Word hasn't leaked yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if President-elect Barack Obama has already figured out that when he wants quick answers to what's going on in the world, the last person to ask is the head of U.S. intelligence.

The steady deterioration of personnel and standards of intelligence analysis, especially at the CIA, has been going on for decades, a number of former top intelligence officials I know say.

The tip of the rot surfaces from time to time, such as with the 9/11 surprise and the gimcrackery reports on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

The dogs howl and the caravan moves on. Nothing changes, many well placed former intelligence officials have been telling me.  But the current, possibly fatal dangers we face demand the problems be fixed.

We've been spending too much time chattering about the operations side of intelligence lately, they say, in particular whether Leon Panetta, the former OMB head and chief of staff to President Clinton, is up to handling the spies and back-alley guys and gals.

But officials have been reminding me that it was the dismally poor analysis of intelligence that enabled President Bush to lead the nation into the disastrous invasion of Iraq -- not faulty espionage (such as it was).   

And it's the analysis served up by the CIA and other spy agencies, they point out, that will guide President Obama's decisions on Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and North Korea, among other front-burner emergencies.

And that, say many rueful former officials, is where the agencies need a severe spanking.

Can Obama do it where so many of his predecessors have failed? One can only hope that the erstwhile professor, forged by the Socratic methods of his Harvard Law School instructors, will lay the lumber on his intelligence chiefs and briefers, asking them harder questions than they're used to.

Such as, "How do you know that?" 

Now, this is a staple of a good newsroom. It's a question editors ask reporters, and good reporters ask sources, all the time. I like to think that an old-fashioned city editor would have laughed the pre-war intelligence on Iraq out of their newsrooms.

But the melancholy truth, according to my well placed sources, is that even after the  intelligence disasters of 9/11 and Iraq, President Obama has a better chance of getting up-to-the-minute information on, say, Hamas, from newspapers than he does the PDB - the President's Daily Brief - served up by the Directorate of National Intelligence and CIA.

"So," I asked a former intelligence agency head over seafood this week, "if I'm President Obama, and I call Leon Panetta into the Oval office and ask him to tell me how Hamas leaders are holding up under the Israeli assault, will he be able to tell me?"

The former official shook his head, nearly blushing.   

No.  "That's not the kind of information" they focus on.

"Well, what do they focus on?" I asked.

If the viability of Hamas isn't important right now, what is?
 
He said the CIA, State Department and Pentagon intelligence agencies do have people specializing on the Palestinians, and even Hamas. But it's not likely they would have up-to-the-minute information on whether, say, in response to Israeli military pressure, its leaders are fighting among each other, unifying, or even where they are.

They just don't have that kind of stuff, he said.

Wow.

What about the NSA? I asked. Could the CIA's Hamas guy call his NSA counterpart and get cell phone intercepts from Gaza to help fill in some holes?

"They won't give it to him, because they don't want their information to help CIA look good."

Right.

And the National Intelligence Directorate, which was set up to put an end to that kind of horse play?

A work in progress, he smiled.  

Ok then: What can CIA briefers tell Obama about Hamas next Wednesday morning?

"They would tell them what they know," said, like squids squirting ink, until they could get back to headquarters and ask around.

But even then, said this former official, Panetta or Adm. Dennis Blair, the incoming head of National Intelligence, would probably not have anyone on staff to answer such specific questions.

Unbelievable, even to me.

He agreed: Unbelievable.

He nodded. "You tell people this and they don't believe it."

This from a man who has devoted his entire adult life to U.S. intelligence.

But doesn't the CIA have guys like Robert Redford in "Three Days of the Condor"? I asked, half joking, guys who read books, who specialize in more or less arcane things?

Doesn't it have people immersing themselves in subjects like Hamas, as intelligence intellectuals? A CIA version of New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman, to name just one of the better known?

Not so much any more, he said. There was a time when the CIA and other agencies hired and encouraged analysts to drill down deeply in, say, Chinese wheat harvests. 

But no longer, he insisted.  And there's little intellectual curiosity in the analyst ranks today, he maintained. A roguish kind of independence among the best journalists is neither sought, nor encouraged, in U.S. intelligence these days, he said.   

