Freeh Defends FBI During His Tenure

Launching a preemptive defense of his tenure on the eve of an appearance today before the Sept. 11 commission, former FBI director Louis J. Freeh said the bureau “used all the means at its disposal” to prevent terrorist attacks but was hobbled by “antebellum politics” that left its counter-terrorism budget underfunded, among other problems.

But some members of the blue-ribbon panel that will be grilling Freeh were already questioning his comments, which were published in an opinion article in Monday’s Wall Street Journal.

Moreover, they said they had gathered additional evidence that cast doubt on claims last week by national security advisor Condoleezza Rice and other Bush administration officials that fighting terrorism was a strategic priority for the FBI in the summer of 2001 and before.

Thomas H. Kean, chairman of the commission, said Monday that the panel today would release findings, based on its survey of FBI field offices, that show a widely scattered response to claims that officials in Washington tried to make terrorism a high priority in the field.

One section of the preliminary report will say that many FBI stations around the country had not gotten a signal from Washington placing them on higher alert for terrorist threats.

“We’ve gone out to the FBI field offices to ask what was coming down from the top,” Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, said in an interview. “Some of the offices did feel there was something coming down from the top, and others didn’t -- didn’t get any sense of any heightened alert, nothing, and that includes some of the most important offices in the country.”

Kean said the commission was exploring the causes of that failure and to what extent bureaucratic barriers or lack of leadership were to blame. “Was it a problem at the top or a problem in the middle? I don’t know,” Kean said.

Asked whether counter-terrorism was a top priority during Freeh’s tenure, Kean said, “I don’t think it was a high priority,” though he added that he thought that was true of many government agencies before the Sept. 11 attacks.

“That’s certainly probably the first question we’re going to ask him -- where counter-terrorism was on the list of priorities and what did he understand about [Osama] bin Laden,” Kean said. “I don’t think [the FBI] ever published a comprehensive assessment of the terrorist threat to the United States during that period,” he said, referring to Freeh’s tenure from 1993 to 2001.

The hearing today -- which will also include testimony from U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft and his predecessor, Janet Reno, among others -- comes a day after President Bush told reporters that he was open to recommendations on reconfiguring the nation’s intelligence community.

A key task facing the commission is determining whether the FBI is up to the job of being the lead domestic counter-terrorism agency or whether the country would be better served by a dedicated domestic intelligence service, such as Britain’s MI5.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, with the aid of hundreds of millions of dollars from Congress, the FBI has been trying to transform itself, reassigning agents to focus on terrorism and hiring hundreds of analysts, among other steps. But critics wonder whether such efforts will be successful or whether the bureau’s cops-and-robbers history and traditions run too deep.

In his op-ed piece, Freeh wrote, “Short of total war, the FBI relentlessly did its job of pursuing terrorists, always with the goal of preventing their attacks.” But he said the bureau’s counter-terrorism resources were “finite and insufficient.”

He said that in the three fiscal years before the Sept. 11 attacks, he had requested about 1,895 agents, analysts, linguists and other specialists to enhance the FBI’s anti-terrorism program. The total number he says the bureau was granted: 76.

“The point is: The FBI was intensely focused on its [counter-terrorism] needs but antebellum politics was not yet there,” Freeh said.

Freeh, now an executive at MBNA Corp., a credit card company based in Delaware, was FBI director from September 1993 until he retired in June 2001.

Thomas Pickard, a career FBI employee who is also scheduled to testify today, served as acting director until one week before the Sept. 11 attacks, when Robert S. Mueller III took over. Mueller is to testify Wednesday.

Timothy Roemer, a Democrat on the Sept. 11 commission and a former congressman from Indiana, took issue with Freeh’s account, particularly the implication that the bureau was undermined by a lack of resources.

“I don’t think this was a question of resources and I don’t think it was a question of mobilizing the public,” Roemer said in an interview. “I think it’s simply some of the backwardness in technology, the bungling of communications and the bureaucracy -- the failure to mobilize the domestic FBI.”

Ashcroft, who has led an aggressive series of prosecutions of suspected terrorists since the attacks, could feel some heat as well today about allegedly downplaying the threat of terrorism before the attacks.

A Washington-based advocacy group, the Center for American Progress, said it had unearthed internal Justice Department documents indicating, among other things, that Ashcroft was proposing to cut the requested FBI counter-terrorism budget a day before the attacks. The liberal group is headed by John Podesta, former chief of staff to President Clinton.

A Justice Department spokesman, Mark Corallo, said the counter-terrorism budget that Ashcroft endorsed was higher than any proposed under the Clinton administration.

And in a statement, FBI Director Mueller said Ashcroft had provided “substantial support to FBI budget requests.” He added, “Atty. Gen. Ashcroft and I have been lock-step in ensuring that FBI resources are sufficient to prevent terrorism and fight crime.”