The Kansas City Star December 03, 2002
FBI refocuses on terror fight, but not fast enough for critics
By MATT STEARNS
WASHINGTON - The FBI's new orders sounded simple: At a time of national crisis, refocus on counter-terrorism activities rather than the bread-and-butter crime-busting it has done for years.
That has proved easier said than done, and with patience running short on Capitol Hill and in the Bush Administration, the FBI finds itself fighting for credibility in the nation's capital as the bureau struggles to turn its mission toward combating terror.
Congressional critics say the agency, beset by turf wars and a clannish mentality, is not moving fast enough.
FBI supporters reply that it takes time to undertake such a substantial shift. They point to several steps embattled Director Robert Mueller has taken to help speed the adjustment to fight terrorism activities.
"Within the context of limited resources, competing priorities, political realities on what you can do, and the fact that it's a big bureaucracy, I don't have a real problem with the rate of change over there," said John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org, an intelligence policy group.
Published reports recently indicated the Bush Administration would consider opening a domestic intelligence agency within the new Department of Homeland Security. That was seen as a snub of the FBI, which is under the Justice Department and historically does such work.
Then, a leaked FBI memo blasted the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms just as administration officials were considering transferring the ATF from the Treasury Department to the Justice Department. The FBI memo said the move would be "unwarranted and counterproductive" because the FBI was better than the ATF at certain law enforcement functions.
Mueller disavowed the memo, but not before it hurt the FBI's credibility on Capitol Hill among those who think the agency is too focused on issues other than counterterrorism. The memo prompted some to muse that crime-fighting should be removed from the FBI portfolio altogether.
"They're still worried about losing turf," said a Senate aide whose boss is a key player on intelligence issues. "Maybe the missions are too different. Maybe we can do some divorcing.
"If Congress sets up jurisdictions," he said, "maybe then they would focus."
The concerns can best be seen in FBI statistics for the six months following Sept. 11, 2001. According to that data, the FBI continued to devote the same level of resources to bank and drug crimes as it did before Sept. 11.
An internal memo leaked in October indicated FBI officials remained concerned about whether the bureau was adapting to its new mission swiftly enough. Mueller responded by saying: "We are a different FBI than we were a year ago; we continue to move toward where we need to be, and I am confident that we will get there."
Then a published report said the FBI was considering closing more than 50 field offices and transferring hundreds of agents to counterterrorism activities. Bureau spokesman Steven Berry called the report overstated and said that "no such plan currently exists." But, Berry added, the bureau's restructuring is an ongoing process with many ideas still being bandied about.
"As far as I'm concerned, they had better be moving in the right direction, because they had a long way to go," said Republican Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, one of the FBI's harshest critics. "Mueller deserves a chance to make this work. I'm going to give him a little while longer to turn around the FBI."
The FBI and Mueller have been unfairly maligned in the days since Sept. 11, 2001, said Warren Rudman, a former U.S. senator who is a co-author of a recent report on American intelligence challenges.
"To Bob Mueller's credit, he is establishing a far-ranging counterterrorism organization that will be in all the FBI field offices around the country," Rudman said. "They will learn to ferret out and prevent. That takes time. That will not happen overnight. ... I think Bob Mueller's doing all the right things."
Besides, Rudman said, the FBI helped stop terrorist incidents before and after Sept. 11.
"In baseball, if you bat .500, you're a Hall-of-Famer in your rookie year," Rudman said. "In intelligence, if you bat .800, you're a loser. ... They've had a lot of success that people don't talk about."
Even so, the establishment of the Homeland Security Department clouds the FBI's role in a key aspect of federal security and law enforcement. The FBI is supposed to share its intelligence with the new department, and Homeland Security Secretary-designate Tom Ridge said he expected his department to make heavy use of FBI-gathered intelligence.
Beyond information-sharing, however, the FBI's relationship with the new department is not clearly defined. The bureau is notoriously independent.
Its critics say the FBI will have to adjust to the new reality whether it likes it or not.
"It's going to be a battle, and the FBI will resist giving them information until something terrible happens or until something embarrassing happens," the Senate aide said.
An FBI spokesman referred a reporter to the Homeland Security office when asked how the bureau would relate to the department in the war on terror.
"Everything is being put over to them regarding where we fit in or don't fit in," Berry said.
Berry quickly added: "I wouldn't extrapolate that much from it."
Homeland Security officials did not return calls seeking comment.
The new challenges follow a difficult decade for the FBI. There was the bungled handling of evidence against Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. The investigation of scientist Wen Ho Lee yielded nothing. There were the fatal standoffs at Waco and Ruby Ridge. There also was the case of Robert Hanssen, a bureau counterintelligence expert who for years was a Russian spy. And there was malpractice at the FBI forensic crime laboratory.
It has been a long, hard fall for the FBI, said Athan Theomire, a Marquette University professor who has written extensively on the FBI. He noted, however, that the FBI had successfully remade itself in the past in the face of congressional criticism.
For decades, under longtime leader J. Edgar Hoover, the bureau had a virtual free rein, with the support of an acquiescent Congress and the media. The agency went from going after bank robbers in the 1930s to hunting Communists and others thought to be subversive in World War II and the Cold War era.
"The FBI became an intelligence agency," Theomire said. "It monitored political activity in the hope of picking up espionage and sabotage. It became a political containment agency, not a law enforcement agency."
In the 1970s, however, when an assertive post-Watergate Congress held public hearings on FBI misconduct and an equally assertive media began filing Freedom of Information Act requests, the FBI's public image was tarnished.
In response, the FBI moved away from intelligence work and became a more traditional law enforcement agency.
"The institutional bias became being very, very good after the fact (of the crime)," said Peter Crooks, a former FBI counterterrorism expert.
That helped it survive the criticisms of the 1970s but left it ill-equipped to deal with the consequences of the war on terror, Crooks said. Congressional hearings showed a sluggishness to respond to clues of the hijack attacks of Sept. 11.
In a historical irony, the FBI is supposed to become an intelligence agency again.
"You would have had to develop sources, and that's not a measurable statistic," Crooks said. "Having a source in Yemen telling you everything that's going on in Yemen for 10 years isn't a measurable statistic. But that's what Washington wants - measurable statistics. So that's what the FBI delivered."
The threats and cajoling from Capitol Hill will likely help the FBI in its re-adjustment, Pike said. But expectations of what the FBI and the Homeland Security Department can do should be realistic, he warned.
"The problem with counterterrorism is that you're dealing with an intrinsically rare event," Pike said. "You can't measure your rate of progress."
Copyright 2002 The Kansas City Star
