FBI GETS BUM RAP

By Larry Johnson

by
Larry C Johnson

The latest reports bashing the FBI for dropping the ball in dealing with terrorism are misleading and wrong. (news link)

I don't have a dog in this fight because I never worked for the FBI nor do I work on FBI contracts. No financial interest here. My experience is confined to the CIA and the State Department. However I have worked with a variety of FBI agents over the last 16 years on terrorism issues and have had a chance to observe first hand their capabilities and qualifications. The pre-9-11 FBI had significant problems. The Counter Terrorism shop, for example, was known within the FBI as the "latte" division because they were always off to Starbucks for a caffeine fix. Nonetheless, they had some genuine success, better than the CIA in fact, in penetrating the Al Qaeda cells. They had recruited at least 3 informants within the AQ ranks. Part of the 9-11 failure was caused by the refusal of FBI HQs personnel to listen to field agents. Remember the FBI guy in Arizona who raised the red flag about the muslims training as pilots? That memo was filed away and ignored.

In the post-9-11 environment Robert Mueller has faced some daunting tasks. How do you reform a recalcitrant, hidebound bureaucracy? Compared to DOD or CIA the FBI has made the most strides of any of the Federal bureaucracies in ramping up to deal with the terrorist threat. The guys brought in to run the Counter Terrorsim effort since 9-11 have been first rate and have had CT experience. Larry Mefford, for example, headed the FBI counter terror effort in 2003. I worked with him back in 1989 when he was the FBI rep assigned to the Foreign Emergency Support Team (an interagency counter terrorism response cell) at State. Not only was he knowledgeable about terrorism but he knew how to run operations and pursue successful investigations. When Mueller tapped him to lead the CT effort at the FBI Mefford helped lead the charge in getting the FBI ready to respond to terrorist events. When an Iranian backed terrorist team blew up a US military apartment building in Saudi Arabia in 1996 the FBI just gathered up any agents they could find and put them on a plane. In many cases you had guys being sent overseas who had only been outside of their home state in order to go thru FBI training. Mefford instituted "fly" teams, which are FBI agents who have language and culture training to work an investigation in a particular geographic region. In other words, if there is a terrorist incident in Iraq the FBI is sending investigators who have Arabic language and culture training.

The FBI is not just sitting around waiting until something happens. They have been very proactive in ferreting out terrorist plots. I have shared an exercise control group seat with the FBI agent who carried off the sting in China that trapped Muslim terrorists selling drugs to acquire man portable surface to air missiles. FBI has also made some important strides in developing information management systems.

Finally, and most astonishing from my standpoint, the FBI is actually putting out intelligence drawn from investigations. CIA and DIA analysts, for example, are now reading FBI FISA material. That's a first.

While there are problems at the FBI caused by the simple fact it is a Washington bureaucracy, Robert Mueller for my money has been something of a miracle worker in pushing the FBI to a new level of competence. He deserves a lot of the credit for the fact that we haven't been hit again since 9-11.

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