Good morning, Mr. Chairman, Senator Rockefeller, and Members of the
Committee. I appreciate this opportunity to discuss the world threats
facing this nation and how the FBI has adapted to meet emerging threats.
I am going to touch on some of the successes of the past 12 months,
but I would like to say, at the outset, that none of these successes
would have been possible without the extraordinary efforts of our
partners in state and municipal law enforcement and our counterparts
around the world. The Muslim, Iraqi, and Arab-American communities
have also contributed a great deal to our success. On behalf of the
FBI, I would like to thank these communities for their assistance
and for their ongoing commitment to preventing acts of terrorism.
All of us understand that the threats we face today, and those we
will face tomorrow, can only be defeated if we work together.
SUCCESSES
IN THE WAR ON TERRORISM
In
2003, the United States and its Allies made considerable advances
toward defeating the al-Qa’ida
network all over the world. Since this Committee’s World
Wide Threat hearing last year, the efforts of the FBI, and our
state and local law enforcement partners,
to identify terrorists and dismantle terrorist networks have yielded
major successes:
- In Cincinnati,
an al-Qa’ida
operative was charged with providing material support to terrorists.
- In Baltimore,
a resident was identified as an al-Qa’ida
operative with direct associations to now detained senior al-Qa’ida
operatives Tawfiq Bin Attash and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
- In Tampa,
the U.S. leader of Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and three
of his lieutenants
were arrested under the RICO statute for
their participation in a conspiracy which contributed to the
deaths of two U.S. citizens in Israel.
- In Newark, three
individuals, including an illegal arms dealer, were
indicted for their role in attempting to smuggle an SA-18
shoulder-fire missile system into the U.S.
- In Minneapolis,
an individual who trained in Afghanistan and provided funds to associates
in Pakistan
was recently arrested and
charged with conspiring to provide material support to al-Qa’ida.
- And in
cities across the country, the FBI, along with our law enforcement
partners, conducted
over 10,000 interviews of Iraqi
expatriates to seek information in support of Operation Iraqi
Freedom. These efforts resulted in the generation and distribution
of information
that proved valuable to our troops in Iraq, and to our counterterrorism
and counterintelligence programs.
Mr. Chairman,
it is important to note that we attribute these and other recent
successes to our
close coordination and information sharing
with other members of the Intelligence Community, with our overseas
partners, and with the essential force multipliers – state and
local law enforcement officials who participate on our 84 Joint Terrorism
Task Forces (JTTFs). The JTTFs have played a central role in virtually
every terrorism investigation, prevention, or interdiction within the
United States. As you know, JTTFs team up FBI agents with police officers,
members of the Intelligence Community, Homeland Security, and other
federal partners to coordinate counterterrorism investigations and
share information. They are also a critical conduit between the FBI
and the officer on the beat.
Our current abilities to coordinate with our partners and develop
actionable intelligence to prevent terrorist attacks are a direct result
of our efforts to transform the FBI to better meet our counterterrorism
mission. I am going to discuss this transformation, but first I would
like to discuss what we see as the greatest threats facing the United
States.
The Terrorist Threat
Al-Qa’ida
and Other Sunni Extremists
The greatest threat
remains international terrorism -- specifically Sunni extremists,
including
al-Qa’ida. While our successes to
date are dramatic, we face an enemy that is determined, resilient,
and patient, and whose ultimate goal is the destruction of the United
States. Al-Qa’ida’s flexibility and adaptability continue
to make them dangerous and unpredictable. This enemy still has the
capability to strike the U.S. both here and abroad with little or no
warning.
Al-Qa’ida
is committed to damaging the U.S. economy and U.S. prestige and will
attack any
target that will accomplish these goals.
- There are strong
indications that al-Qa’ida
will revisit missed targets until they succeed, such as they did
with the World
Trade Center. The list of missed targets now includes the White House
and the Capitol.
In addition, our
transportation systems across the country, particularly the subways
and bridges
in major cities, as well as airlines, have
been a continual focus of al-Qa’ida targeting.
