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Cia fbi homeland { July 2 2002 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10912-2002Jul1.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10912-2002Jul1.html
Congress To Postpone Revamping Of FBI, CIA
Homeland Security Agency Becomes Legislative Focus
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 2, 2002; Page A01
Congress will put off a reorganization of the FBI and CIA to improve the performance of the intelligence community until it establishes a Department of Homeland Security, according to Bush administration and congressional sources.
The decision will delay any significant revamping of the nation's intelligence system until at least next year, a marked shift in priorities since the Sept. 11 attacks, which prompted members of Congress to identify serious shortcomings in the FBI and CIA's performance that they said required urgent attention.
In a move backed by the White House, Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, which will produce the legislation establishing a Department of Homeland Security, has now agreed to put off tackling any changes to the CIA and FBI.
"I think that it's so controversial that it might delay and obstruct the passage and creation of the new department," Lieberman said at a hearing last week.
The delay underscored the increasing awareness on Capitol Hill that reorganizing the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency and other intelligence bodies is an extraordinarily complex undertaking about which there is little agreement on what needs to be fixed or, indeed, whether any changes are even required.
FBI Director Robert S. Mueller and CIA Director George J. Tenet have made no secret of their opposition to any major intelligence overhaul, and the joint House-Senate intelligence committee established this year to examine the intelligence agencies' performance and recommend changes has been struggling in its investigation.
The panel held two weeks of closed hearings but has now apparently delayed until September its first public sessions, which were originally scheduled for last month.
Reorganization of the intelligence agencies has been under discussion for more than a year, but since Sept. 11 it has focused primarily on changes to fight the war on terrorism. Among the proposals expected to be taken up by the intelligence panel are combining the counterterrorism centers at the CIA and FBI within the proposed Department of Homeland Security; creating an internal security service that would absorb the FBI's counterterrorism and counterintelligence functions; and giving the director of central intelligence control over Pentagon technical collection agencies while eliminating his direct control over the CIA.
One result of the decision to create the Homeland Security Department before tackling the issue of restructuring the intelligence agencies is that the new department will be dependent on the FBI and CIA for collecting domestic intelligence. It also will put off any move to replace the FBI's domestic intelligence-collection role with a new federal internal security service. Both ideas have generated significant interest on Capitol Hill.
Lieberman said last week that one task facing his committee was deciding "how to redress the awful lack of coordination and information-sharing among key agencies, including the FBI and the CIA, that now appears to have been the most glaring failure of our government leading up to September 11th."
But, he said, he saw the proposed Department of Homeland Security as primarily an "aggressive, agile and demanding . . . consumer of intelligence," but not one that would have "operational or collection capability" that the FBI and CIA have. Lieberman will also write into the legislation that the new department will have access to all raw intelligence on terrorism and the authority to task the CIA, FBI and other Pentagon intelligence agencies to collect specific information.
At a hearing last Thursday, Mueller opposed taking counterterrorism away from the bureau. "Such a move at this critical moment would disrupt our ongoing battle against terrorism," he said. Mueller said his FBI reorganization plan, which adds agents and analysts to meet the challenge posed by terrorism, was the answer.
Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has said the joint House-Senate intelligence committee would study whether a different domestic intelligence collection system is needed.
Graham said three questions still have to be determined if something different from today's FBI approach to counterterrorism would be needed: Who would be the targets of surveillance, what legal methods for collection would be available and where within the federal government would it be housed?
Graham said these "may end up being some of the most contentious issues that will have to be faced" either within the proposed department or elsewhere in the intelligence system. "We'll have to come back and have the national debate over domestic intelligence-gathering," Graham said.
Senior CIA and FBI officials have begun to question publicly whether members of Congress and the Bush administration, pushed by what they perceive as public pressure for more security, may be promising too much and going too far in providing them tools to fight terrorism.
In a soon-to-be-published Georgetown University book, Paul R. Pillar, formerly deputy chief of the CIA Counterterrorism Center and currently a senior intelligence officer, writes that the pressure "to be seen doing things in new and different ways . . . means that the challenge for U.S. intelligence will be not only to do the best possible job of collecting and analyzing information about terrorism but to respond to the demand for change in ways that avoid doing more harm than good."
One important risk for CIA and the intelligence community, Pillar said, "is the political risk of standing up to these short-term pressures in order not to undermine long-term effectiveness."
One longtime FBI agent, who asked not to be identified, recently questioned the new rules that have been established for agents in field offices to initiate counterterrorism investigations without first obtaining approval from headquarters.
"I'm worried about six or seven years from now when there are five or six Arab-American members of Congress and they call me before some committee to grill me on my actions against their people," the agent said.
Pillar said that if the United States is "successful enough and fortunate enough to avoid another major terrorist attack, counterterrorism will no longer be an overriding priority." Then, he asked, if attention is refocused on human rights, privacy and the domestic intelligence activities, what happens in the future to the intelligence officer "who takes the risk [now] of making a recruitment that becomes controversial?"
Staff writer Dana Priest contributed to this report.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
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