FBI Chief Outlines Moves to Halt Turf War With DEA : Law enforcement: Freeh is concerned rivalry could endanger agents’ lives. He plans management shake-up.

FBI Director Louis J. Freeh, concerned that a turf war with the Drug Enforcement Administration is endangering the lives of U.S. drug agents, is planning a dramatic management shake-up and threatening to dismiss any FBI field commanders who conceal information from the rival agency.

Freeh, in an interview, said he soon will name a senior DEA official to head the FBI’s anti-drug operations. The appointment represents an unprecedented effort to unite the two feuding agencies and quell their longstanding power struggle.

In related actions, FBI agents will be assigned to the three main investigative units at DEA headquarters, Freeh said. Later, high-ranking officials in FBI and DEA field offices across the country will be interchanged.

The moves are intended to send shock waves through the insular and tradition-conscious agencies, where officials’ narrow loyalties sometimes have resulted in wasteful, parallel investigations and even endangered the security of their rivals’ operatives.

“The American people don’t want to hear about two bureaucrats fighting over jurisdiction, who gets credit for a case or who was there first,” Freeh said. “They just don’t want to hear it, and I don’t want to hear it.”

Freeh said he has seen “more than a couple of instances” in which FBI and DEA managers in field offices “are not only not cooperating, but not telling each other what they were doing in their areas.”

“I just can’t think of a more dysfunctional or more dangerous method of operation,” he said. “It’s to the point where we could conceivably be buying and selling drugs to each other through our informants and witnesses and there’s a potential there for people getting killed.”

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The FBI director’s concerns are shared by new DEA Administrator Thomas A. Constantine, a former superintendent of the New York State police. “We share the same philosophy,” Constantine said in an interview. “Everybody’s got to get on board. If they (DEA field commanders) resist messages from the top, they’re doing it at their peril.”

In some areas, relationships between DEA and FBI offices are relatively good, Freeh noted. “But those have been in spite of very, very poor relationships on the headquarters level,” he said. “And they have been, more and more, the exception to the rule.”

Freeh is using his authority as both FBI director and head of the Office of Investigative Agency Policies to forge the new cooperation. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno created that office last November after the Clinton Administration decided against merging the DEA into the FBI, an idea floated by Vice President Al Gore’s reinventing government committee. The mission of the new office is to end turf battling by the Justice Department’s separate investigative arms--the FBI, DEA, Marshals Service and Immigration and Naturalization Service.

On May 25, acting in his new role at the Office of Investigative Agency Policies, Freeh fixed responsibility for conducting drug investigations overseas with DEA. The drug agency, he said, has a more extensive foreign office network and should be “the single point of contact” for such inquiries.

Lack of cooperation between DEA and FBI attaches based at some U.S. embassies had drawn complaints from Ambassador to Venezuela Michael M. Skol, Ambassador to Colombia Morris D. Busby and former U.S. Ambassador to Germany Robert Kimmitt.

“The agencies have been more competitive than cooperative on drug investigations overseas and in Mexico,” Freeh said. In some cases, their actions have confused foreign law enforcement officials. “They don’t want to offend either agency, and we’ve not made it clear to them how our drug enforcement program is organized,” said Freeh, noting that he has been warned that turf battling is the biggest problem hindering overseas investigations.

Under the May 25 resolution, four countries are exempted from the DEA’s primary jurisdiction: Italy, Canada, Japan and--subject to approval of its government--Mexico. In each case, Freeh said, the high volume of FBI cases require more direct and even unilateral contacts with foreign law enforcement officials.

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But even in those instances, the resolution requires the FBI to advise the DEA of its contacts with foreign law enforcement officials “so they will have an overall and comprehensive understanding of U.S. drug programs and cases in those countries,” Freeh said.

The resolution commits the FBI to assign personnel to DEA headquarters and to several DEA offices overseas to work on drug-related investigations. They include Bangkok, Thailand, and Bogota, Colombia. Subject to funding, the list of foreign assignments will be expanded to Brasilia, Brazil; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Caracas, Venezuela; Islamabad, Pakistan; Lagos, Nigeria; Lima, Peru, and Seoul, Korea.

In addition to cutting costs by joining existing DEA offices rather than setting up separate facilities, the FBI will expand its investigative jurisdiction beyond the portion of the criminal code covering drug offenses to include Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations provisions that are among the FBI’s most powerful tools.

The moves to “integrate, not consolidate” FBI and DEA drug operations are the most significant since two veteran FBI officials were sent to command DEA during the Ronald Reagan Administration, after an earlier merger proposal was rejected in 1982.

FBI officials complained at that time that the two DEA administrators, Francis C. Mullen and John C. Lawn, had “gone native,” by rejecting their FBI upbringing in favor of DEA’s view of conducting the war on drugs.

Trying to head off turf battles, the FBI and DEA entered into a memorandum of understanding in 1982 that recognized DEA as the single point of contact overseas for drug investigations. But five years later, Congress broadened the FBI’s drug jurisdiction, and the bureau “started to drift from the consensus in the memorandum” about DEA’s status, Freeh said.