As Congress wrestles with President Bush's proposal for a sweeping reorganization
of government for homeland defense, let's not lose sight of the fundamental
reality: The war on terrorism will be won or lost in the nation's intelligence
and counterterrorism agencies. With its noisily aggressive domestic reform
proposals -- paired with law enforcement tactics that push the envelope of
constitutionally protected civil liberties -- the White House has opened
a two-front war on terror. Yet these efforts may be beside the point.
In terms of intelligence and counterterrorism, says counterterrorism expert
Neil Livingstone, the president's proposals "are at best marginal
kinds of changes." The Bush administration has been happy to pick
fights with the American Civil Liberties Union. But the White House has
only tip-toed up to critically needed reforms at the FBI and other intelligence
and counterterrorism agencies.
On information sharing, the White House has called for an enhancement
of the FBI's analytic capabilities -- but that could be years away. Yet President
Bush acts as though the fundamental problem has been solved. In June,
he announced that he was confident that the FBI and the CIA are now sharing
intelligence. But few knowledgeable observers believe it's really so simple.
"George Bush thinks we've now solved this problem because his domestic
guy, Mr. [Robert] Mueller, and his foreign guy, Mr. [George] Tenet, brief
him [together] each morning," says Ivo Daalder, a former Clinton
National Security Council official. The real problem is the extreme dissimilarity
of the two institutions -- one geared toward domestic law enforcement and
the other toward foreign spycraft -- and the lack of any overarching authority
able to coordinate action between them. The problem won't be solved with
interagency liaisons or by making the heads of the CIA and FBI chummier.
The problem requires real reform.
We could make the Director of Central Intelligence -- the person who runs
the CIA-into an actual director of central intelligence. Currently,
the title is a sham; the DCI has only nominal authority over agencies
like the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency,
the massive electronic eavesdropping organization. The CIA is also specifically
barred from domestic spying; this has been traditionally interpreted to
mean that the DCI must keep hands off the FBI, with no role in its domestic
intelligence work. A more ambitious proposal -- discussed by William Wechsler
in the spring 2002 issue of The National Interest -- is to reform
the intelligence community like the armed forces were reorganized under
the National Security Act of 1947. The 1947 Act consolidated the departments
of War and Navy into a unified Department of Defense and created the Joint
Chiefs of Staff. Just as important, it also created a Joint Staff, a cadre
of officers who, in theory at least, shed their individual service identities
to collectively oversee the entire military establishment. Some reform
is clearly needed. But the White House hasn't proposed any.
The federal government also needs to find a way to make sure that information
generated in the course of law enforcement investigations is made available
for intelligence purposes, something that now happens only sporadically.
Law enforcement collects vast quantities of data, which are of no use
to a particular investigation but would be of great value if available
for intelligence purposes. The problem is that it's seldom clear to law
enforcement officials what information would prove critical for intelligence
or counterterrorism. In 1995, according to former CIA intelligence analyst
Larry Johnson, a dispute erupted between the State Department and the
CIA's counternarcotics center over whether two Colombian rebel groups -- the
FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) and the ELN (National Liberation
Army) -- were involved in drug trafficking. The CIA claimed there was no
evidence to sustain the charge. Actually, says Johnson, there was plenty
of evidence. The CIA had just never seen it. It was stashed away in Drug
Enforcement Administration case files.
The USA Patriot Act, the post-Sept. 11 omnibus anti-terrorism bill, did
ease up some of the legal strictures on information sharing between law
enforcement agencies and intelligence agencies -- such as the prohibitions
against using secret grand jury testimony for intelligence purposes. But
making such sharing legal doesn't necessarily make it more likely to happen.
Most information collected by local law enforcement is kept on paper or
in databases that aren't accessible to other agencies. Few mechanisms
exist -- either technological or administrative -- to facilitate such information
transfers. And the administration has done little to foster or create
them. In fact, even in areas where the federal government is already sending
anti-terrorism money to the states, the effectiveness of the effort is
blunted by the lack of national coordination from the federal government.
"You have bioterrorism money that's going out to state health departments,"
says John Cohen, a security consultant who is a veteran of federal and
local law enforcement. "But they're leaving it up to states without
any guidance to think this through on their own. As a result you're getting
50 different states coming up with 50 different ideas of what is meant
by preparing to confront bioterrorism."
