For a Different Game, Make Different Rules

By Richard Lacayo

Robert S. Mueller III, the new FBI director, always knew the bureau had problems he needed to get at quickly. If the place has had its share of triumphs in recent years, especially the quick capture of Timothy McVeigh, it has also had to explain the bungled investigation of Wen Ho Lee and the embarrassment of Robert Hanssen, the agent who sold secrets to Moscow for 21 years. In May, McVeigh's execution was delayed when it emerged that case documents had not been handed over to his attorneys during trial. On the day of his swearing in, Mueller must have hoped for a few months to get up to speed and start making changes. Too bad he was sworn in on Sept. 4.

One week later the luxury of time disappeared in the flames over New York City, Washington and Pennsylvania. The FBI was called upon to simultaneously investigate the four hijackings and track down leads that could fend off any future attack. That was enough to stretch the bureau to its limits. But then came anthrax and the new responsibility of finding out who sent the contaminated letters and where they got the bacteria. New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was furious at the FBI field office last week because it did not inform him for nearly a week after it learned about a suspicious letter received by NBC News. And agents who arrested two men, Ayub Ali Khan and Mohamed Azmath, in connection with the investigation may have overlooked intriguing evidence. The Wall Street Journal reported finding a 1995 issue of TIME in the men's Jersey City, N.J., apartment last week. The TIME cover story was about the Sarin gas attack on a Tokyo subway. Also found was a copy of U.S. News & World Report with a cover on killer microbes.

Is the FBI overwhelmed? To date, on all the investigations, there have been more than 400,000 leads and tips. There are 11,143 FBI agents. You do the math. If it were just a question of workload, the solution would be simple: a massive hiring binge. But the bureau's critics say the problems go to the very question of just how the agency should go about beefing up its counterterrorism capabilities. In June 2000, the National Commission on Terrorism established by Congress called on the FBI to develop clearer guidance for agents on when to open terrorism investigations. The commission wanted the bureau to encourage agents to pursue those investigations more vigorously. To analyze the torrent of data the FBI receives, the report also recommended more linguists and intelligence analysts. There are almost 300 FBI agents in the New England area, for instance, but before the attacks there were none fluent in Arabic.

Mueller has already sought more money for analysts and translators. As for technology, he intends to acquire software that will enable FBI analysts to work rapidly with counterparts at the CIA and the National Security Agency. The new director has won quick praise for being approachable and open to change. As a career prosecutor, Mueller gained some experience in terrorism investigations--he supervised the Pan Am 103 bombing indictments. But he has not said what he will do to improve the FBI's human-intelligence gathering to target Islamic radicalism; the bureau desperately needs informants who can blend into, say, Muslim communities in the U.S.

The FBI investigation of the Sept. 11 attacks was barely under way when the grumbling started about the bureau's treatment of local law enforcement. Such complaints have dogged the place since the days of J. Edgar Hoover, but today there is more riding on the issue. Local police and sheriffs say they are eager to be the eyes and ears and legs for the bureau's overburdened agents. Michael J. Chitwood is chief of police in Portland, Me., near the motel where two of the hijackers, suspected ringleader Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz Alomari, spent the night before the attacks. Chitwood complains that the FBI has shared nothing with him. "They've got two or three agents here," he says. "I've got 160 cops. These terrorists live, eat, drive in our communities. The people most likely to have run into them are local police--at a traffic stop or because of domestic violence. We had a couple of anthrax scares over the weekend, but again, [the FBI is] not sharing anything."

Agents have their reasons for being closemouthed--and not just, as their critics often suspect, so they can hog the credit and hype their conviction numbers. For one thing, agents are bound by stringent rules outlawing disclosure of grand-jury evidence. By late last week Mueller had met in Washington with representatives of local law-enforcement groups. He promised them that all 56 FBI field offices would establish joint terrorism task forces with local law enforcement. Just 35 offices have them now. He proposed allowing several members of local law-enforcement agencies access to the Strategic Information and Operations Center inside the FBI's Hoover Building. "To have that opened up to us is a major step," says Bruce Glasscock, president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, who attended the meeting after calling Mueller with his complaints last week.

It may comfort local police departments to know that the FBI is no more open when it deals with other federal agencies. For years the bureau has not provided U.S. consulates with direct access to the crime-suspect databases at its National Crime Information Center, though that would help overworked officials make more informed decisions on whether to grant visas. Things become even more complicated when the bureau has to deal with the CIA. The separation between foreign and domestic intelligence gathering is a long tradition of the U.S. security apparatus. In part this was a remedy for the excesses of the Hoover-era bureau, which routinely kept files on political dissidents and infiltrated peaceful protest groups.

But the ease with which terrorists now move across borders has rendered the compartmentalized approach obsolete. "That little piece of information from an FBI field office in, say, Los Angeles could be crucial when combined with information coming in from Pakistan or the Philippines," says L. Paul Bremer, chairman of the National Commission on Terrorism. "The intelligence needs to be seamless between the international and domestic, and it's certainly not seamless now."

The FBI has "some great people, but they are a huge, huge bureaucracy," warns Richard Shelby, ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee. "Bureaucracies are not agile. They are generally behind the times." It will require a hard push from Mueller to force change. "And he can't let up," says a senior Justice Department official. "If he doesn't keep up a consistent message, there could be some backsliding." But by quickly sending the message of change from the top and by reaching out to local law enforcement, as well as to U.S. and overseas intelligence agencies, he has shown a measure of that resolve. And some FBI officials predict that the terrorist crisis will give him a chance to learn about the strengths and weaknesses of the FBI in days rather than months or years. Time, after all, is a luxury Mueller does not have.

--Reported by Amanda Bower and Josh Tyrangiel/New York and Viveca Novak and Elaine Shannon/Washington

With reporting by Amanda Bower and Josh Tyrangiel/New York and Viveca Novak and Elaine Shannon/Washington