[Nettime-bold] FYI about the FBI

Ex-FBI Officials Criticize Tactics On Terrorism
Detention of Suspects Not Effective, They Say

By Jim McGee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 28, 2001; Page A01

Until Sept. 11, the FBI employed a distinctive strategy for fighting terrorists: By using informants and wiretaps, the bureau monitored suspected cells -- sometimes for years -- before making any arrests. The theory was that only such long-term investigations reveal useful information about potential plots.

Since the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, that strategy has undergone a wholesale revision. Under the new approach, the FBI will focus chiefly on preventing terrorist acts by rounding up suspects early on, before they get a chance to act.

The aggressive FBI dragnet -- championed by Attorney General John D. Ashcroft -- has provoked much commentary and criticism for its impact on civil liberties. Now, in a series of on-the-record interviews, eight former high-ranking FBI officials have offered the first substantive critique of the Ashcroft program, questioning whether the new approach will have the desired effect.

The executives, including a former FBI director, said the Ashcroft plan will inevitably force the bureau to close terrorism investigations prematurely, before agents can identify all members of a terrorist cell. They said the Justice Department is resurrecting tactics the government rejected in the late 1970s because they did not prevent terrorism and led to abuses of civil liberties.

"It is amazing to me that Ashcroft is essentially trying to dismantle the bureau," said Oliver "Buck" Revell, a former FBI executive assistant director who was the primary architect of the FBI anti-terrorism strategy during the 1980s. "They don't know their history," he said, "and they are not listening to people who do."

Former FBI director William H. Webster said Ashcroft's policy of preemptive arrests and detentions "carries a lot of risk with it. You may interrupt something, but you may not be able to bring it down. You may not be able to stop what is going on."

In the past, Webster said, when the FBI identified a person or group suspected of terrorism, agents neutralized the immediate threat of violence. Then they began a long-term investigation using informants, surveillance or undercover operations, "so when you roll up the cell, you know you've got the whole group."

Ashcroft declined to be interviewed for this article, as did FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III. Justice Department spokeswoman Mindy Tucker defended the change in tactics as part of a wartime mobilization at the department prompted by the Sept. 11 attacks.

"The world is different and the priorities are different," Tucker said. "I understand this is not the traditional way the FBI handled things. But that's the priority."

A senior Justice Department official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that none of the changes ordered by Ashcroft would have enabled the FBI to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks. After two months of intensive investigation, the FBI has concluded that the 19 suspected hijackers acted alone in the United States as a self-contained terrorist cell whose mission was planned and funded overseas.

"There was not a lot of the plot we could have jumped on here," the official said.

Webster and others say Ashcroft's conviction that FBI counterterrorism operations require radical surgery ignores a record that, though not widely known outside the bureau, includes 131 prevented terrorist attacks from 1981 to 2000.

"We used good investigative techniques and lawful techniques," said Webster, who left the FBI in 1987 to take over the helm at the CIA. "We did it without all the suggestions that we are going to jump all over the people's private lives, if that is what the current attorney general wants to do. I don't think we need to go that direction."

Many of the prevented attacks were potentially catastrophic, with targets that included a 747 airliner, a gas pipeline, a crowded movie theater and a visiting world leader, Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.

"Interdiction [of planned terrorist attacks] became an investigative-planning tool, and we were rather successful at it," said former FBI assistant director Kenneth P. Walton, who established the first Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York City.

The sharp increase in FBI intelligence wiretaps and terrorism investigations after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing led to the prevention of 15 attacks in 1997 and 10 in 1998, FBI documents show.

"We lived to prevent a terrorist act," Robert Blitzer, former chief of the FBI's counterterrorism section, said. "That was our whole program. We prevented many acts of terrorism."

But not the ones on Sept. 11, which came at a time when the FBI was reeling from high-profile embarrassments, from misplaced FBI laptops and guns to a much-criticized investigation of Wen Ho Lee to the treason of former FBI agent Robert P. Hanssen.

FBI management reforms were under consideration even before Ashcroft announced his new strategy in a series of carefully orchestrated public statements over the past two months. The key elements include:

• Arresting and jailing "suspected terrorists" on minor criminal or immigration charges. "It is difficult for a person in jail or under detention to murder innocent people or to aid or abet in terrorism," Ashcroft said on Nov. 13.

