How many FBI agents does it take to get to the center of a radical terrorist group’s hideout by disabling the biometric door lock in order to plant bugs in the den’s clock radio?

Well, you would need ten plus George Clooney to rip off a casino, so of course the FBI’s answer to terrorist hideout question is eleven.

And those agents need at least three days, according to FBI budget documents.

Then of course you need to add in the engineers who build the bugs and figure out how to get around alarm systems and biometric entry scanners.

At least that’s the math the FBI told Congress in its 2008 budget request where the Tactical Operations Support Center asked for an extra $5 million, six new agents and a few more engineers. That request, if granted by Congress, would be a significant jump for a group that had just 18 agents on the payroll in 2006 and 2007 and an annual budget just shy of $17 million. Those agents spend close to 40% of their work time on the road.

Almost 88% of the cases that the legal burglars helped out with in 2006 involved intelligence gathering, rather than traditional prosecutions. While that’s a significant jump, more than 50% of the group’s work has dealt with national security investigations since 1998.

The execution of covert entry/search operations usually requires the TOSC to physically deploy a team of approximately 11 agent personnel full time over a period of time (usually at least 3 days) to the target location. During FY 2006, TOSC operational SSAs spent an average of 97 days on travel status, which accounts for approximately 39% of a 251-day work year

How many black bag jobs did the FBI pull off in 2006? Unknown.

But the legal cat burglars do say that they helped with 353 investigations in 2006 and figure they will be involved in more than 400 in 2008.

And the break-ins are only getting harder to pull off, due to better security technology:

The successful execution of the surreptitious entry/search operations is dependent on continued aggressive applied scientific and engineering efforts directed at the emerging technologies in the security and countermeasures industries. The requested increase in non-personnel funding would enhance TOSC’s capacity to take a proactive approach to identifying the technologies emerging in the marketplace, as well as conduct the research and development necessary to produce the tools necessary to detect and defeat them.[…] TOSC also faces challenges that emanate from the convergence of technology within the security industry. Traditional lines of separation (alarms, locks, safes, access controls, biometrics, video, etc.) within the industry have blurred with manufacturers integrating security functions and features.

There is nothing, however, in the budget request asking for new faux cable guy outfits.