By Joby Warrick and Peter Finn

WASHINGTON - Relentless attacks against al-Qaeda in the Pakistan tribal region appear to have driven Osama bin Laden and other top leaders deeper into hiding, leaving the organization rudderless and incapable of planning sophisticated operations, CIA Director Leon Panetta said Wednesday.


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So profound is al-Qaeda's disarray that one of its lieutenants, in a recently intercepted message, pleaded to bin Laden to come to the group's rescue and provide some leadership, Panetta told The Washington Post in an interview.

Panetta credited an increasingly aggressive campaign against al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies, including more frequent strikes and better coordination with Pakistan. He called it "the most aggressive operation that CIA has been involved in in our history."

"Those operations are seriously disrupting al-Qaeda," Panetta said. "It's pretty clear from all the intelligence we are getting that they are having a very difficult time putting together any kind of command and control, that they are scrambling. And that we really do have them on the run."

The comments came as a senior U.S. intelligence official revealed new details of an attack last week in a top al-Qaeda commander who reportedly was killed in the militant stronghold of Miram Shah in North Waziristan, in Pakistan's autonomous tribal region. The al-Qaeda official died in what local news reports described as a missile strike by a unmanned aerial vehicle. The CIA has declined to acknowledge U.S. participation in such attacks inside Pakistani territory.

The man killed in the attack was identified by the U.S. official as among al-Qaeda's top 20 leaders and a participant in the planning for the Dec. 30 suicide bombing at a CIA base in the province of Khost in eastern Afghanistan.

Panetta's upbeat remarks during a 40-minute interview contrasted with recent U.S. intelligence assessments of continuing terrorist threats against the U.S. homeland, and in the wake of the suicide attack, in which a Jordanian double-agent was able to gain access to a CIA base and kill nine intelligence operatives.

Panetta acknowledged that al-Qaeda was continuing to look for ways to kill Americans and was specifically seeking to recruit people who lacked criminal records or known ties to terrorist groups to carry out missions.

Still, the CIA under the Obama administration is "without question putting tremendous pressure on their operation," Panetta said. "The president gave us the mission to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaeda and their military allies and I think that's what we are trying to do."