Even as the FBI announced a reorganization plan intended to strengthen its ability to prevent future terrorist attacks, Director Robert Mueller on Wednesday acknowledged that the agency missed two additional possible warning signs before the Sept. 11 attacks.
Mueller described a May 1998 memo from an FBI pilot based in Oklahoma City who reported noticing “large numbers” of Middle Eastern men taking flight lessons at airports in the state. The pilot warned that the pattern was “a recent phenomenon” and “may be related to planned terrorist activity,” according to a copy the agency provided later in the day.
Another agency official said the FBI also had been alerted, in a classified report from another government agency, to an unsuccessful attempt by a Middle Eastern country to buy a sophisticated flight simulator. The official declined to name the nation, or the year of the alert, but said it was on a list of countries that are barred from purchasing sensitive technology.
In a two-hour discussion with reporters, Mueller conceded for the first time that the FBI might have been able to stop the Sept. 11 attacks if it had done a better job of connecting all the advance clues.
“The jury is still out on all of it,” he said. “Looking at it right now, I can’t say for sure . . . that there wasn’t a possibility that we could have come across some lead that would have led us to the hijackers.”
In laying out the broad reorganization plan, Mueller was fundamentally promising to change the structure, mission and culture of the FBI. He argued the shift would focus the bureau on combating terrorism and improve future chances to pick up on advance intelligence of an impending attack.
Making cultural changes
That resets the bar quite high for the FBI’s success, and it would institute a cultural change from investigating crimes to preventing terrorism. The new disclosures come as the bureau is under criticism for revelations in recent weeks that it failed to act on other advance hints of the Sept. 11 hijacking attacks.
Three years after the warning about Oklahoma pilots, an agent in Phoenix warned FBI headquarters of a group of Middle Eastern radicals engaged in aviation training in Arizona. In August 2001, agents in Minneapolis arrested Zacarias Moussaoui, now charged with conspiring in the attacks, after his unusual requests to flight trainers aroused suspicions.
The FBI employs about 11,400 agents spread among field offices, its Washington headquarters and foreign embassies. The plan calls for moving hundreds of the field agents–most of them now involved in drug investigations–out of traditional law-enforcement duties so they can be used for counterterrorism work. Mueller also is establishing an Office of Intelligence, headed by a former CIA agent, that will focus on analyzing data coming into FBI headquarters.
As a law-enforcement agency that historically investigates crimes after the fact, careful analysis to predict future attacks “has not been part of our mentality,” said Mueller, who took the helm at the FBI on Sept. 4.
Mueller noted that it will take some time for the bureau to build the expertise to function more like an intelligence agency. His department has not finished hiring 108 analysts that Congress funded last fall in the wake of the terrorist attacks, and his plan does not call for a full staff of 682 analysts until 2004.
“It is a lengthy process. It is frustrating, because you want to get the right people with the right experience for the job,” said Mueller, whose agency is supplementing its staff with CIA analysts on loan since Sept. 11.
Congress’ reaction mixed
The reorganization plan, parts of which will have to be approved by Congress, won praise from House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.).
“I believe that today’s announcement reflects a dramatic reallocation of resources to terrorism prevention without abandoning traditional law enforcement,” said Sensenbrenner, whose committee will oversee the reorganization.
But Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), a frequent FBI critic, warned that the 2,400 agents Mueller plans to deploy to counterterrorism by next autumn may not be enough, and that the bureau may still be too involved with other priorities.
“The FBI doesn’t seem to be giving much up. The number of agents reassigned to counterterrorism is relatively small. The total number is still less than a quarter of the FBI’s force. And, the FBI still plans to be involved in all its traditional operations,” Grassley said.
Still, Mueller pledged he would refashion the bureau into an organization that is foremost a domestic security agency, setting as its “two top priorities” preventing terrorist attacks and investigating foreign espionage.
“Each special agent in charge in the field, everybody at headquarters should understand that our resources first go to these top priorities. Everything flows from those two top priorities,” Mueller said.
He also said the government planned to remove some “bureaucratic impediments” in the fight against domestic terrorism.
He appeared to be referring to plans by the Justice Department to make it easier for FBI field agents to initiate terrorism and espionage investigations and wiretaps. What is currently required is that anything more than a cursory counterespionage or counterterrorism investigation has to be approved by FBI headquarters, as do wiretaps brought under foreign intelligence surveillance laws. In an ordinary criminal case, an FBI squad leader and a local U.S. attorney can seek permission to get a search warrant or a wiretap through the courts.
Drug war likely to suffer
The biggest loss from the shift in priorities is likely to be in drug investigations, which before the Sept. 11 attacks took the attention of about one-fifth of the FBI’s agents.
Nancy Savage, president of the FBI Association, a professional organization for agents, notes that the reduction in resources devoted to narcotics is likely to meet resistance from state and local law-enforcement officials.
“Obviously, the drug investigations are going to be losing something. And sheriffs and local police chiefs are knocking on our door for drug investigations because it’s the major crime problem in many communities. Drugs lead to a huge amount of violent crimes and spousal and child abuse,” Savage said.
Bob Blitzer, a former chief of counterterrorism at the FBI, added that the new focus on thwarting terrorists and disrupting their organizations would require a shift in the way the organization has evaluated performance.
He noted that special agents in charge of field offices traditionally have been evaluated based on the convictions their offices have generated, as well as on fines and recoveries they made.
“That’s the measure of worth, that’s what you do,” Blitzer said.
“Unless you had a big spy case, it’s pretty darn hard to quantify what you do every day in sifting through intelligence and analyzing intelligence and doing those kinds of long-term investigations,” he added. “You didn’t get a whole lot of kudos from FBI headquarters for those things, even though they were terribly important.”
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Anti-terrorism staffing
The FBI’s reorganization unveiled Wednesday will more than double its counterterrorism staff through new hires and transfers.
FBI COUNTERTERRORISM STAFF
New total 3,718
Federal, state and local law enforcement on new joint terrorism task force 1,316
Redirected agents 480
New support staff 124
Added in 2002 154
Before Sept. 11 1,644
REDIRECTED AGENTS
The FBI will transfer 518 agents, 480 of whom will go to counterterrorism. The remainder will move to the security and training division.
Agents by unit of origin
Drugs: 400
Violent crime: 59
White-collar crime: 59
Source: FBI
Chicago Tribune
