Behind The Badge

hen the code "888" pops up on FBI special agents' beepers, they pay attention.Triple eights signals an emergency, Christopher Whitcomb writes in his new book, Cold Zero: Inside the FBI Hostage Rescue Team (Little, Brown, 2001). The book recounts Whitcomb's days as a member of the elite corps of 50 cross-trained rescuers called in for drug stings, hostage releases, the standoffs at Ruby Ridge and Waco-even the apprehensions of international criminals and terrorists-in the 1990s. "Although most of the details remain classified, we began reaching out into small, fast-moving teams to let terrorists know we could come for them virtually anywhere they tried to hide," Whitcomb recalls. "Watching the expression on a former hijacker's face when you bust down his Third World hotel room door, slap on the cuffs, throw a bag over his head and whisk him away to life in an American prison is enough to raise anyone's spirits."

Whitcomb retired from the bureau on Sept. 14, but his former colleagues no doubt have seen "888" on their beepers frequently since Sept. 11, as agents try to track down the conspirators who helped 19 hijackers pull off the deadliest attack against American civilians in history. FBI Director Robert Mueller, confirmed just five weeks before Sept. 11, ordered 4,000 of the bureau's 11,000 agents to go after conspirators and terrorists.

The bureau's track record on terrorism includes the March 1994 conviction of four terrorists involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the June 1997 conviction of Timothy McVeigh for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and the June 2001 conviction of four terrorists involved in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya. The bureau helped prevent seven terrorist attacks in 1999, Deputy Director Thomas Pickard told Congress earlier this year. Pickard retired last month.

The bureau's management track record is far less impressive. And in times of crisis, festering management problems quickly can tarnish the best of records. One of the bureau's most intractable problems-an unwillingness to cooperate and communicate with other federal agencies and state and local law enforcement agencies-has been implicated both in the pre-Sept. 11 intelligence failure that allowed the attacks to happen and in difficulties with the investigation afterward. Troubles with leadership, technology and asset-tracking could provide further stumbling blocks. What's more, the bureau only recently has been relieved from a seemingly relentless downpour of bad publicity resulting from the discovery of spy Robert Hanssen in its ranks, the botched investigation of former Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist Wen Ho Lee, the mishandling of documents in the Timothy McVeigh case and continuing criticism of the FBI's management of the Ruby Ridge and Waco tragedies.

"All institutions-even great ones like the FBI-make mistakes," Mueller told the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearing in July. "The measure of an institution is in how it responds to its mistakes. I believe the FBI can and must do a better job of dealing with mistakes. . . . I will make it my highest priority to restore the public's confidence in the FBI-to re-earn the faith and trust of the American people."

Mission Creep

While members of Congress have spent much time criticizing the FBI in recent years, they have not hesitated to expand its mission. The bureau now has jurisdiction over 200 categories of crime, including terrorism, espionage, civil rights, organized crime, drug trafficking, bank robbery, money laundering, pornography, public corruption, fraud against the government, health care fraud, kidnapping, crimes on Indian reservations and unlawful flight to avoid prosecution.

To investigate those crimes, the FBI has a $3.5 billion annual budget. It employs 27,883 people, including 11,585 agents at 56 field offices, 400 small "resident agency" offices, legal attache offices in 44 foreign countries, four computer centers, a criminal justice information center, a training academy, an engineering research facility and FBI headquarters.

Even with that vast organization, it's not easy for 11,000 agents to investigate a wide range of offenses in a nation of 281 million people and in a world where crime has become increasingly international. Louis Freeh, FBI director from 1993 to 2001, made terrorism a top priority in the bureau's 1998 five-year strategic plan. "Our highest national priority is the investigation of foreign intelligence, terrorist and criminal activities that directly threaten the national or economic security of the United States," Pickard explained to the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime in May.

The shift toward counterterrorism came as part of a reorganization that Freeh launched after he took over the agency from William Sessions, who was fired by President Clinton in 1993 amid a cloud of scandal and disintegrating morale among agents. Freeh transferred hundreds of agents out of headquarters into the field to make the bureau less top-heavy. He created the Critical Incident Response Group to speed emergency response operations by preventing the bureaucratic tangles that often slowed them.

