnell says he wants to address is the legal framework intelligence officers work within.

The US still does not know where Osama bin Laden is

There is a big controversy as to whether it is moral and proper to spy on people within the US.

Mr McConnell has no doubts on this one: "People who are known to be terrorists, outside the US, call into the US. So the question, the judgement, is could you, should you - is it legal to monitor that phone call?

"The president in his declaration that followed 9/11 concluded that is a legal activity for intelligence, and I can tell you with great confidence because I have personal knowledge - the fact that we do has saved lives in the US."

Mr McConnell says that during the 1990s the intelligence community atrophied by 40%. He says: "We lost a whole generation."

We have to know our enemy and that basically comes down to, not just technological means Professor Hoffmann

But numbers are only part of the problem. With all its hi-tech gadgetry, US intelligence still does not know for certain if Iran is building a nuclear bomb, or the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden. Human intelligence, says Bruce Hoffman, has been under-resourced.

"We have to know our enemy and that basically comes down to, not just technological means but human intelligence sources," he says. "But also the kinds of knowledge that I think in the past may have been neglected - cultural knowledge, linguistic knowledge, having the contacts with people so that you can, not necessarily read their mind, but anticipate how they are going to think."

To be fair, US intelligence has had its successes.

The 9/11 attacks have not been repeated and at least a dozen terrorist plots have been foiled since then. But critics still maintain that this community is still too big, too unwieldy and often too territorial to apply its expertise effectively.

The man with the two-tone shirts and the comb-over will need all his stamina if he is to wrestle US intelligence into shape.