Mr. Chairman,
my classified statement sets forth additional detailed information
about what we
know and can anticipate about al-Qa’ida’s
operational methodology. I will be happy to address those matters with
the Committee in a closed session.
We also remain
concerned about al-Qa’ida’s efforts to
acquire weapons of mass destruction. The discovery of ricin in Europe,
al-Qa’ida’s clear interest in a range of Chemical, Biological,
Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) weapons, and its desire to attack the
U.S. at equal or greater levels than 9/11, highlight the need for continual
vigilance in this regard.
Finally, al-Qa’ida retains a cadre of supporters within the
U.S. that extends across the country. These supporters are not confined
to individuals of Middle Eastern extraction, as evidenced by the members
of the al-Qa’ida support group arrested and convicted in Portland,
Oregon. In fact, al-Qa’ida appears to recognize the operational
advantage it can derive from recruiting U.S. citizens. While the bulk
of al-Qa’ida’s supporters in the U.S. are engaged in fundraising,
recruitment, and logistics, there have been cases of those apparently
involved in operational planning.
Other International Terrorist Groups
While al-Qa’ida
and like-minded groups remain at the forefront of the war on terror,
other groups, such as Hizballah, HAMAS and PIJ
in the U.S. warrant equal vigilance due to their ongoing capability
to launch terrorist attacks inside the U.S. Historically, however,
these groups have limited their militant activities to Israeli targets
and have reserved the U.S. for fundraising, recruitment, and procurement.
The FBI disrupted
several significant Hizballah cells over the last year. In Charlotte,
North
Carolina, an individual was sentenced to
155 years in jail for conspiring to provide material support to Hizballah.
In Detroit, Michigan, 11 individuals – some of whom have admitted
to ties to Hizballah – were charged with bank fraud, cigarette
smuggling and RICO offenses. These arrests were the result of a long-term
investigation of criminal enterprises associated with Hizballah.
The Foreign Intelligence Threat
Mr. Chairman, although the impact of terrorism is more immediate and
highly visible, espionage and foreign intelligence activities are no
less threats to U.S. national security. Given our country's stature
as the leading political, military, economic, and scientific power,
both now and for the foreseeable future, foreign intelligence services
and non-intelligence collectors will continue to recruit sources to
penetrate the U.S. Intelligence Community and U.S. government, target
our national economic interests, research and development base, and
national defense plans and information, and assert political influence
through perception management operations. The loss of sensitive, classified,
and proprietary information critical to U.S. interests can hamper our
ability to conduct international relations, threaten our military,
and diminish our technological base and economic competitiveness.
My classified statement discusses our National Strategy for Counterintelligence
and our current assessment of foreign intelligence threats. I will
be happy to address these issues in greater detail in a closed session.
The Cyber Threat
Finally, Mr. Chairman, I would just like to mention that the FBI
is also expanding our efforts to address the rapidly growing cyber
threat as it relates to both terrorism and national security. The number
of individuals and groups with the ability to use computers for illegal,
harmful, and possibly devastating purposes is on the rise. We are particularly
concerned about terrorists and state actors wishing to exploit vulnerabilities
in U.S. systems and networks.
The FBI has a division dedicated to combating cyber crime and cyber
terrorism. We are committed to identifying and neutralizing those individuals
or groups that illegally access computer systems, spread malicious
code, support terrorist or state sponsored computer operations, and
steal trade secrets that present an economic and security threat to
the U.S.
TRANSFORMATION OF THE FBI
Prioritization, Mobilization, and Centralization
Over the past year, the men and women of the FBI have continued to
implement a plan that fundamentally transforms our organization to
enhance our ability to predict and prevent terrorism. As you know,
we took the first steps toward this transformation in the days and
weeks following the 9/11 attacks. We established a new set of priorities
that govern the allocation of manpower and resources in every FBI program
and office. Counterterrorism is our overriding priority, and every
terrorism lead is addressed, even if it requires a diversion of resources
from other priorities. The other threats discussed above are also top
priorities for the FBI.
