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Mr. Brennan, who has wielded tremendous power as the president's top White House counterterrorism adviser, is expected to face occasionally sharp questioning on a range of topics: from the drone campaign in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere to his role in the Bush administration's detention and interrogation program carried out while he was a top official at the C.I.A.

The hearing comes just days after the leak of a Justice Department document explaining the legal rationale for the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen who had joined Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and was killed in Yemen in September 2011. Mr. Brennan, a former C.I.A. station chief in Saudi Arabia, has been central to the Obama administration's clandestine war inside Yemen.

Pressured by members of Congress in the days before the hearing, the White House on Wednesday ordered the Justice Department to provide the Congressional Intelligence Committees with the formal, classified memos that provide the legal justification for the killing of Mr. Awlaki and other American citizens overseas who are considered terrorists. The Obama administration had previously refused to give lawmakers the full memos, written by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel.

Because so much of the targeted killing program remains shrouded in secrecy, however, it is unclear how much the Senate Intelligence Committee will press Mr. Brennan for detailed answers about the program during the public session, or whether it will wait until the additional "closed hearing" that is routine for the confirmation hearings of C.I.A. directors.

If he returns to the C.I.A. as its director, he will inherit an agency that has changed drastically in the years since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, with a new focus on hunting down terrorists that has led some to say that the agency has strayed too far from its traditional mission of foreign espionage and analysis.

In his responses to questions posed by the Senate Intelligence Committee in advance of the hearing, Mr. Brennan hinted that he shared some of these concerns. For instance, he said that the agency's performance in anticipating and analyzing the tumult in the Arab world since 2011 shows "that the C.I.A. needs to improve its capabilities and its performance still further."

Mr. Brennan is widely expected to be confirmed by the Senate, as senators from both parties have expressed their support for his candidacy and lawmakers have generally approved of the Obama administration's aggressive use of drone strikes overseas.

Mr. Brennan, 57, was first exposed to the Middle East while he was a student at Fordham University and spent a year abroad at the American University of Cairo studying Arabic. His 1980 master's thesis at the University of Texas was called "Human Rights: A Case Study of Egypt." That year, after spotting a newspaper ad recruiting for the C.I.A., he joined the agency.

He served as a Middle East analyst, as a briefer for President Bill Clinton and as station chief in Saudi Arabia from 1996 to 1999, forming relationships with Saudi officials whom he would later consult constantly about Yemen. By the end of the 1990s, he was serving as chief of staff to the director, George J. Tenet, and when terrorists struck in 2001 he was deputy to the agency's third-ranking official.

He was in charge of the creation of the agency now called the National Counterterrorism Center, founded at the urging of the national commission on the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He left the government in 2005 for a lucrative job running an intelligence contracting firm, the Analysis Corporation, that worked closely with his government security agencies.

Mr. Brennan was an early supporter of Mr. Obama in 2008, though the men did not meet until after the election. Though he was a leading candidate for C.I.A. director, he withdrew from consideration for the post, citing what he considered to be unfair criticism from human rights advocates for his role as a senior agency official when it was using brutal interrogation methods.