Freeh won congressional trust that translated into funding. On Freeh's watch, the FBI's budget rose from $2 billion in 1994 to $3.5 billion proposed for fiscal 2002. That budget boost helped Freeh bump up his workforce from 23,785 in 1993 to nearly 28,000 in 1999, a 17 percent increase at a time when the federal workforce was downsized by nearly 20 percent. With the shift toward counterterrorism, Freeh increased the ranks of intelligence officers, who analyze the activities of terrorists and other enemies of national security, from 224 in 1992 to 1,025 in 1999, according to an analysis by Syracuse University.

Some observers suggest that the bureau go even further in its shift toward counterterrorism by getting Congress to move some FBI responsibilities to other law enforcement agencies. Drug investigations, for example, could go to the Drug Enforcement Administration, while local police could take over investigations of bank robberies.

"Congress has pushed more and more duties on the FBI," says Joseph McNamara, former police chief of San Jose, Calif., and of Kansas City, Mo. He is now a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. "Today's bank robber is not John Dillinger. It's the same person who holds up a 7-Eleven store. Let's let the local police handle these kinds of bank robbers unless there's some interstate connection or some unusual element."

Mueller's post-Sept. 11 reassignment of thousands of agents to investigations of terrorism might permanently refocus the bureau, even without the sanction of Congress. President Bush hinted at an overhaul of the FBI during an Oct. 12 news conference. "The FBI is rightly directing resources toward homeland security," he said. "It's been an adjustment, and I'm proud to report that Director Mueller has adjusted quickly."

Working Together

But other government agencies have mixed feelings about the FBI's willingness to share information and work with them on investigations. The words "arrogant" and "aloof" often appear alongside "FBI" in conversations with other law enforcement officers. "The lack of cooperation and communication that exists with the FBI has been a severe detriment to the successful resolution of many investigations," says Robert Castelli, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and a 21-year veteran of the New York State Police Department. "You have to understand, I worked with the FBI for five and a half years, day in and day out. One of the things that I think many people in the law enforcement community are perplexed and often annoyed by is 'the bureau attitude.' The attitude is 'what's yours is ours and what's ours is ours.' The perception by many agents in the bureau is that nobody else knows anything else about law enforcement except them."

Some local officials complained publicly in the months following the Sept. 11 attacks that the FBI continued to withhold information, making cooperation difficult. New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in October called on Congress to pass a law requiring the FBI to share more information with local cops. Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley complained to a House panel in October that the FBI was not involving his police force. Complaints also flowed out of the Portland, Maine, police department, which worked with the FBI to investigate the travels of some of the Sept. 11 hijackers' through the local airport.

Stanford's McNamara says the FBI often has good reason not to share information. There is the principle of 'need-to-know.' You don't share information because it can blow sources away," McNamara says. "I wouldn't share information with some of the [police] chiefs around in my days because I didn't trust them and I didn't trust their departments."

The bureau's tendency to eschew cooperation with other federal agencies stems, in part, from the FBI's role in past tragedies. Other agencies start messes, the FBI cleans them up, or so the bureau's thinking goes. The FBI was called in at Ruby Ridge, for example, when a U.S. Marshals Service operation went bad. In Waco, the FBI took over from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which lost four agents in a shootout with the Branch Davidians. Criticism of the FBI's handling of those two incidents fueled distrust of the bureau at other agencies.

Mueller took a step toward improving trust among law enforcement agencies by meeting with representatives of state and local police associations on Oct. 4. "As we all realize, no one institution has enough resources or expertise to defeat terrorism. It must be a joint effort across agencies, across jurisdictions, and even across borders," Mueller said at the meeting. State and local law enforcement are playing a critical role collecting information, running down leads, and providing the kind of expertise critical to an effort of this magnitude and of this importance. Information sharing between us all is as important now as it ever has been."

Some local law enforcement officials say they already have a smooth working relationship with the FBI. After the meeting, Cape May County, N.J., Sheriff James T. Plousis and Sheriff John Cary Bittick of Forsyth, Ga., praised the FBI for the cooperative efforts that they have undertaken in the past and after Sept. 11. "We have a good working relationship," Plousis says.

