He also revealed an ambitious agenda for the committee in the 109th Congress, which he said would "look ... from a strategic standpoint ... peeling back a bunch of layers" to assess the effectiveness of the sources and methods used by U.S. intelligence.

"I don't want to get into what members might or might not have known," about the Defense Department's dramatic expansion of its human intelligence capabilities, Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., told United Press International. "The committee was appropriately informed ... It was clearly communicated at the staff level."

Hoekstra said that he and other members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence were being briefed Tuesday by Steven Cambone, the senior-most intelligence official at the Defense Department, about the so-called Strategic Support Branch, the new office the Pentagon is using to plan and execute intelligence operations abroad.

The initiative, funding for which was approved in the 2005 Defense Authorization Act, became the object of controversy after a report in The Washington Post said that defense officials were "re-interpreting" the law to allow the Pentagon to conduct clandestine operations in areas that had previously been the CIA's bailiwick.

The Post reported that the department's "new espionage arm" deploys teams of case officers, linguists, interrogators and technical specialists, along with newly empowered special operations forces, to both friendly and hostile nations.

The ranking Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., expressed concern that Defense officials might be making an "end run" around congressional oversight and the new intelligence reform act, which was fiercely resisted by the Pentagon and its allies in Congress.

Hoekstra said, "a lot of members" had "expressed an interest in what the Defense Department is doing," which is why he had arranged the briefing. He denied that the move was designed to get around the more centralized control of U.S. intelligence envisaged by the reform law. "This is exactly what the Sept. 11 commission wanted ... out of the box thinking about how to expand our human intelligence capabilities," he said.

Hoekstra said he planned to look hard at U.S. human intelligence as part of his oversight responsibilities. He became chairman of the committee last summer after his predecessor, Florida Republican Porter Goss, was appointed director of the CIA.

Wednesday, the committee was set for its first hearing ofthe congressional session, to examine developing global threats to U.S. security. Some experts say that U.S. intelligence agencies are focusing too myopically on counter-terrorism. They argue that the agencies appear to have learned the tactical, immediate lesson of Sept. 11 -- the danger of transnational Islamic terrorism -- at the expense of the broader, strategic lesson -- the danger of being caught off guard by unanticipated emergent threats.

Hoekstra said that the hearing was the first in a series -- some open, some closed -- designed to help the committee better understand the threats the country faces.

Witnesses Wednesday were scheduled to include the former CIA Director James Woolsey, and the businessman and neoconservative eminence grise Richard Perle. Experts from several Washington think tanks were also to testify.

Hoekstra said that over the course of the hearing, he hoped to hear from "as many different shades of opinion as we can."

He said that, having identified the threats, the second stage of his oversight agenda would be an examination of the capabilities agencies had in relation to such threats, and the techniques and tradecraft used to gather intelligence on them.

Finally, the committee would be able to turn to the question of whether the resources congress was providing were sufficient, and sufficiently well aligned, to the task.

"We'll look at effectiveness and sufficiency," he said.

Hoekstra said he intended to get to a considerable level of detail. "We're going to peel back a bunch of layers," he said, "We're going to do case studies ... Country A is a perceived medium-term threat. It's developing nuclear weapons. We want to look at not only the current assessment, but how we got there. Ask how we got that information."

Assessing the effectiveness of intelligence sourcesis a ticklish matter, because of the sensitivity of identifying them, even if only for measurement purposes. Former CIA officer Reuel Gerecht wrote in a newspaper op-ed article this week that he did not know of any effort made by the CIA to judge how well or badly it had done against any target during the Cold War, and quoted un-named active duty officers as saying that no such assessment had been conducted of the agency's work against Islamic extremists, either.

During the Cold War, he wrote, "Certain targets would suddenly grow in importance -- Cuba, Iran or Iraq -- and large operational desks would become even larger task forces, all fueled by the assumption that bigger is better."

But, as Hoekstra pointed out, numbers are rarely a good metric in intelligence. "If you've got one great source on the inside, maybe that's all you need to get the information," he said.

All rights reserved. � 2004 United Press International. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by United Press International. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of United Press International.

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