After the U.N. inspectors left in 1998, we made an aggressive effort to penetrate Iraq. Our record was mixed. While we had voluminous reporting, the major judgments reached were based on a narrower band of data. That's not unusual in our business.

There was by necessity a strong reliance on technical data which. to be sure, was very valuable, particularly in the imagery of military and key dual-use facilities, on missile and unmanned aerial vehicle developments, and in particular on the efforts of Iraqi front companies to falsify and deny us the ultimate destination and use of dual-use equipment.

We did not have enough of our own human intelligence. We did not ourselves penetrate the inner sanctum.

Our agents were on the periphery of WMD activities, providing some useful information. We had access to emigres and defectors with more direct access to these programs. And we had a steady stream of reporting with access to the Iraqi leadership come to us from a trusted foreign partner.

Other partners provided important information. What we did not collect ourselves, we evaluated as carefully as we could.

Still, the lack of direct access to some of these sources created some risk. Such is the nature of our business.

To be sure, we had difficulty penetrating the Iraqi regime with human sources. And I want to be very clear about something: A blanket indictment of our human intelligence around the world is dead wrong. We have spent the last seven years rebuilding our clandestine service. As director of central intelligence, this has been my highest priority.

When I came to the CIA in the mid-'90s, our graduating class of case officers was unbelievably low. Now, after years of rebuilding, our training programs and putting our best efforts to recruit the most talented men and women, we are graduating more clandestine officers than at any time in the history of the Central Intelligence Agency.

It will take an additional five years to finish the job of rebuilding our clandestine service, but the results so far have been obvious.

A CIA spy led us to Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of the September 11th attacks.

Al Qaida's operational chief Nashiri, the man who planned and executed the bombing of the USS Cole, was located and arrested because of our human reporting.

Human sources were critical to the capture of Hambali, the chief terrorist in southeast Asia, who organized and killed hundreds of people when they bombed a nightclub in Bali.

So when you hear pundits say that we have no human intelligence capability, they don't know what they're talking about.