"During a collection mission on Nov. 15, 2004, Lance Cpl. Swain volunteered to assist with security by manning a vehicle mounted machine gun. As Marines prepared to enter a building, Lance Cpl. Swain identified an insurgent ambush. He immediately opened fire, alerting his fellow Marines and suppressing the ambush but exposing himself to the enemy. Lance Cpl. Swain's heroic actions saved the lives of his fellow Marines, but cost him his own life when he fell mortally wounded."

"When Michael Morell was growing up in Cuyahoga Falls -- hanging out at the city pool, playing baseball, watching the Browns and Indians -- he had no clue he would wind up at the highest level of the world's biggest spy agency," the Akron Beacon Journal reported last August.

But today, National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell tapped Ohio native Morell, the CIA's third-ranking official, to brief President-elect Barack Obama on the U.S. intelligence community's view of global developments and its secret operations.

Morrel joined the agency in 1980, almost as an accident, he told the Akron paper upon his appointment as CIA associate deputy director.

"I had every intention of going to grad school and getting a Ph.D. in economics and teaching," he said. "But a friend of mine suggested, 'Why don't you send a resume to the CIA?'"

"Even on the day he walked into the CIA for his job interview," the paper said, "he had no intention of actually working there. He was a just college kid at the University of Akron cashing in on a free trip to Washington, D.C."

That was 1980.

Morrel ended up on the analysis side of the business, spending most of his career with the Directorate of Intelligence. He was chief of the agency's Asia, Pacific and Latin American division.

He also headed the unit that prepares the President's Daily Brief (PDB). In that role, he briefed President George W. Bush.

He has also been the acting associate deputy director of intelligence for strategic programs and was deputy director for intelligence at the National Counter-Terrorism Center.

DNI McConnell led a team of senior intelligence officials to brief Obama Wednesday morning.

But the CIA sounds like it's not going to take a back seat in forming the president-elect's views.

"We have already prepared a great deal of information about CIA for the Obama team," CIA Director Michael Hayden said in a letter to agency employees.

"The goal today is to review what has been done and to ensure that every part of the Agency is well-placed to contribute in the weeks ahead."

Speaking at his high school alma mater in Greenville, S.C., Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell claimed Sunday that "dozens" of terrorist plots against the U.S. have been thwarted since 9/11.

Privately, many serious analysts of terrorist threats, both in and outside of U.S. spy agencies, question whether the figure is exaggerated -- while at the same time confirming that al Qaeda-associated terrorists continue to pose  a mortal threat to the U.S. homeland.

"As we are today - post 9/11 - just some seven short years ago, we have not suffered a similar attack. That is not because people aren't trying," said McConnell in a speech during his induction into Wade Hampton High School's "Legion of Honor," a roster of distinguished graduates. 

"My community and the community of military, and law enforcement, and intelligence officials around the globe are working every day to prevent another attack on the United States. And we have been successful dozens of times."

Responding to a request for clarification, a spokesperson for McConnell today cited four documents, including a Justice Department report on counterterrorism issued on the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. 

The report listed eight "notable" prosecutions, but suggested other plots had been disrupted by covert counterterrorism operations that did not -- or may not have been intended to -- result in arrests.

"In each of these cases, the Department has faced critical decisions on when to bring criminal charges, given that a decision to prosecute a suspect exposes the government's interest in that person and effectively ends covert intelligence investigation," it said.

Such determinations require the careful balancing of competing interests, including the immediate incapacitation of a suspect and disruption of terrorist activities through prosecution, on the one hand; and the continuation of intelligence collection about the suspect's plans, capabilities, and confederates, on the other; as well as the inherent risk that a suspect could carry out a violent act while investigators and prosecutors attempt to perfect their evidence.

An FBI spokesman declined to comment, beyond referring me to past reports on terrorist plots, including one which cited 24 incidents between 2002 and 2005 that included attacks by animal rights and white supremacist groups

A White House Fact Sheet released in Oct. 2005 named "10 plots" that had been disrupted and five "casings and infiltrations" that were either detected or disrupted.  

