Pubdate: Wed, 29 May 2002
Source: Wall Street Journal (US)
Copyright: 2002 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Contact:  http://www.wsj.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/487
Author: Gary Fields and John R. Wilke
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?203 (Terrorism)

FBI TO ANNOUNCE HUGE OVERHAUL TO BETTER COMBAT TERROR THREAT

WASHINGTON -- The Federal Bureau of Investigation will reassign 
hundreds of agents from local drug and violent-crime investigations 
to counterterrorism and intelligence in a sweeping reorganization to 
be announced Wednesday.

The changes include a new Office of Intelligence to analyze foreign 
and domestic terrorist threats, as well as a new cybercrime division. 
The FBI promises closer coordination with the Central Intelligence 
Agency and will seek expanded authority to conduct investigations 
abroad and pursue potential threats at home.

The changes follow intensifying criticism of the crime-fighting 
agency's management and procedures. Those include new details that 
have emerged in recent days about FBI headquarters' lack of response 
before Sept. 11 to reports by field agents about religious extremists 
taking flight training in the U.S.

Reorganizing the agency has become an urgent priority for FBI 
Director Robert Mueller, a former federal prosecutor who took over 
the bureau a week before the Sept. 11 terror attacks transformed the 
nation's law-enforcement priorities. The changes he will detail 
Wednesday draw together a number of proposals that are under way or 
are being accelerated. One of those is an overhaul of the agency's 
long-maligned computer networks, most recently criticized by the 
Justice Department inspector general and an independent commission.

The bureau plans to seek new authority, through legislative or 
administrative changes, to expand its use of wiretaps under the 
foreign-intelligence surveillance law; share criminal and grand-jury 
information with the intelligence community; conduct interviews 
abroad; and detain aliens for as long as 90 days under immigration 
rules.

The FBI's ability to handle wiretaps under the foreign-intelligence 
surveillance law came under new fire Tuesday. A court-ordered release 
of FBI e-mails appeared to describe an investigative error by the 
task force tracking followers of terrorist leader Osama bin Laden. 
One of the e-mails, obtained by the nonprofit Electronic Privacy 
Information Center here, recounts how a problem with the Internet 
monitoring software Carnivore led to the destruction of wiretap 
information. Because the system captured e-mails from people besides 
the court-ordered target, "The FBI technical person was apparently so 
upset that he destroyed all the e-mail take, including the take on" 
the suspect, said a March 2000 FBI memo e-mailed to agency 
headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Referring to a second, undisclosed investigative error, the memo 
cites "a pattern of occurrences which indicates ... an inability on 
the part of the FBI to manage" its foreign-intelligence wiretaps. An 
FBI spokesman on Tuesday night had no comment.

The planned reallocation of resources moves almost 500 field agents 
to counterterrorism from other details, diminishing the FBI's 
involvement in local murder, kidnapping and drug cases and returning 
a greater burden for these prosecutions to local law enforcement. The 
planned reassignments would affect FBI drug-enforcement efforts most, 
bureau documents show. Efforts to combat white-collar crime, 
including health-care fraud, also will be trimmed.

The bureau, in briefing materials prepared for Wednesday's 
announcement, also says it will restructure counterterrorism efforts 
and "redefine [the] relationship between HQ and field," shifting from 
"reactive orientation to proactive orientation."

This appears to be a tacit acknowledgment of the harsh criticism made 
public last week by a lawyer in the Minneapolis field office, Coleen 
Rowley, who accused an FBI supervisor of "thwarting" an investigation 
before Sept. 11 of Zacarias Moussaoui, who has been linked to the 
World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks by the al Qaeda terror group. 
Her letter infuriated lawmakers, who were already upset over the 
FBI's handling of a warning from a Phoenix field agent that Middle 
Eastern men linked to al Qaeda were enrolling in flight schools.

The FBI director has been working closely with Attorney General John 
Ashcroft to assert greater control over the fiercely independent 
agency in the wake of a string of botched investigations and rising 
congressional criticism. A bill to overhaul the FBI is pending in the 
Senate and some lawmakers have called for more far-reaching reforms.

Clinton Van Zandt, a former FBI counterterrorism expert who now heads 
a security firm in Fredericksburg, Va., estimated that agents who are 
transferring into counterterrorism will need "five years to get up to 
speed, to learn who the bad guys are, what the guidelines are in 
counterintelligence and how to work surveillance."

Lawmakers were briefed by Mr. Mueller last week on the reorganization 
plan and some took issue with the details, including Iowa Republican 
Sen. Charles Grassley, who raised questions about how terrorism units 
will be centralized in Washington. "Making technology and 
intelligence analysis priorities are no-brainers, but a new 
organization chart alone won't work," said Sen. Grassley.

Other critics of some of the proposals to redirect FBI resources have 
included local law-enforcement officials. But most were expected to 
support the redeployments, said Gene Voegtlin, legal counsel for the 
International Association of Chiefs of Police. Mr. Voegtlin said 
there is some concern that there will be lost experience and manpower 
with the shift, but added, "I think state and local officers are 
ready to step up to the plate."
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