The intelligence community must pay its analysts better and give them more career advancement opportunities to ensure agencies can stop future terrorist plots, the chairmen of the now-dissolved 9/11 Commission said Jan. 26.

"We need to increase the prominence of the analyst, which will lead to a lifting of standards across the intelligence community," commission chairman Thomas Kean told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Intelligence analysts are in charge of sifting through mountains of data obtained by spies and surveillance equipment and piecing together clues to uncover threats against the nation. Intelligence agencies have come under fire after analysts failed to sound alarms that could have prevented Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from boarding a U.S.-bound airplane on Christmas Day with the intent of blowing it up. Abdulmutallab failed in that attempt and is being prosecuted.

Lee Hamilton, the commission's vice chairman, said analysts in some agencies "take a back seat" to the operators who collect raw intelligence. At the FBI, for example, the highest-ranking jobs for many years were held by agents, and analysts only recently started having more opportunities to advance, he said.

Hamilton said the intelligence community also needs to reconsider how it pays its analysts to ensure it can recruit and retain talented people.

"I don't think in the federal civil service you have the incentives that you need," Hamilton said. "Maybe we don't have the pay that we need to elevate the job of the analyst. Congress needs to give its full support to whatever the intelligence community needs to get top-flight analysts."

Hamilton would not say whether he thinks the intelligence community should resume its pay-for-performance system, which Congress put on hold through the end of 2010 amid concerns that it was unfair.

He also said the government needs to study whether it has enough analysts and whether they're being trained properly.

"I don't think you produce an analyst quickly," Hamilton said. "It takes several years. It's tough work. You're sitting there watching millions of bytes of data come across the screen, and 99.9 percent of it is useless, and there's the nugget in there."

Kean also said the intelligence community needs better ways to sift through the vast amounts of data it collects each day. Committee Chairman Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., said the National Security Agency alone collects four times as much information each day as is stored in the Library of Congress.

Hamilton and Kean said the director of national intelligence has had some success in making intelligence agencies work together, but said more work needs to be done.

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said she is concerned that DNI Dennis Blair and CIA Director Leon Panetta are "still engaged in turf battles" that could undermine the intelligence community's ability to work together.

"We need a strong DNI who is a leader of the intelligence community," Hamilton said. "The DNI must be the person who drives interagency coordination and integration."

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