Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008
"Approach to Counterterrorism"
The FBI took a traditional law enforcement approach to counterterrorism. Its agents were trained to build cases. Its management was deliberately decentralized to empower the individual field offices and agents on the street.
The Bureau rewarded agents based on statistics reflecting arrests, indictments, and prosecutions. As a result, fields such as counterterrorism and counterintelligence, where investigations generally result in fewer prosecutions, were viewed as backwaters.
Agents developed information in support of their own cases, not as part of a broader, more strategic effort. Given the poor state of the FBI's information systems, field agents usually did not know what investigations agents in their own office, let alone in other field offices, were working on. Nor did analysts have easy access to this information. As a result, it was almost impossible to develop an understanding of the threat from a particular international terrorist group.
Agents investigated their individual cases with the knowledge that any case information recorded on paper and stored in case files was potentially discoverable in court. Thus, there was a disincentive to share information, even with other FBI agents and analysts. Analysts were discouraged from producing written assessments which could be discoverable and used to attack the prosecution's case at trial.
In the investigative arena, the field office had primacy. Counterterrorism investigations were run by the field, not headquarters. Moreover, the field office that initiated a case maintained control over it, an approach the FBI called the "Office of Origin" model. This decentralized management structure allowed field offices to set their own priorities with little direction from headquarters.
"Management Priorities and Challenges"
The FBI determined early in the 1990s that a preventive posture was a better way to counter the growing threat from international terrorism. In its first budget request to Congress after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the FBI stated that, "merely solving this type of crime is not enough; it is equally important that the FBI thwart terrorism before such acts can be perpetrated."
The FBI made several organizational changes at headquarters during the 1990s, including the creation of a Counterterrorism Center, the exchange of senior FBI and CIA counterterrorism officials, and the creation of a unit focused exclusively on Usama Bin Ladin. The FBI also expanded its overseas Legal Attache program during this period, largely to improve its liaison with foreign governments on terrorism.
By the late 1990s, the FBI recognized that certain limitations undermined a preventive counterterrorism strategy, and it initiated several significant reforms to address them. These broad efforts were focused on intelligence collection and analysis, counterterrorism expertise and training, information technology, and the counterterrorism capacity of field offices.
Yet the FBI's leadership confronted two fundamental challenges in countering terrorism. First, the FBI had to reconcile this new priority with its existing agenda. This immediately required choices about whether to divert experienced agents or scarce resources from criminal or other intelligence work to terrorism. As the terrorism danger grew, Director Freeh faced the choice of whether to lower the priority the FBI attached to work on general crime, including the war on drugs, and allocate these resources to terrorism.
The Department of Justice Inspector General found that when the FBI designated "national and economic security" as its top priority in 1998, it did not shift its human resources accordingly. Although the FBI's counterterrorism budget tripled during the mid-1990s, FBI counterterrorism spending remained fairly constant between fiscal years 1998 and 2001. The Inspector General's 2003 report stated that prior to 9/11, "the Bureau devoted significantly more special agent resources to traditional law enforcement activities such as white collar crime, organized crime, drug, and violent crime investigations than to domestic and international terrorism issues." According to another external review of the FBI, by 2000 there were twice as many agents devoted to drug enforcement matters as to counterterrorism. On September 11, 2001, only about 1,300 agents, or six percent of The FBI's total personnel, worked on counterterrorism.
Former FBI officials told us that prior to 9/11, there was not sufficient national commitment or political will to dedicate the necessary resources to counterterrorism. Specifically, they believed that neither Congress nor the Office of Management and Budget fully understood the FBI's counterterrorism resource needs. Nor did the FBI receive all it requested from the Department of Justice, under Attorney General Janet Reno.
Reno told us that the Bureau never seemed to have sufficient resources given the broad scope of its responsibilities. She said in light of the appropriations FBI received, it needed to prioritize and put counterterrorism first. She also said that Director Freeh seemed unwilling to shift resources to terrorism from other areas such as violent crime. Freeh said that it was difficult to tell field executives that they needed to do additional counterterrorism work without additional resources.
Finally, even though the number of agents devoted to counterterrorism was limited, they were not always fully utilized in the field offices. We learned through our interviews that prior to 9/11, field agents often were diverted from counterterrorism or other intelligence work in order to cover major criminal cases.
Get Salon in your mailbox!