CIA Analysts To Help FBI Shift Focus
Terrorism Prevention Key to New Approach
By Walter Pincus and Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, May 26, 2002; Page A01
The CIA is dispatching personnel to help the FBI upgrade its ability at headquarters in Washington to analyze intelligence and criminal data for use in preventing terrorist acts, according to senior FBI officials.
More than 25 agency analysts and at least one senior manager from the CIA's Directorate of Intelligence will assist FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III in reshaping the bureau into an agency more focused on counterterrorism.
Another group of CIA analysts will soon be dispatched to 10 major U.S. cities to review FBI terrorist cases being pursued in field offices to see whether intelligence information has been missed. They will determine whether, among the separate cases, patterns of behavior, techniques or personnel turn up that may have been overlooked in the past, the officials said.
The CIA transfers illustrate one of the major changes involved in Mueller's FBI overhaul, an approach that will emphasize gathering information to prevent terrorist acts inside the United States while reducing the bureau's traditional criminal work on car thefts, bank robberies and other matters he believes can be handled by local law enforcement agencies.
As early as this week, Mueller plans to begin rolling out a major reorganization of the FBI, whose problems handling clues about the Sept. 11 attacks have become the focus of scrutiny in the White House and on Capitol Hill. The extra CIA help is only a small part of a plan that will include the creation of a Washington-based FBI "super squad" to conduct terrorism investigations and the creation of a clearinghouse for sensitive intelligence on terror.
The plan is aimed, at least in part, at improving coordination within the FBI and with other agencies with which the bureau has occasionally jousted.
Relations between the CIA and FBI during the early Cold War were almost nonexistent, as then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover refused to cooperate with the CIA, preferring to use his own people overseas. After the Cold War, attempts were made at the top to improve relations, but strains still remained at the working level. The creation of interagency centers such as Counterintelligence and Counterterrorism provided a beginning, but as shown in recent years, gaps between the agencies still existed.
FBI officials said they are turning to the CIA to help create a cadre of FBI intelligence analysts who will pull cases together and avoid the apparent lack of coordination illustrated by the failure last year to link a July 2001 memo from a Phoenix FBI agent, suggesting a study of Islamic radicals at pilot training schools, with information from Minneapolis in August about terrorist defendant Zacarias Moussaoui, who came under suspicion because of his actions at a pilot school.
Analysts and research specialists at the FBI have traditionally trained at the CIA, but their main focus has been gathering the type of information that will allow them to stop crimes about to be committed or help the Justice Department bring legal action against individuals, said Harry "Skip" Brandon, former deputy chief of intelligence for the FBI.
For years, FBI counterterrorism analysts focused on "domestic terrorism," trying to track right-wing militia and violent white supremacist groups that could be prosecuted.
"The terrorism program never really had an understanding of true analysis, of mining raw data, drawing independent conclusions and the need to be predictive," said I.C. Smith, former head of the FBI's analysis, budget and training section of the National Security Division.
Eventually the FBI created the Investigative Support Division, which grouped all analysts together at headquarters and made them subordinate to the operational staff, something Smith said impinged on the analysts' ability to function and think independently. Mueller dismantled that division shortly after he arrived.
"Most Western countries separate law enforcement agencies from counterterrorism agencies," another FBI official said. "They require different analyses and different resources, and historically, we have not had the funds needed to do both."
This official pointed out that Britain's MI-5 service, which works on counterterrorism and counterintelligence, "doesn't prosecute criminal cases, and their information for the most part can't be used in criminal trials. That is left to the police."
Another official said the FBI is going to increase its role as an "internal security service" of a type found in Europe. Using analysts to help in FBI criminal prosecutions "will take a back seat," an FBI official said.
"It is really kind of anachronistic to believe that we should be handling terrorism cases the same way we handle narcotics or public corruption," a senior U.S. official said. "This requires a very specialized body of expertise, supported by an abundance of analytic capability. It is impractical to have that sprinkled all over the place."
One reason the CIA analysts can review criminal cases rests in the post-Sept. 11 changes in U.S. law that permit agency personnel to have access through the FBI to criminal investigation information, including material developed by federal grand juries.
In 1995, as the terrorist threat grew, the bureau established its Counterterrorism Center. It included the operations of the FBI's International Terrorism Operations Section and Domestic Terrorism Operations Section.
The center was patterned in part on the CIA's Counterterrorism Center in Langley, which was created 10 years earlier. Agency officers were brought in to the new FBI center as FBI agents had been placed at the CIA center. At the field office level, 18 FBI joint terrorism task forces were put in major cities to maximize interagency cooperation and coordination among federal, state and local law enforcement.
Although CIA officers and analysts work with FBI personnel in the CIA, and in the FBI Counterterrorism Center at its Washington headquarters, the new deployment will represent a broader sharing between the two agencies.
Brandon said U.S. intelligence services should do what the military began to do in 1986: break down the walls between the services and fight "jointly," or "purple," as it is dubbed. "Talking about all this can be healthy if it will force the civilian intelligence agencies to go purple," he said.