Everyone in the spy agencies is feverish about "current intelligence," writing reports that might get the attention of their bosses, maybe even the President of the United States, he said.

But isn't the current leadership structure of Hamas - I kept coming back to that - "current intelligence"?

No, not necessarily, he said. "Current intelligence" is the big-picture stuff that CIA chiefs like to show off to the president -- "what we know about Iran,"  usually larded with sexy secrets -- not necessarily what the president needs to know. 

It's quite likely that the analysts' bosses might not have asked them to track the state of Hamas, he said.  And when their bosses haven't tasked them with such a challenge, the analysts then to be "passive," fixating on a hot piece of secret information that came in over the transom, no matter how incidental to the more critical question: what's Hamas up to?

After much resistance, CIA and DNI finally did set up an Open Source Center with analysts, some of whom don't even have security clearances, working from unclassified material. And they've proved to be very good, some experts say, giving the spy agency a fresh view on developments ranging from Iran to North Korea. The final verdict is far from in, but one well informed former official said that on at least one subject he was familiar with, the regular CIA analysts "couldn't hold a candle" to the Open Source Center's product.

But of course, that begs the question of exactly what the 16 agencies of the so-called U.S. intelligence community -- who still hoard information like children at day care, according to most accounts -- are actually doing with $65 billion a year.

And what, especially, should be done to fix the CIA, with all those floors upon floors of people scattered across Northern Virgina gathering and analyzing secret information?  

"Blow up the place," my lunchtime guest said, "and start over."

Unfortunately, that's not a new idea, either.

Careful planning, including extensive intelligence gathering and a "disinformation" campaign to lull Hamas into thinking an attack was not imminent, preceded Israel's dramatic assault on Gaza, according to a reputable Israeli newspaper.

"Long-term preparation, careful gathering of information, secret discussions, operational deception and the misleading of the public - all these stood behind the Israel Defense Forces 'Cast Lead' operation against Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip, which began Saturday morning," Haaretz correspondent Barak Ravid reported.

The intelligence missions targeted Hamas's "permanent bases, weapon silos, training camps, the homes of senior officials and coordinates for other facilities," the paper said, citing "sources in the defense establishment."

Meanwhile, to mislead the Islamist Sunni group's leadership, "Israel continued to send out disinformation in announcing it would open the crossings to the Gaza Strip and that [Prime Minister Ehud] Olmert would decide whether to launch the strike following three more deliberations on Sunday -- one day after the actual order to launch the operation was issued," the paper said.

Such preparations marked a dramatic departure from Israel's assault on Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon in July 2006, which quickly bogged down amid unexpectedly stiff resistance, analysts said.

Among the fiercest critics of the Lebanon campaign then was Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, notes my CQ colleague Jonathan Broder, who has reported on and in the Middle East for three decades, beginning with the Associated Press and Chicago Tribune.

 "Barak was very critical of Israel's lack of intelligence-gathering and other important preparations before the 2006 war against Lebanon, which resulted in Hezbollah's emerging victorious in the minds of many Arabs and the perception of Israel's deterrent capacity being badly damaged," Broder commented for me  "The precision of Israel's attacks against Hamas leaders and their installations this time shows that Barak was not going to make the same mistake."

But if Israel goes ahead with an anticipated ground assault, says James Abourezk, a Lebanese American former Democratic Senator from South Dakota, it will encounter "pretty stiff resistance." 

Hamas has about 25,000 fighters in Gaza, said Abourezk, who frequently leads citizen tour groups to Syria.

"So Israel might not launch a ground incursion because Hamas has some pretty tough fighters in there."

On the other hand, "Israel can do pretty much anything it wants" because of its firm backing from the United States in general and the Bush administration in particular, he said.

The White House and State Department have blamed Hamas's rocket attacks on Israel for precipitating the crisis.

"The violence will keep going until the U.S. puts a stop to it," Abourezk said.

Today Bush administration officials said they were working hard to restore a ceasefire in Gaza. 

A former CIA operative's account of how the spy agency wreaked vengeance on him for his unauthorized expose of American bungling during the fall of Saigon is heading to the flat screen.