Case-driven analysis. Even where the administration is moving
in the right direction, the president's people have shied away from taking
on entrenched bureaucracies. Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director
Mueller have announced plans to vastly increase the number of intelligence
analysts at the FBI. But according to most intelligence experts, the problem
isn't that the FBI has too few intelligence analysts. The problem is that
they don't really have any. Claiming that the FBI lacks an intelligence
analysis capacity, says Larry Johnson, "is like saying there's a
lack of police investigating capability at CIA. It's just a statement
of fact. They don't do it."
The problem isn't resources. It's the culture of the institution. "Intelligence
analyst" means something different at the FBI than it does at the
CIA or, for that matter, almost every other Western intelligence agency.
At the CIA, an intelligence analyst focuses on a particular subject area
such as Algerian Islamists. Every day the analyst reviews wire intercepts,
debriefings of human sources, newspapers, and other media. Then the analyst
writes peer-reviewed reports to make sense of it all for the president
and his advisers. The analyst is like a reporter with a beat or a stock
analyst who follows a particular industry.
But that's not how it works at the FBI. Rather than having a particular
area of focus, an FBI analyst's work is case-driven. The analysts function
more like research assistants, gathering information for specific criminal
investigations at the direction of the special agent running the case.
(The CIA has similar support staff analysts in its Directorate of Operations
who also have second-tier status. But the CIA's real intelligence work
goes on in an entirely separate Directorate of Intelligence. The FBI has
no equivalent.) An FBI analyst may develop deep knowledge about some aspect
of counterterrorism, but those insights aren't funneled into a broader
structure that will put them to use beyond the single individual or case.
"Even if you can call someone who's working [at the FBI] an intelligence
analyst, they still don't have an intelligence mission," says Johnson.
"They are not writing on a daily basis to serve any particular audience."
Director Mueller plans to import a team of analysts from the CIA to set
up a real intelligence shop at the FBI. But will the new outfit really
be integrated into the organization or just get walled off like a bullet
that can be left in the flesh without affecting the health of the body?
Recent history isn't very encouraging. Even as Congress pumped in new
funds to fight terrorism, the counterterrorism division languished and
was rightly seen as a slow lane for career advancement in the FBI. "The
counterterrorism side has not had the kind of respect that the other areas
have had," says FBI historian Ronald Kessler. "There's been
a lot of turnover. [Agents] will typically stay there a year and then
go some other place." One key reason analytic work got relegated
to second-tier support staff rather than being assigned to actual agents
was that the FBI's macho, crime-fighting culture resisted the emphasis
on information analysis that is at the heart of counterterrorism work.
"In the pecking order of the FBI," says Greg Treverton, a former
vice-chairman of the National Intelligence Council, "if you don't
carry a gun, [or] if you're not a special agent in charge, you're a second-class
citizen."
That same attitude has kept computer technology at the FBI in a primitive
state. Former FBI Director Louis Freeh was himself notoriously technology-averse -- he
had the computer removed from his office when he took over the FBI, and
he never began using email. When he left in June 2001, the standard issue
FBI computers were 386 or 486 PCs -- machines that were obsolete by the mid-1990s.
The FBI actually had a central database that should have helped pull together
the various memos and leads that pointed to the Sept. 11 plot. But it
was an abysmal failure. The automated case support (ACS) system was poorly
designed and was hobbled by the fact that the agents and field offices
with the choicest information often refused to use it because they either
had little experience with computers or because they didn't trust security -- suspicions
that proved prescient when arch-spy Robert Hanssen used it to harvest
prized information. "It was a dinosaur," explains Kessler. "You
could punch in 'flight' to retrieve millions of documents. But you couldn't
punch in 'flight schools.' So it was almost useless. People came up with
all sorts of jury-rigged ways around this ACS system. There literally
were 42 different computer systems in the criminal division alone to keep
track of different areas because this thing was so useless. If they wanted
to check a name they'd have to literally go to dozens of different databases.
No one would ever believe it. But that's the way it was."