• Cutting short long-term criminal terrorism investigations when agents detect the possibility of new violence. "Even though this may hinder a criminal investigation, prevention of terrorist attacks, even at the expense of a prosecution, must be our priority," Ashcroft said on Oct. 29.

• Deploying hundreds of state and local police officers to conduct voluntary interviews of 5,000 Middle Eastern men who are legal residents in the United States, based on their age and the country issuing their passport.

• Shifting control of the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces across the country from the FBI to presidentially appointed local U.S. attorneys.

Although none of the former officials interviewed for this article questioned the value of fine-tuning FBI operations in light of Sept. 11, they contended that Ashcroft's new policies will weaken the FBI's primary strategy for penetrating terrorist cells.

"It's the Perry Mason School of Law Enforcement, where you get them in there and they confess," Walton said of the plan to interview 5,000 Middle Eastern men. "Well, it just doesn't work that way. It is ridiculous. You say, 'Tell me everything you know,' and they give you the recipe to Mom's chicken soup."

While Revell and others said the 5,000 interviews may have a short-term deterrent effect, they said the tactic is problematic. "One, it is not effective," Revell said. "And two, it really guts the values of our society, which you cannot allow the terrorists to do."

Through years of trial and error, the FBI has found that intelligence-gathering rarely deterred terrorist acts unless it was combined with long-term criminal investigations that employed informants, undercover agents and electronic surveillance.

In virtually every case in which the FBI prevented a terrorist attack, these sources said, success depended on long-term investigations, whose hallmarks were patience and letting terrorist plots go forward.

"You obviously want to play things out so you can fully identify the breadth and scope of the conspiracy," said James Kallstrom, former chief of the FBI office in New York, who oversaw two large investigations of the al Qaeda terrorist network. "Obviously, the most efficient and effective way to do that is to bring it down to the last stage."

Former FBI assistant director John Otto described a case in which a long-running FBI investigation in Chicago of a Serbian nationalist terrorist cell prevented the deaths of nearly 300 Serbian American children attending a Christmas party at a church. An informant tipped off an agent to the plot.

"Long-term successful investigations are our forte," Otto said. "I don't think there is ever a need to get away from them. Look at the track record over time."

Although there are inherent risks, the ex-officials said there is no known case in which an FBI decision to let a bombing plot unfold resulted in injury or death.

Former FBI deputy director Floyd I. Clarke said he sympathized with Ashcroft's desire to take aggressive preventive measures, but said most preventions arise from methodical investigations. He cited one case in which FBI agents found out where a terrorist cell stored its explosives.

"We did not want to just go and arrest them and grab the explosives," he said, "because we knew they were connected with other groups."

Instead, FBI agents entered the building surreptitiously, rendered the explosives inert and sat back and waited. "Eventually, we ended up taking down a whole cell of people," Clarke said. "You try to make sure you have got as complete a picture as you can."

After the World Trade Center bombing in February 1993, the FBI quickly arrested several Middle Eastern men with ties to the radical Islamic religious leader Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, who was based in New Jersey. The bureau came under pressure to arrest or detain Abdul Rahman and others around him on immigration charges. But the FBI resisted.

"We wanted to take the whole cell down and get him off the street for the rest of his life," said Blitzer, the former counterterrorism chief, "not just allow him to be deported some place where he could continue on as the kind of terrorist leader he had been."

The FBI inserted a confidential informant into Abdul Rahman's inner circle and began intensive electronic surveillance. Within two months, the informant reported a second plot.

In June 1993, agents raided a warehouse in Queens, N.Y., where they surprised five Islamic fundamentalists. The men were bent over large mixing barrels and stirring a porridge of bomb-making chemicals, which they planned to use to blow up the Holland and Lincoln tunnels and other New York landmarks.

"We had to let the information develop," said former FBI assistant director William Gavin, who oversaw the investigation. "Taking them off the street at an early stage of the investigation, I don't believe would have afforded us the opportunity to discover and resolve the intent to blow up the tunnels."

Steve McAlexander
"Strength and Honor"

Confucious wrote, "When words lose their meaning, people lose their liberty."