WASHINGTON, Dec 21: Spies who go deeply undercover with no apparent ties to the U.S. government are needed to infiltrate groups like al Qaeda, but the CIA shows an aversion to such operations, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee said on Friday.

Senator Mike DeWine, a Ohio Republican, said CIA spying was too focused on using U.S. government positions as cover. Official cover offers a more comfortable lifestyle than non-official cover but is ineffective in penetrating extremist groups, he said.

Official-cover positions might include U.S. Embassy jobs or posts in government agencies such as the Commerce Department.

In a statement to be included in the report of a congressional inquiry into Sept. 11 intelligence failures, DeWine proposed creating a separate agency of non-official-cover operatives, or NOCs, to pursue terrorists.

“Nobody openly associated with any element of the U.S. government is going to be able to get close to an organization like Al Qaeda, so an official cover is of little use against these targets,” DeWine said.

DeWine said the best way to infiltrate is with covers in which a spy appears to be a private citizen, “typically operating under the cover of a legitimate commercial enterprise.”

The CIA’s Directorate of Operations has been unable to transform the clandestine service to fully use NOCs, DeWine said. A CIA spokesman declined comment.

It is mainly a problem of CIA culture, DeWine said. Many CIA clandestine officers prefer the more comfortable lifestyle of official-cover assignments, and supervisors find official-cover operations easier to manage, he said.

CIA officers under non-official cover are paid the same but have less safety, few of the comforts and none of the legal protections such as diplomatic immunity, he said.

“It is one thing to have an official-cover employee declared persona non grata and expelled from the country; it’s quite another to have him (an NOC) arrested and shot,” DeWine said.

Only about 35 percent of the CIA’s clandestine officers have spent more than three of the last 10 years overseas, he said. “This low ratio indicates that the wrong mindset now dominates what is supposed to be an overseas clandestine service,” DeWine said.

He proposed creating a “small, agile and adaptive” organization to exclusively conduct non-official-cover operations against a limited target list of terrorists, weapons proliferators and “rogue states.”

The culture would allow for longer-term, unorthodox approaches to collecting intelligence on groups like Al Qaeda, with an understanding that results might take years.

For example, an NOC officer would be allowed to attend a mosque in the United States, develop contacts, travel abroad for training in an extremist camp, and infiltrate organizations like Al Qaeda, DeWine said.

The current system is averse to such assignments, which would allow an officer to be out of contact with the chain of command for weeks or months at a time, he said.

“A new, independent, clandestine HUMINT (human intelligence) agency may be the fresh start we need to break the pattern of failure that has prevented us penetrating groups like Al Qaeda,” DeWine said.—Reuters