Call it the revenge of the nerds, Washington-style. The gun-toting FBI agent and the swashbuckling CIA undercover officer are being increasingly called upon to share their clout, their budgets and even their Hollywood glamour with the humble, desk-bound intelligence analyst.

As the two agencies confront an evolving terrorist threat, cyberattacks and other challenges, both are reorganizing in ways intended to empower analysts. That involves the delicate job of meshing the very different cultures of the streetwise agent and the brainy analyst, who reads secret dispatches, pores over intercepted communications, absorbs news media accounts and digests it all.

The biggest challenge remains at the FBI, a traditional law enforcement organization that has struggled since the 2001 terrorist attacks to remake itself as an intelligence agency that can prevent attacks and not just investigate crimes. A report on the FBI’s progress, released Wednesday, concluded that despite great strides, the bureau needs to step up the role of analysts and the respect and resources they get.

While bureau officials have long extolled the importance of intelligence analysts, the report, by the FBI 9/11 Review Commission, found that the bureau "still does not sufficiently recognize them as a professionalized workforce with distinct requirements for investment in training and education." The FBI director, James B. Comey, acknowledged the problem and said that empowering analysts was one of his main goals.

At the CIA, where analysts have had a central role since its founding, they long worked largely apart from the "operators," who work in the field overseas recruiting agents. This month, John O. Brennan, the CIA director, announced that analysts and operators would be combined in 10 new "mission centers," following the model of the agency’s Counterterrorism Center. That may give the analysts greater day-to-day influence on operations.

The latest moves continue the steady enhancement of the role of intelligence analysts. Even popular culture has caught on, with analysts becoming the stars of recent movies and television shows.

In "Zero Dark Thirty," the 2012 movie account of the hunt for Osama bin Laden, the central character is a CIA analyst called Maya, played by Jessica Chastain. Addressing the beefy, heavily armed members of the Navy SEALs who are about to fly into Pakistan, the petite Maya is no wallflower.

"Bin Laden is there," she confidently tells the SEALs. "And you’re going to kill him for me."

The failure to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks and the subsequent focus on terrorist threats have helped drive the new stature of analysts. The National Counterterrorism Center — not to be confused with the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center — was created after Sept. 11 as an analytical hub to make sure that every scrap of threat information was combined with other data to detect plots.

Another factor is the explosion of data in an era of smartphones and the Internet, as the National Security Agency documents leaked by Edward J. Snowden have underscored. While the NSA has always been a data-driven operation, other agencies now need their own skilled people to sort and make sense of the flood of information, or it will overwhelm them.

"These days when you have an intelligence lapse, it’s usually because the crucial information is lost in an avalanche of data," said John E. McLaughlin, a former deputy director and acting director of the CIA.

He said that while analysts had always been valued at the agency, they were long segregated in the Directorate of Intelligence, separate from the Directorate of Operations, which did the spying. For many years, a turnstile and a security checkpoint at the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, separated the analysts from the operations officers, he said.

A career analyst himself, McLaughlin said some operations veterans "may feel angst" about the reorganization that will group them with analysts, but that it made sense. "The role of the analyst who puts all the pieces together has become more critical, because there are just more pieces," he said.

After Sept. 11, the CIA lent the FBI some 40 analysts to try to jump-start the bureau’s reorientation, McLaughlin said. Before 2001, according to the national 9/11 commission, 66 percent of FBI analysts were "not qualified to perform analytical duties." Secretaries were sometimes rewarded with a promotion to analyst, with duties that included emptying the trash and answering the phone.

Proud special agents did not always see the value of analysts who did not necessarily build criminal cases — the traditional measure of success at the FBI. "At the end of my career, there was low-level tension between the agents and the analysts," said Jack Cloonan, an FBI agent from 1976 to 2002. "Who was running the case?"

Cloonan said the analysts did not always share the "camaraderie and esprit de corps" that agents had with one another. "Street agents are street agents," he said, adding that he still heard grumbling from former bureau colleagues about some analysts who earn more than they do.

Philip Mudd, a career CIA analyst who moved to a top counterterrorism job at the FBI in 2005, said the difference in cultures was striking, and predictable. He recalled the case of David C. Headley, an American affiliated with Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistani extremist group, who admitted to scouting targets for the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India.

Headley was arrested, prosecuted and sentenced to 35 years. The more difficult and novel task the FBI faced, and one for which analysts were critical, was determining whether Lashkar-e-Taiba had other operatives in the United States.

"It’s exploring the world of the unknown," Mudd said.

By empowering analysts, "You’re telling agents, ‘You’re going to have to give up some turf,’" he said. "Someone’s going to say, ‘OK, how many child molesters do you want me not to prosecute so you can do your analysis?’"

Comey, the FBI director, has used the analogy of an arranged marriage to describe the relationship between agents and analysts, who have often been quickly paired together, with little say in the matter. Sometimes arranged marriages end up with the couple living happily ever after. Other times, they end up sleeping in different beds.

To build better relationships, Comey is trying to get agents and analysts to "date" at the FBI Academy, where they are now required to train and practice working together. Comey has said his hope is for a career intelligence analyst to rise to the FBI’s most senior ranks before he retires.

Some people who study intelligence and counterterrorism are concerned that the pendulum could swing too far. Intelligence analysts, said Amy Zegart, a Stanford scholar who studies intelligence, could become too consumed by daily operations and neglect strategic thinking about threats that could be years away.

At the CIA, she said, counterterrorism analysts are "too tactical," focused on the next drone target. If the same model is now applied to the rest of the agency’s work, other analysts, too, could be caught up in short-term demands, she said.

"Who in the U.S. government," she asked, "is going to be thinking about longer-term threats?"

© 2015 The New York Times Company