Such figures suggest that at least two dozen more plots had to have been thwarted in the past three years to reach McConnell's "dozens"  threshold.

A recently retired senior CIA counterterrorism officer expressed skepticism about McConnell's figure, saying it came down to "word games."

Perhaps a half dozen "serious" terrorist plots against the U.S. homeland had been disrupted by Western intelligence, he said on condition of anonymity, because the information is classified, such as the 2006 London-based plot to sabotage nine commercial airliners en route to the United States. 

But he was skeptical of McConnell's claim that "dozens" of attacks had been thwarted.

"I suppose every time they arrest a guy who had an idea for an attack and put him in jail they can claim they 'stopped an attack'," he said. 

"After all, the FBI arrested some guys and charged them with conspiracy to blow up the Sears Tower, and the closest they ever got to doing anything was driving around the building with a video camera - which the FBI gave them."

But author Ronald Kessler, a longtime intelligence specialist with close contacts in the spy agencies and White House, made the same "dozens" claim as McConnell in a recent book, "The Terrorist Watch: Inside the Desperate Race to Stop the Next Attack." 

Responding to a query Monday, Kessler cited the White House and Justice Department reports and expressed a weariness about questioning "what was a real planned attack."

"If something was not blown up, it was not a real attack," according to critics, Kessler said.

"Many more have been rolled up since then. Beyond that, because the FBI and CIA have rolled up more than 5,000 terrorists worldwide since 9/11, most of the attacks were never hatched in the first place," he said.

When Hoskinson listened to the interview, broadcast only in Arabic, he was startled to discover that ElBaradei had suddenly sliced years off his previous estimates of how long it would take Iran, if left alone, to build a bomb.

Nobody seemed to notice that ElBaradei said Saturday Iran would need only six months to a year to produce a nuclear weapon if it broke off talks and expelled IAEA inspectors. 

This seems like a huge shift: ElBaradei has consistently said that it could take Iran from three to eight years to make a weapon. Or sometimes, demurring on personal estimates but seeking to knock down the more inflammatory statements by some Bush administration figures, ElBaradei took refuge in the softer estimates on Iran by U.S. intelligence chief Mike McConnell and Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte. In October, for example, he told CNN's Wolf Blitzer that Iran was "a few years" away from a bomb.   

Of course, last fall's controversial National Intelligence Estimate. also gave ElBaradei cover to throw cold water on the hawks' itching for an attack on Iran.   

But now it looks like ElBaradei's gone off the reservation. By the sound of last Saturday's interview, he's pulled much closer to what Israel is saying about the immediacy of the Iranian threat. 

Here's what he said on Al-Arabiya, the Saudi-owned station based in Dubai:

ELBaradei: "If Iran wants to turn to the production of nuclear weapons, it must leave the NPT [Nuclear Proliferation Treaty], expel the IAEA inspectors, and then it would need at least -- "

Interviewer: "How much time would it need?"

ElBaradei: "It would need at least six months to one year. Therefore, Iran will not be able to reach the point where we would wake up onemorning to an Iran with a nuclear weapon."

Six months is a lot better than a week, or overnight. But what happened to the eight-years estimated lag?

The interviewer seemed shocked by the sudden evaporation of seven years in ElBaradei's thinking, too. 

Interviewer: "Excuse me, I would like to clarify this for our viewers. If Iran decides today to expel the IAEA from the country, it will need six months..."

ElBaradei: "Or one year, at least --"

Interviewer: "-- to produce [nuclear] weapons?"

ElBaradei: "It would need this period to produce a weapon, and to obtain highly-enriched uranium in sufficient quantities for a single nuclear weapon." [...]

What's going on here?

My guess is that the IAEA chief may well be sick of recent Iranian behavior and wanted to send a message to Tehran (while cautioning Washington that Iran has the wherewithal to respond with fire).  

But the English-language media missed the first part.

In retrospect, ElBaradei's toughening -- if that's what it is -- should not come as such a surprise: Last month's IAEA report, after all, was tougher than previous ones, with a complaint that Iran was holding back on the inspectors.

ElBaradei, the most patient of diplomats, may be running out of patience with Iran.