In the fight against terrorists, improving cooperation among federal agencies is just as critical as is making up with state and local cops. Better federal information sharing could have made the Sept. 11 attacks more difficult, some critics say. Assistant Secretary of State Mary Ryan, head of the State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs, criticized the FBI for not passing information from its criminal database to visa officers. Mike Kirkpatrick, assistant director in charge of the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division, says the bureau hasn't shared information in the past because of privacy laws and because visa issuance has not been considered a criminal justice issue. Through legislation passed in October, Congress is now requiring the FBI to share data with the State Department.

Many observers caution that an investigation of intelligence and law enforcement failures related to the terrorist attacks would pull the FBI and other agencies away from the more important task of tracking down conspirators and preventing further attacks. But at some point, they say, the government must figure out what went wrong and how to make sure agencies collectively use information to the best advantage. A big part of the problem is that intelligence agencies, including the FBI, simply collect too much information and can't sift through it effectively. Figuring out how to deal with information overload is a key management challenge.

"There was a failure to effectively communicate intelligence information to the law enforcement community, to collate, coordinate, disseminate and act on the information in a timely fashion," Castelli says. "While the FBI is certainly not the only agency guilty of this, one can't help but wonder if all of this were taken seriously, would the World Trade Center still be standing?"

Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., chairwoman of the Senate Judiciary Committee's terrorism panel, is pushing the FBI, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and other agencies to tie their databases together to make sure a criminal on one agency's watch list doesn't slip by another agency's officers. "I am concerned about continuing to appropriate money to systems that don't talk to each other," Feinstein said at an October hearing.

The bureau's technology challenge doesn't end with matching its systems with those of other agencies. Bob E. Dies, assistant director of the FBI's Information Resources Division, told the Senate Judiciary Committee in July that agents are working on workstations that are up to eight years old, are unable to use modern software and are trying to connect to networks on slow modem lines. "FBI information technology has had no meaningful improvements in over six years," Dies told the committee. "At the dawn of the 21st century, the FBI is asking its agents and support personnel to do their jobs without the tools other companies use or that you may use at home." Dies is heading up an upgrade known as the Trilogy project. It will include a modernization of investigative programs and the development of easy Web access to those programs for agents. This part of the project is being handled by San Diego-based SAIC, under a three-year deal awarded in June and valued at $14 million for the first year.

While it upgrades computers, the bureau also needs to come up with a better way to keep track of them. An FBI review last summer revealed that several hundred laptops, some containing classified information, were unaccounted for.

Management Checkup

The agency also is revamping its executive development and selection program following the FBI's April settlement with African-American agents who sued for more objective promotion procedures. The FBI Agents Association, an organization of 7,700 active-duty agents, complained in its February newsletter that FBI management and executive promotions rely too heavily on friendship. In addition, the organization charged that subjective standards create a "good old boy" network in which young managers become indebted to the older managers who promoted them. When older managers retire and go to work for private firms, they often call in "chits" to get access to information. "Some former senior managers will call in the markers from a protégé," the newsletter explained. "The markers can take the form of an improper request for information or consideration on investigative matters. . . . These dangers are not abstract hypotheticals; we have seen them happen."

Agents also question whether executives are held accountable for their actions. The bureau's internal discipline process came under fire at a July Senate hearing in which agents, in an unusual public criticism of the bureau, said senior executives were held to a lower standard of professionalism than agents were. Before departing the bureau last summer, Freeh merged the executive and agent disciplinary systems, making top brass and the rank-and-file subject to the same conduct review process. But FBI executives and managers have a long history of protecting one another from disciplinary action, agents said at the July hearing. John Roberts, a unit chief at the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility, said that FBI Senior Executive Service members who traveled to a retirement party and submitted false vouchers received letters of censure, while a similar transgression by agents would have warranted stiffer punishment.

More management reforms could surface after a series of reviews this year. A commission headed by former FBI and CIA director William Webster will consider internal security procedures; a Justice Department inspector general will study the bureau's mistakes with files in the Timothy McVeigh case; and consulting firm Andersen will conduct a management study.

Nancy Savage, president of the FBI Agents Association, gives Mueller high marks for his management efforts so far. "He's tremendously supportive of getting agents the tools they need," Savage says.

But Castelli says the FBI reminds him of the students in his class who cruise along with B grades when they could work to get A's. Mueller needs to shake up management and get rid of some of the old-timers, he says. "I still believe they're the premier law enforcement agency in the United States," Castelli says. "But I believe they are premier in spite of themselves, not because of themselves."