Since 9/11, we
have centralized management of our counterterrorism, counterintelligence,
and cyber
programs to limit “stove piping” of
information, to coordinate operations, to conduct liaison with other
agencies and governments, and to be accountable for the overall development
and success of our efforts in these areas. Our operational divisions
at Headquarters have analyzed the threat environment, devised national
strategies to address the most critical threats, and are implementing
these strategies in every field office, task force, and Legat.
We have also reallocated resources in accordance with the new priorities.
For example, we increased the number of agents assigned to counterterrorism
from roughly 1,300 to 2,300, and hired over 400 analysts. To enhance
our translation capabilities, we increased the number of permanent
and contract linguists with skills in critical languages from 555 to
over 1,200. We also established a number of new operational units that
give us new or improved capabilities to address the terrorist threat.
The FBI Intelligence Program
Over the past
year, we have made tremendous progress in implementing the next key
step in our
transformation – the FBI’s Intelligence
Program.
While the FBI has always been among the world's best collectors of
information, for a variety of historical reasons, the Bureau never
established a formal infrastructure to exploit that information fully
for its intelligence value. Individual FBI agents have always capably
analyzed the evidence in their particular cases, and then used that
analysis to guide their investigations. But the FBI as an institution
never elevated that analytical process above the individual case or
investigation to an overall effort to analyze intelligence and strategically
direct intelligence collection.
Today, an enterprise-wide intelligence program is absolutely essential.
The threats to the homeland are not contained by geographic boundaries
and often do not fall neatly into investigative program categories.
Consequently, threat information has relationships and applicability
that crosses both internal and external organizational boundaries.
Counter-terrorism efforts must incorporate elements from -- and contribute
toward -- counter-intelligence, cyber, and criminal programs. In order
to respond to this changing threat environment, we are building our
capabilities to fuse, analyze and disseminate our related intelligence,
and to create collection requirements based on our analysis of the
intelligence gaps about our adversaries.
We have created an Office of Intelligence within the FBI to establish
and execute standards for recruiting, hiring, training, and developing
the intelligence analytic workforce, and ensuring that analysts are
assigned to operational and field divisions based on intelligence priorities.
We also established a new position, the Executive Assistant Director
for Intelligence (EAD-I), who joins the three other Executive Assistant
Directors in the top tier of FBI management. We have hired an intelligence
expert with 25 years of experience in the Intelligence Community to
serve in this position, which is responsible for managing the national
analytical program and for institutionalizing intelligence processes
in all areas of FBI operations.
We have established a formal requirements process for identifying
and resolving intelligence gaps. This will allow us to identify key
gaps in our collection capability that must be filled through targeted
collection strategies.
Finally, in order to ensure that FBI-wide collection plans and directives
are incorporated into field activities, all field offices have established
a Field Intelligence Group (FIG). The FIG is the centralized intelligence
component in each field office that is responsible for the management,
execution, and coordination of intelligence functions. FIG personnel
gather, analyze, and disseminate the intelligence collected in their
field office.
Field offices
will also support the "24-hour intelligence cycle" of
the FBI by employing all appropriate resources to monitor, collect,
and disseminate threat information, investigative developments (e.g.
urgent reports), and other significant raw intelligence to meet the
executive information needs of the field offices, other field offices,
FBI Headquarters, Legal Attachés, and other federal or state
and local agencies.
If our Intelligence Program is to succeed, we must continue to build
and strengthen our intelligence workforce. Our efforts to recruit,
hire, and train agents and analysts with intelligence experience began
shortly after September 11, 2001. In 2003 and in early 2004, we have
also taken steps to enhance the stature of intelligence and analysis
within the FBI and to provide career incentives for specialization
in these areas. To ensure that our intelligence mission is carried
out, we revised field office and program inspections and agent and
management evaluations to make it clear that developing and disseminating
intelligence is the job of every office and agent.
Mr. Chairman, my prepared statement provides additional details about
the many enhancements to our intelligence program to include increased
training, targeted hiring, creation of a College of Analytical Studies,
establishment of career tracks for Agents who devote their careers
to intelligence, and improvements to our information technology. In
the interest of time, Mr. Chairman, I will conclude at this point and
respond to any questions the Committee may have. Thank you again for
the opportunity to be here today.
