WASHINGTON -- Ask Washington insiders about John McLaughlin, a 61-year-old father of two and the man who will become the nation's acting chief spy on July 11, and they pause for a moment and say, "Magic."

Dennis Cook, Associated Press John McLaughlin, deputy CIA director, testified before the federal panel reviewing the Sept. 11 attacks in Washington this spring. Click photo for larger image. NAME: John Edward McLaughlin AGE: 61 BORN: McKeesport, June 15, 1942 EDUCATION: Bachelor's degree, Wittenberg University, 1964; master's degree, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, 1966 FAMILY: Married, two children CURRENT JOB: Deputy director, CIA IN THE NEWS: He was named acting director of the CIA by President Bush to replace the embattled George Tenet, effective July 11. QUOTE: "Our objective is a vigorous, creative, agile, analytic capability that is equal to the 21st century challenges."

Known unofficially around the CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., as "Merlin" because of his passion for performing magic tricks, McLaughlin looks more like Hollywood's idea of the balding, mild-mannered, bespectacled, suspender-wearing head bookkeeper than a flashy magician.

And that's just fine with the man from McKeesport, now a self-effacing, bespectacled, suspender-wearing suburbanite in Northern Virginia. The lower the profile, the better to rise up the ranks in an agency that rewards competence but shies from the flashy.

After getting an undergraduate degree in 1964 from Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, he earned a master's degree at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in 1966 with a specialty in European affairs. In the late 1960s, he was an Army infantry officer in the Vietnam War.

He joined the CIA in 1972 and founded the Sherman Kent School for Intelligence Analysis to train new CIA employees. In April 1989, he became director for European analysis. In July 1997, he was named deputy director for intelligence. And in October 2000, he was sworn in as deputy director under George Tenet, who announced early this month he is resigning after seven years.

Nobody, but noooobody, envies the job ahead of him. The CIA is about to get slammed with two major reports from a congressional committee and from the super-prestigious blue-ribbon panel investigating intelligence failures and the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on America. The CIA is braced for the worst.

One of McLaughlin's favorite magic tricks is to tear up a hefty copy of The Washington Post and then, presto, reproduce it in its entirety. But it is unlikely he'll be able to tear up the new reports and make them disappear.

McLaughlin's friends and supporters are keeping their fingers crossed that he won't get crosswise with the Bush administration, members of Congress and just about anybody else in authority who has a beef about the intelligence failures of the past several years. Most dramatically, the CIA was surprised by the nuclear tests in India, North Korea's efforts to develop a nuclear bomb, the al-Qaida attacks on the U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 and the 9/11 attacks.

On the face of it, McLaughlin's new job is almost undoable. The CIA director oversees the CIA itself but also is responsible for the intelligence produced by 14 other agencies. But, in a typical Washington bureaucratic arrangement, he has no hiring or firing or budgetary authority over them.

The total intelligence budget is believed to be $40 billion a year, but the CIA's budget is only about 10 percent of that.

Talking to CIA employees on the day his resignation was announced, Tenet said his deputy is "a man of magical warmth, wit, wisdom and decency."

He said McLaughlin will be "a great acting director," but he did not say a "great director."

McLaughlin could be in the running to be the next CIA director, but it's not a sure thing. Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security director, says McLaughlin is two steps ahead because he has Bush's total confidence, having briefed him on many occasions. But some in the White House say McLaughlin was seen by some in the administration as not "forceful" enough in his briefings.

Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, says he is confident McLaughlin will do well because of his broad experience and service to Tenet.

But it is that loyalty and experience that make some nervous. McLaughlin knows all the secrets, such as why the agency over-hyped the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

That worries the agency's many critics who think the CIA has been too reluctant to change, too eager to please its political bosses and too intent on pursuing its legendary rivalry with the FBI.

But McLaughlin is known for being smart and a quick study, as well as gifted at analyzing raw intelligence data. He defends the agency and its employees, saying they are among the best in the world and noting in his speeches that they take enormous personal risks and that their families make huge sacrifices. But the agency, he says, is far more rewarding than a big-bucks private job.

In 2001, in a commencement address at his alma mater of Wittenberg, he said, "When you leave this great school, you will find as I did that many forks appear in the road, and I defy any of you to know now where those choices will lead you three decades hence. I could not in 1964 have traced my path more than a year or so into the future."