U.S. Law Enforcement Bastions Slowly Settle Turf Wars : Reform: A Justice Department group is fostering cooperation and rooting out wasteful duplication among fiercely protective agencies.

Trying to halt the seemingly endless turf battles and jealousies among various U.S. law enforcement agencies is an acutely sensitive task.

When the job was given to the head of one of those agencies--FBI Director Louis J. Freeh--rather than to an official unaffiliated with any of the agencies, some senior officials in other agencies complained that the fox had been sent to guard the chicken coop.

Freeh was chosen last November to head the Justice Department’s new Office of Investigative Agency Policies. His mission was to bring about cooperation and end wasteful duplication among four Justice agencies: the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Marshals Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

The first meeting of representatives of those agencies offered stark proof of the problem. “We walked in there with open hands and everybody’s coming at us with clenched fists,” said James R. Bucknam, a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan whom Freeh brought with him to the FBI and who serves as chief of staff of the new office.

In a recent interview, Freeh recalled “a lot of apprehension, a lot of tension and a lot of mistrust” at the meeting.

But today, five months into the effort, the walls are beginning to crumble. To the relief and surprise of the other agencies, more than once the group has recommended against FBI preferences in resolving conflicts involving drug intelligence, violent crime approaches, budgets and radio communications--the areas addressed so far.

Freeh’s Office of Investigative Agency Policies is made up of two representatives from each of the four agencies, along with one from the Justice Department’s Criminal division and one from the U.S. Attorneys’ Advisory Committee, which advises Atty. Gen. Janet Reno.

Attorneys general dating back to the Richard Nixon Administration have vowed to end struggles between federal law enforcers. Such conflicts have included attempts to freeze others out of operations so that sole credit can be claimed for successes and competition over who will target federal fugitives. At their worst, these struggles run such dangers as exposing undercover operations or revealing secret wiretaps.

Clearly, the rhetoric of previous attempts to change the system did not measure up to what was accomplished. If the effort succeeds this time, it could curtail law enforcement competition and perhaps eventually reach beyond the Justice Department to other federal enforcement agencies, notably Treasury Department agencies: the Secret Service, Customs, Internal Revenue Service and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

Despite the hostility and tension at the first sessions of the new coordinating agency, Freeh addressed one of the touchiest subjects that has divided the FBI and DEA for the past dozen years--consolidating drug intelligence files. Each agency had its own files and was “competitive in that they did not talk to each other electronically or manually and had been operating (like that) since the early 1980s,” Freeh noted.

Attempts had been made to link up the systems so they could share data on suspects, trafficking rings, travel and the like. But each agency resisted, saying that it did not want the other “roaming” in its intelligence base.

“Look, this is 1994, and I don’t feel comfortable telling the attorney general and the American people that we’ve got the two agencies charged with federal drug law enforcement maintaining separate, but non-communicative intelligence bases and we’ve got to fix this,” Freeh told the agency representatives.

To Freeh’s question of how long it would take to draft a proposal for integrating the intelligence bases, the agencies provided estimates of up to two years. Freeh said that he was thinking of four to five weeks, which drew a near universal reaction of “impossible.”

Freeh resolved the deadline issue by giving the DEA and FBI representatives at the Dec. 6 meeting until Jan. 31 to come up with a solution “or I’ll fix it.”

“There was an extreme amount of griping, particularly in my own agency,” Freeh said. “It can’t be done, we shouldn’t take these risks, we can’t trust the other agency,” he recalled opponents complaining.

But before the deadline, the “technical wonks” of the two agencies got together and came up with a system that, once the computer software modifications are made, will be operating by September “on a fully integrated, talking and safeguarded basis,” Freeh said.

“We’re doing something now in federal drug enforcement that we haven’t done in 12 years--the most basic requirement and that’s sharing information and intelligence,” he said. And the system is being equipped with safeguards to discourage a corrupt FBI or DEA agent from gaining access to intelligence and compromising it.

“That really broke the ice and a lot of the mistrust,” Freeh said. Other moves have been done with more efficiency “because there’s more and more confidence that nobody’s going to get screwed,” he said.

In ruling against FBI representatives, the Freeh group recommended that FBI agents should join their counterparts from other agencies in staffing the El Paso Intelligence Center--a tactical drug intelligence center that the FBI had long shunned.

But despite the progress, many highly sensitive issues remain, including the proposed growth of FBI activities overseas in the face of established DEA operations in foreign lands and consolidating training of DEA and FBI personnel in common areas.

Freeh estimated that joint training could save taxpayers $25 million to $30 million a year.

His optimism about the new office is shared by Eduardo Gonzalez, director of the U.S. Marshals Service, and former DEA Administrator Robert C. Bonner. But skeptics remain. Some senior managers at DEA, for example, have concerns that “the process has the potential to disenfranchise us.”

So far, however, none of the member agencies have exercised their right to appeal recommendations by the coordinating office to the deputy attorney general or attorney general.