Remarks prepared for delivery by Robert S. Mueller, III, Director,
Federal Bureau of Investigation
Citizens Crime Commission of New York City
The Milstein Lecture
New York, NY
December 19, 2002
Good afternoon. It is good to be here among colleagues and friends. I would like to thank Harold Milstein--not only for the invitation, but for his leadership. To Mayor Bloomberg, Commissioner Kelly, my former colleagues in the U.S. Attorney's office, District Attorneys, Tom and everyone at the Citizens Crime Commission, it is good to see you, and I thank you for coming here today.
With the end of the year upon us, it is a good time to take an accounting of where we are in our mission to protect our country against terrorism. And, given the events of 9/11 and the inspirational leadership that we have all seen from New Yorkers since that terrible day, there is no better place for us to take stock than here in New York City.
Someone once said that at moments of crisis, words are hollow vessels. I felt this again this morning flying into New York, remembering not only 9/11, but also my visit to Ground Zero just ten days after the attacks. Even for a Marine who thought he had seen it all, that day remains among the saddest of my life. I will never forget it. My heart and the hearts of all FBI employees remain with the victims, the victims' families, and the people of this great city.
We have all been changed by 9/11. Nowhere is that change more apparent than in the FBI.
Let me start with an update on our war on terror. This truly is a war, a global war--from Kabul to Karachi, from Bali to Mombasa, from Sanaa, Yemen, to New York City. Preventing terrorism means identifying cells and disrupting their operations. And it means crippling and dismantling terrorist networks country-by-country, operative-by-operative, dollar-by-dollar, so that they no longer pose a threat to the United States.
2002 has been the first full year in this war, and looking back, much has been accomplished. We have taken the fight to Al-Qa'ida, to where they train, recruit, plan, and live. We have taken away their safe haven in Afghanistan. We have taken into custody more than 3,000 Al-Qa'ida leaders and foot soldiers worldwide. Here in the United States, we have charged nearly 200 suspected terrorist associates with crimes. Worldwide, we have prevented as many as a hundred terrorist attacks or plots, including a number here in the U.S.
These successes have come because of the singular, united focus of
virtually everyone engaged in this war--law enforcement, intelligence,
the military, and our diplomatic community. Every level--federal,
state, local, international--has contributed its unique set of skills.
Nowhere is that more evident than here in New York. This city has been a leader in the war against terror since the 1920 bombing of the old J.P. Morgan building. That tradition of leadership continues today. Commissioner Kelly has done an outstanding job in leading the NYPD's post 9/11 fight. The new Counterterrorism Division led by Frank Libutti, and the newly revamped Intelligence Division led by David Cohen, are models for the nation. Commissioner, my thanks to you, Frank, David, and the 40,000 officers and detectives who serve this city so well.
New York's leadership includes the men and women of the FBI. Our Assistant Director in Charge here--Kevin Donovan--has picked up where the tireless Barry Mawn left off in the war on terror.
September 11 made the prevention of terrorist attacks the FBI's top priority and overriding focus. While we remain committed to our other important national security and law enforcement responsibilities, the prevention of terrorism takes precedence in our thinking and planning; in our hiring and staffing; in our training and technologies; and, most importantly, in our investigations.
With this shift in priorities has come a major shift in the allocation of resources within the Bureau. We have doubled the number of Agents devoted to terrorism. We have hired nearly 300 new counterterrorism translators specializing in Middle Eastern languages. And, we have completely overhauled our counterterrorism program at Headquarters, centralizing our management and accountability, beefing up existing units, and adding new capabilities.
Essential to preventing future terrorist attacks is improving our intelligence analysis and predictive capability. The FBI has always been a collector of intelligence in pursuing its criminal cases. But with the mandate of prevention, we are now restructuring to provide proper analysis and dissemination of intelligence to all our partners in the war on terror.
We have taken a number of steps to build that capacity within the FBI. We set up a National Joint Terrorism Task Force at FBI headquarters, staffed by representatives from 30 different federal, state, and local agencies. This national task force coordinates the two-way flow of information and intelligence between Headquarters and the JTTFs around the country. We have quadrupled the number of strategic analysts at Headquarters. We are building a cadre of more than 700 analysts nationwide.
As a result of our efforts, we will now be able to produce a greater
quantity and quality of analytical product, and to share that product
more effectively with policy makers, with the intelligence community
and with our law enforcement partners.
We are also completely upgrading our information technology capability in the Bureau. Our longstanding problems with information technology are well known. What is less well known is what we are doing to fix those problems and to add a whole new set of capabilities to FBI operations. We have brought in some of the best and brightest from private industry to lead this effort. These individuals--along with a range of outside experts--are bringing the Bureau into the digital age. From the rollout of new hardware, to the upgrade of critical networks, to the redesign of investigative applications, we are making progress. Thanks to these new initiatives, we will soon have a system that we can mine for data and analysis, and that will allow Agents to manage their case files electronically for the first time in history.
In step with these institutional changes have come important legal and cultural changes that are enhancing our ability to prevent terrorism.
Principal among these is the manner in which September 11 has torn down the legal walls between intelligence and law enforcement agencies. For those of you who followed the 9/11 hearings in Congress this fall, you may recall meetings between the CIA and FBI where it was unclear what information on a hijacker could be legally shared under the arcane set of rules and laws that was known as "the Wall."
Since 9/11, we have breached the Wall. First, thanks to the PATRIOT Act and the recent FISA Appeals Court decision, we no longer have legal obstacles to coordination and information-sharing between the law enforcement community and the intelligence agencies. Law enforcement officers can now coordinate their approach to terrorist targets without running afoul of the law.
In addition to the collapse of the legal "Wall," we have also seen the collapse of the cultural and operational wall between the FBI and CIA. Those who focus on stories of the feuding between the agencies back in the era of J. Edgar Hoover and Allen Dulles are overlooking the increased operational integration between the two agencies since 9/11. From my daily morning briefings with CIA officers and George Tenet to the widespread assignment of executives, Agents, and analysts between the two agencies since 9/11, the FBI and the CIA have become integrated at virtually every level of our operations.
The third wall we are tearing down is the one between us and our state and local partners. Our 11,500 FBI Agents are a small cadre compared to the nation's 670,000 state and local law enforcement officers. We need every one of those officers to be fully integrated into the war on terror. That is why we created the National JTTF; that is why we have established JTTFs in all of our field offices; and, that is why we are standing up regional information sharing operations that will revolutionize the way we work together. These efforts are opening doors to cooperation that simply did not exist prior to 9/11.
This crumbling of pre 9/11 walls brings us to the issue of whether America should create a new domestic intelligence agency similar to the British MI-5. This idea is based on a faulty understanding of counterterrorism that sees a dichotomy between "intelligence operations" and "law enforcement operations." This misunderstanding of counterterrorism has led some to conclude that we should separate these two functions and create a new domestic intelligence agency.
We have just discussed how important it is to break down walls to enable the sharing of information. Building new walls is going in the wrong direction. There is no reason to separate the two functions of law enforcement and domestic intelligence. On the contrary, combining law enforcement and intelligence grants us ready access to every weapon in the government's arsenal against terrorists. We can now make strategic and tactical choices between our law enforcement options of arrest and incarceration and our intelligence options of surveillance and source development.
The wisdom of this approach has been clearly borne out. Over the last year, the FBI has identified, disrupted, and neutralized a number of terrorist threats and cells. We have done so in ways an intelligence-only agency like MI-5 cannot. Why is that? Because the FBI is uniquely situated for the counterterrorism mission.
