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

So profound is al-Qaida'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-Qaida and its Taliban allies, including more frequent strikes and better coordination with Pakistan, in a near-acknowledgment of the CIA's war against extremists in Pakistan. He called it "the most aggressive operation that CIA has been involved in our history."

"Those operations are seriously disrupting al-Qaida," 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 a March 8 killing of a top al-Qaida commander in the militant stronghold of Miram Shah in North Waziristan, in Pakistan's autonomous tribal region. The al-Qaida official died in what local news reports described as a missile strike by a unmanned aerial vehicle. The CIA formally declines to acknowledge U.S. participation in such attacks inside Pakistani territory.

Hussein al-Yemeni, the man killed in the attack, was identified by an intelligence official as among al-Qaida's top 20 leaders and a participant in the planning for a 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-Qaida 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-Qaida and their military allies and I think that's what we are trying to do."

Counting the March 8 operation, the agency is believed to have mounted 22 such strikes this year, putting the CIA on course to exceed last year's roughly 53 strikes, a record. The March 8 event was believed to have been the first to occur in an urban area; the U.S. intelligence official familiar with the operation said the building targeted had housed "a large number of al-Qaida" fighters who were in the process of developing explosives. There were no other casualties, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the agency's operations in the region are classified.

Panetta, while declining to comment on the strike itself, said the death of the al-Qaida commander sent a "very important signal that they are not going to be able to hide in urban areas."

He also cited recent arrests of top Taliban figures - mostly notably Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, captured in Karachi on Feb. 8 - as tangible evidence of improving ties with Pakistan's intelligence service. He said Pakistan had given the CIA access to Baradar since his capture, and added, "we're getting intelligence" from the interrogation.

Panetta, who marked his first anniversary as CIA director last month, acknowledged that the agency did not know precisely where bin Laden and his top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, are hiding, but he said agency officials believe the two are inside Pakistan, "either in the northern tribal areas or in North Waziristan, or somewhere in that vicinity."

While there have been no confirmed sightings of either man since 2003, the continued pressure increases the opportunities for catching one or both, he said. "We thought that the increased pressure would do one of two things: that it would either bring them out to try to exert some leadership in what is an organization in real trouble, or that they would go deeper into hiding," Panetta said. "And so far we think they are going deeper into hiding."

But Panetta also expressed concern about the proliferation of suspects, both domestic and foreign, who are primed to attack Western targets, but have no previous record. He pointed to Najibullah Zazi, the Afghan immigrant who targeted the New York subway system, and recently pleaded guilty to terrorism charges, and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian charged with attempting to detonate explosives on a commercial flight about to land in Detroit.

"How many other Zazis are there? The people who have a clean record who suddenly for some crazy reason decide to get involved with jihad," said Panetta. "The bomber in Detroit. This person suddenly goes off, has a U.S. visa, and within 30 days he's recruited to strap a bomb on and come to this country. What we are seeing is that they are now looking for those kind of clean credentials."

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Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.