It takes a couple of years just to get the background and knowledge that you need before you can go into detailed training for your mission.

The ordinary American - as far as I can tell - knows so much less than he did fifty years ago and has such poor work habits compared with fifty years ago that the average multiplicand of knowledge/capabilities is a much smaller number than it was in 1961.

For four years I listened to stories of intelligence failures and it wasn't due to incompetence of anyone in the system but that the system is so arcane.

And I understand that I testified in closed hearings over eight years because there are intelligence matters there are sensitive matters that should not be held in a public hearing.

A lot of the things that we've been able to do in the last several years were Democratic ideas including the structure for this new director of national intelligence.

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.

As a nation we have over the past seven years been rebuilding our intelligence with powerful capabilities that many thought we would no longer need after the Cold War. We have been rebuilding our clandestine service our satellite and other technical collection our analytical depth and expertise.

Well it's a - I don't want to disappoint you but it's a time worn tradition of Australian Governments over many years not to get into any discussion about that aspect of intelligence matters.

If you look back today over the last 25 years it is a fact that we have had a progressive degeneration of our intelligence community in general in particular in the field of human intelligence.

Over the course of two years we arrived at a point where we began to look at the value added by making information more easily accessible across the intelligence community both defense and national.