FBI must switch gears to prevent terrorism, experts say

As its agents sift through rubble and interview countless people about the attacks of September 11, the FBI is in its element. Its traditions, rules, and organizational structure generally make it very adept at crime-solving-but very poor at terrorism prevention. The pressing question now is whether the FBI can radically shift gears, despite its own inertia and investigative limits imposed by Congress and the Constitution. More specifically, can the FBI systematically detect and deter future terrorist attacks? The FBI was designated the nation's lead counter-terrorism agency by a 1995 law. Its current fitness for that role is being seriously questioned, however, because of its failure before September 11 to piece together clues then in its possession that might have enabled it to prevent the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Although its critics are reluctant to assign exclusive blame to the FBI for the U.S. failure to thwart the suicide attacks, they point to critical flaws in the bureau's intelligence-gathering methods, as well as to the reality that the FBI is conditioned to pursue terrorists after they have struck, not to stave off such violence. "If there is any reason to have law enforcement at the federal level, it has to be to protect national and federal interests. And ours is incapable of doing that under the current arrangement," warns Oliver "Buck" Revell, who is a former associate deputy director of the FBI and a former adviser to the National Security Council. Revell emphasizes that many of the obstacles to fighting terrorism are not of the bureau's making: The Constitution, federal privacy laws, and stringent Justice Department counterintelligence guidelines all focus on protecting individual civil rights. This emphasis hinders crime prevention by severely limiting the surveillance of suspicious individual and groups, the interception of mail and phone calls, and the seizure of evidence, such as computer hard drives, that might provide clues to the plans of would-be terrorists. The anti-terrorism bill now in Congress would ease some of the restraints on the FBI when the agency is focused on fighting terrorism. FBI agents are not permitted to create what is essentially an intelligence-gathering file- one based solely on suspicion that an individual or group might pose a threat to the United States. Under current wiretapping standards, FBI investigators must demonstrate to a court that a crime already has been committed or is about to be committed. But Revell argues that this "criminal predicate" is much too high an investigative standard to retain, now that there is an obvious potential for terrorist attacks even more ghastly than those of September 11. The FBI's response to suspicions triggered by the behavior of Zacarias Moussaoui illustrates how the agency is hamstrung. According to an October 1 Newsweek article, top Justice Department and FBI officials in Washington turned down an August request by FBI agents in Minneapolis for a special counterintelligence surveillance warrant against Moussaoui, even though there reportedly was evidence linking him to an Algerian terrorist group. The Minneapolis agents had seized Moussaoui's computer in mid-August after receiving a tip that he had sought flight training only in making turns--not take-offs and landings--and had asked about flying over New York City. After September 11, the FBI's Minneapolis office finally got approval to inspect the computer's hard drive. Agents allegedly say they found that it contained information on crop-dusting aircraft and wind patterns. Moussaoui, 33, was arrested on August 17 on immigration charges. According to critics of the FBI's methods, one of the agency's most glaring problems is that it lacks a coordinated threat-assessment system--that is, a systematic way of ferreting out, weighing, and appropriately responding to possible terrorist threats. The FBI had no way, for example, of connecting the bits and pieces of suspicious information that field agents were receiving about the suicidal terrorists before September 11. Robert J. Heibel, a former FBI counter-terrorism chief who now teaches at Mercyhurst College in Pennsylvania, says that the FBI does a "tremendous" job with tactical intelligence--amassing and using information after a crime has been committed. In other words, the FBI is great at crime-solving. "They are like hounds after the hare," Heibel says. Indeed, according to the State Department, since September 11, the FBI has analyzed more than 241 serious or credible threats related to the attacks, conducted more than 540 interviews and 383 searches, and arrested or detained at least 439 people. But the FBI routinely falls short on strategic intelligence--identifying threats as they develop and alerting appropriate officials in time to avert a crisis. Heibel contends that in recent years, the FBI has made the mistake of promoting people who lack the "intellectual horsepower" to do such intelligence work and who aren't properly trained for it. "Analysis is a cerebral exercise, and I think that is where the bureau has fallen down," Heibel says. According to him, FBI agents refuse to use information readily available to the public-- in scholarly journals, on the Internet, or in foreign newspapers or magazines, for example--because of an attitude that if the FBI didn't uncover the information, it must be worthless. Also, as has been widely reported, there are too few language specialists at the FBI to translate the information it does take seriously. Juliette N. Kayyem, a Harvard professor who served on the National Commission on Terrorism, notes that piecing together and disseminating intelligence has not traditionally been an important part of the FBI's mission. Larry M. Wortzel, a security and military intelligence expert at the Heritage Foundation, recently investigated the lack of data-sharing among the FBI's field offices. He says that case files are intentionally kept from other field offices in order to try to prevent sullying suspects' names, or endangering future prosecutions. In the agency's "need to know" culture, there is a reluctance to pass information up the chain of command unless it pertains to an existing investigation. And the FBI is not in the habit of sharing its findings with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Customs Service, the Federal Aviation Administration, or the CIA. Likewise, the 1996 report "Preparing for the 21st Century: An Appraisal of U.S. Intelligence" found that agencies such as the CIA strictly interpret their legal authority to be limited to "foreign intelligence." Therefore, they often decline FBI requests for intelligence information. The FBI's intelligence-gathering capabilities also suffer every time the government takes a suspected terrorist to trial. Ruth Wedgwood, a former federal prosecutor and a leading national security expert, says, "The due-process culture of a courtroom tilts toward full disclosure of all matters in the government's files." Thus, Wedgwood explains, an ongoing terrorist enterprise such as Osama bin Laden's can use once-secret information that is publicly disclosed in court to get savvier at avoiding surveillance. In Wedgwood's view, the American legal system is an important anti-terrorism tool, but its value must be weighed against the potential harm that trials can do to terrorism- prevention efforts. Criminal convictions after the fact are cold comfort for the nation, she notes. Moreover, it is hard to persuade informers to cooperate when they know their identities might be exposed in a federal trial. When the CIA faced a similar problem with the information it was collecting abroad, it came up with ways to, in effect, sanitize the information so that crucial findings could be distributed as needed without compromising secret sources. Many of the FBI's critics hope that Tom Ridge, head of the new Office of Homeland Security, will find ways to take some of the handcuffs off the FBI so that its terrorism- prevention efforts are more productive. Revell says: "We really need to look at a consolidation of law enforcement and its mission consistent with the threat of the 21st century. [Ridge] can help in this process … so we don't have so many people running around at cross-purposes." However, Revell concludes: "Whether the psyche of the nation is sufficiently traumatized to take a realistic look at changing [the FBI's] old habits and existing patterns, I don't know. I certainly hope it doesn't take many more of these attacks."