The FBI ate reforms alive. By the mid-1990s the FBI could see that the
counterterrorism was a winning card for expanding budgets. President Clinton
repeatedly called for and the Congress repeatedly voted more funding for
counterterrorism work at the FBI, particularly in the 1996 Omnibus Anti-terrorism
Act. But, according to FBI observers, only a portion of that money went
to actual counterterrorism work. "The problem," says Livingstone,
was that "every guy who needed a secretary or an assistant for some
reason over at FBI put them in under the terrorism authority. At the end
of that time, I bet there weren't a hundred people who were really hired
for terrorism. You had all these new hires over there that covered all
these bureaucratic sins." No doubt there were many agents at the
FBI doggedly committed to the counterterrorism effort. But in the absence
of political accountability, managers who saw counterterrorism and intelligence
as second-tier tasks doled out the counterterrorism money according to
their own priorities.
Untouchable term. Having better luck with this new round of reforms
will require a strong hand pushing them from the outside and a broader
effort to make the FBI itself more accountable. Why, for instance, should
the FBI director still be appointed to an almost untouchable 10-year term?
Preventing political abuse of the FBI is a serious concern, of course.
But history -- particularly the Hoover years -- has shown that the real danger
is not that the FBI will be too accountable to the White House, but that
it won't be accountable to anyone at all. The director's untouchability
deepens the climate of unaccountability that permeates the institution.
In the 1990s FBI agents mockingly called their nominal superiors at the
Justice Department "the Christmas help" -- as in, temporary hires
whose views could be ignored because they would be gone soon enough. "They're
unmanageable," says one former Clinton Justice Department official.
"It is almost impossible for attorneys general or whoever wants to
change the FBI to do so."
Tackling such daunting problems would require sustained effort and a
major investment of political capital. But the administration has preferred
to pass on structural reform in favor of what might be called spasmodic
anti-civil libertarianism. "It's easier to say that we'll use these
extrajudicial [measures or] techniques such as profiling," says Cohen,
"because it's much harder to actually fix the institutions."
When Ashcroft takes showy whacks at the sacred cows of civil libertarians,
it makes for great short-term politics because his outbursts signal an
indifference to political correctness and rights dogma that even his opponents
take as a sign that the administration is deadly serious about fighting
terrorism. Then there's the added benefit of picking fights with generally
toothless and unpopular opponents like the ACLU or left-wing law professors.
But the real problem with most of these policies is not so much that they
violate civil liberties as that they just don't do much good.
A prime example came on June 5, when Ashcroft announced a plan to require
a class of foreign visitors -- mainly 18- to 35-year-old men from Middle
Eastern and predominantly Muslim countries -- to be fingerprinted, photographed,
and required to fill out lengthy forms. It sounds like a tough, no-nonsense
policy until you discover that the administration has been sitting for
some 18 months on another program that would likely accomplish much more
with few of the attendant constitutional concerns. In the June issue of
The Washington Monthly, Nick Confessore described how in the late
1990s the Immigration and Naturalization Service successfully field-tested
a state-of-the-art database program which would have used biometric smart
cards to identify, screen, and track foreign students in the United States.
The program would effectively track all foreign students and certainly
accomplish more than the selective targeting of Arab and Muslim men. Yet
the program has languished for three years in a state of bureaucratic
suspended animation, the victim of internal sabotage and aggressive lobbying
by pro-immigration advocates and -- of all people -- a group called NAFSA, the
Washington lobby for foreign student advisers. The Republican congressional
staffer who played the key role in axing the program during the Clinton
years now serves as the associate commissioner for policy at INS and continues
to keep the program on ice.
Maybe we shouldn't be surprised that the White House has dodged these
challenges. Keeping a tight lid on information and attacking anyone who
criticizes lapses in the counterterror fight has helped the administration
stifle debate about many of these problems. But the administration's puny
efforts on intelligence reform make for a sorry contrast with its tough
rhetoric and aggressive military posture. Passivity has ruled the day.
Even the Department of Homeland Security proposal only received administration
backing after a rush of embarrassing headlines and the first signs of
a drag on the president's popularity. Intelligence and counterterrorism
reform require leadership and action. But if the last 10 months are any
example, don't expect them from the Bush White House.
