A top former U.S. intelligence official told a Senate panel Tuesday that the FBI is taking too long to develop a first-rate domestic intelligence capability and that “other options” should be pursued.

John Gannon, who headed the CIA’s National Intelligence Council from 1997 to mid-2001, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that almost “five years after 9/11, we still do not have a domestic intelligence service that can collect effectively against the terrorist threat to the homeland or provide authoritative analysis.”

“It is not enough to say these things take time,” said Gannon, who also helped the White House set up the Department of Homeland Security and then became staff director of the House Select Committee on Homeland Security.

“We should be looking seriously at other options.”

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, testifying earlier in the day, was forced to parry questions about the abrupt resignation late last week of Gary M. Bald, his sixth counterterrorism chief since Sept. 11, 2001.

Bald and other top FBI intelligence officials earned a measure of notoriety last year when they could not answer basic questions about al Qaeda and Islam’s major rivals, Sunnis and Shiites, during testimony in a whistleblower suit.

“This is not a position for on-the-job training,” Sen. Charles E. Grassley, R-Iowa, a frequent FBI critic, complained at the time.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., asked Mueller Tuesday to explain the FBI’s “high turnover,” which has also included “six different executive assistant directors overseeing counterterrorism.”

Money was a big reason, Mueller said.

Longtime FBI agents and officials like Bald, who held the top counterterrorism job for a little over six months, had “tremendous . . . opportunities” to make money in private industry, “particularly since September 11th . . . .

“Everyone wants a security director, and the obvious fact that many of these corporations can pay far more than the federal government is a factor.”

Burnout was a factor, too, Mueller said.

“We work 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There’s a lot of pressure on persons in those positions.”

Feinstein pressed Mueller on why he hadn’t gotten a commitment from Bald to stay more than a few months as quarterback of the FBI’s program to build a new intelligence arm.

“I understand what you are saying,” Mueller said, “and it is an issue we’re wrestling with.”

But the FBI director, a former Justice Department prosecutor who took office only days before the 9/11 attacks, said he had “a very strong bench, particularly in counterterrorism, ” to draw Bald’s replacement from.

“We have a number of people who have been working in counterterrorism before September 11th who are coming along, and a strong bench of those who have worked in counterterrorism solely on that issue since September 11th,” Mueller said.

But Gannon, who held top intelligence analysis posts at the CIA from the mid-1990s until June 2001, suggested that the FBI was incapable of melding its nearly century-long tradition as federal law enforcement agents, who arrest criminals, with a secret intelligence service, which seeks to understand and penetrate terrorist groups.

“It could not be clearer from the intelligence community’s experience over the past 25 years that it is extraordinarily difficult to blend the families of intelligence and law enforcement,” Gannon said, “and that the Bureau’s organizational bias toward the latter for deep-seated historic reasons — is powerful and persistent.

Gannon said Congress should be asking “why it is so hard for the FBI to develop a national intelligence capability, and opening ourselves to the possibility that we have asked too much of an otherwise capable criminal-investigation agency.

“We should be looking seriously at other options,” one of which was to “give the lead on domestic intelligence to a resuscitated and revitalized Department of Homeland Security.”

Only much stronger leadership can help the FBI “remain the agency of choice in developing a domestic intelligence capability,” he said, with “much stronger and clearer direction and much closer oversight from the executive and legislative branches on the much bigger and faster structural steps it needs to take.

“The urgent objective must be to develop an intelligence capability that is not subordinated to the Bureau’s criminal investigation mission and that is based on a level of collaboration including with nongovernment experts — unprecedented in FBI history,” said Gannon, who after 24 years in government last year became vice president for Global Analysis at BAE Corp.

“I will not say that it cannot be done, but the evidence to date suggests otherwise,”

Mueller insisted, however, that the FBI was not only up to the job, but had plenty of past experience to draw on with confidential informants and counterintelligence cases.

By law, the FBI had the lead domestic responsibility for countering Russian, Chinese and other spy services operating in the United States, and controlled many double agents in enemy security services.

“And although still relatively new, the National Security branch is making significant progress in integrating the missions, the capabilities, and the resources of the Counterterrorism and Counterintelligence divisions as well as the Directorate of Intelligence,” Mueller said in his prepared statement.

“The FBI is currently working with the Department of Justice and the administration to ensure that the National Security branch meets the directives set forth by the president and is responsive to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.”

But Mueller said he was aware “that some harbor doubts about the FBI’s ability to transform itself into a leading intelligence agency.”

“Such critics often cite the mistaken belief that the intelligence mission and the law enforcement mission are inherently incompatible,” he said.

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.