CIA vet heads new FBI intelligence office

The FBI has named Mark Miller, a 20-year CIA veteran and one of its top analysts, to lead the bureau's new Office of Intelligence, according to a CIA spokesman. Miller started working at the FBI May 27.

FBI Director Robert Mueller announced the creation of the office May 29, when he outlined changes he wants to make in the way the FBI investigates terrorist activities, as well as how it collects, shares and analyzes intelligence. The new Office of Intelligence will sift through information about terrorist activities in order to predict future attacks, Mueller said at the time. Bureau officials declined to elaborate on how that would be accomplished and how the new division would work with the CIA, given the cultural and regulatory boundaries that have kept the two agencies apart for decades.

"I think both agencies have a lot to learn from working together in ways that we have not worked in the past," Mueller said in May. "And consequently…the Office of Intelligence will be handled…by an individual who is an experienced CIA intelligence officer."

An FBI spokeswoman wouldn't elaborate on what Miller's specific duties would be as head of the new office. She said only that the division's design is "a work in progress." Miller declined to comment.

Miller has spent most of his career studying Soviet and Russian intelligence, the CIA spokesman said. Most recently, he led an interagency task force that focused on mujaheddin and Islamic terrorist activities in Bosnia. The task force was created in 1992 in response to growing political and ethnic turmoil in the former Yugoslavia and includes representatives of the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The CIA trained and financed mujaheddin fighters during Afghanistan's war with the Soviet Union in the 1980s. After the Soviet pullout in 1989, many mujaheddin disbanded and became mercenaries in the former Soviet republic of Chechnya and also in Somalia and the Philippines. The Bush administration has referred to some of them as terrorists.

Miller's work on the task force could serve as a primer for his new assignment with the Office of Intelligence, which Mueller has said will rely heavily on technology to analyze and distribute information on terrorists. In a speech at a technology symposium in Virginia in March 1997, John Gannon, former deputy CIA director for intelligence, described the task force as "a model in driving collection of information and serving the range of key intelligence consumers" in the Balkans.

"On a typical day," Gannon said, "a [task force] analyst…might exchange information with military personnel in Bosnia across a classified network. The analysts would consult with analysts from other intelligence agencies and policy counterparts over our classified e-mail and videoconferencing systems…Their analytic papers and memoranda would be automatically routed, archived and indexed for future reference."

Mueller has said the FBI must update its antiquated technology systems in order to better share information within the bureau and among other agencies. The FBI began a multi-million dollar upgrade of its information systems more than a year ago, but the FBI inspector general has found that the agency's technology is still woefully inadequate.