US President-elect Barack Obama has chosen former lawmaker and White House chief of staff Leon Panetta to head the CIA.
Mr Panetta, who was White House chief of staff for former president Bill Clinton, is one of the last major nominations for the incoming administration.
Mr Panetta has relatively little experience in national security matters, though he did participate in daily intelligence briefings with President Clinton between 1994 and 1997.
Presidential transition aides have also said that retired admiral Dennis Blair is Mr Obama's choice for director of national intelligence to oversee the country's sprawling intelligence system.
A former commander of US forces in the Pacific from 1999 to 2002, Blair will be only the third director of national intelligence.
The position was created by Congress in 2004 after investigations revealed that turf-sensitive intelligence agencies failed to share information that might have averted the 11 September attacks.
That failure was followed by US intelligence's fateful error on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
The DNI's main mission was to break down the barriers between the agencies, and make them operate more collaboratively.
