Proposal Would Remove FBI as DEA Overseer : Law enforcement: Justice Dept. officials say having both agencies report to Thornburg would erase a layer of drug war bureaucracy.

In 1982, when federal drug fighters were told to report through the FBI, the then-chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration would point to a special hot line on his desk that connected directly to FBI headquarters to symbolize the close coordination of the two agencies.

But now the Justice Department wants “to reflect reality,” as one official put it, by removing the DEA from the general supervision of the FBI director so that both agencies report separately and directly to Atty. Gen. Dick Thornburgh.

Requiring the top drug official to report through the FBI director had stirred deep resentment inside the DEA and has not been the actual practice since 1988.

And as Harry H. Flickinger, assistant attorney general for administration, noted in a letter made public Wednesday to Rep. Neal Smith (D-Iowa), chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the Justice Department, the “reporting relationship has proven to be impractical.”

“Both DEA and FBI have significantly different missions,” Justice Department spokesman Dan Eramian said Wednesday. “To have the DEA report to the FBI adds another layer of bureaucracy and slows down the flow of information.”

Drawing an analogy to a football team, Eramian said: “If a head coach wants to know what the defensive coach is doing, he certainly doesn’t go to the offensive coach.”

The proposed change, which will be implemented if Smith raises no objection by mid-June, marks the fifth reorganization involving the DEA since 1973 and illustrates the difficulty of resolving the bureaucratic turf wars that hamper the federal anti-drug effort.

The subordinate relationship was established under former Atty. Gen. William French Smith after a lengthy department study called for involving the FBI in the drug fight but stopped short of endorsing fully merging the two organizations.

Then acting Administrator Francis M. (Bud) Mullen was so optimistic over the partnership of the two agencies that he forecast “a minimization of the (drug) problem in a year’s time,” adding that he did not think it could be eliminated.

Mullen said that he used the hot line to check with then-FBI Director William H. Webster three or four times a week.

But in practice, it didn’t work out.

An FBI spokesman said it would be “inappropriate” for the bureau to comment on a change in the organization chart proposed by its parent Justice Department.

At the DEA, an official noted that the hot line phone linking the DEA administrator with the FBI director did not make it to Virginia when DEA moved its headquarters there last fall from downtown Washington. “We think that the correspondence (from Flickinger to Smith) speaks for itself--and is welcome,” a DEA spokesman said.