Criticism Greets FBI Overhaul

For a once-vaunted agency that brought down John Dillinger and nabbed the Lindbergh baby kidnapper, the last few years have been brutal ones at the FBI.

The nation’s premier police force has been hit with one embarrassing headline after another: its bungled probe of nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee, its failure to catch in-house spy Robert Philip Hanssen, its mishandling of the Oklahoma City bombing documents, its coddling of Boston mobsters and, most recently, its inability to piece together pre-Sept. 11 warnings.

Rein in the FBI, many critics on Capitol Hill have demanded. But in a supreme bit of Washington-style irony, the Bush administration is now doing just the opposite by expanding the FBI’s scope and power to heights unseen since the days of former Director J. Edgar Hoover.

Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft says that beefing up the FBI--giving field agents new powers to monitor suspects, hiring 900 more agents, adding $700 million to the budget and centralizing oversight in Washington--will take away the “competitive advantage” of terrorists.

Critics, however, liken the FBI to a troubled teenager who has gotten into a string of mishaps only to have his parents send him out on the town with the keys to the car and a wad of spending money.

“The government is rewarding failure at the FBI,” said Gregory Nojeim, associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s national office, which attacked the order Ashcroft approved Thursday giving FBI agents new authority to monitor the Internet, mosques, rallies and other once-restricted areas in search of possible terrorists.

“The notion that the answer to the FBI’s failure to connect the dots [before Sept. 11] ought to be rewarding the agency with more power to collect more information without any evidence--to me, that just seems wrongheaded,” he said.

Ashcroft’s plan to empower the bureau has earned some support in the last few days, particularly from agents, who say the new guidelines finally will give them the tools to track terrorists.

But the naysayers clearly have outshouted the supporters so far in the debate, and the Bush administration is facing harsh criticism from all sides--from civil libertarians on the left to conservatives on the right--over the future of the FBI.

In fact, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, often a bellwether of conservative opinion, Friday called for FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III’s resignation. The Journal, which opposed Mueller’s nomination last fall, said that, “without leadership and credibility at the top, no amount of bureaucratic reshuffling will make a difference.”

Ashcroft, however, says he has not wavered in his support for the former San Francisco prosecutor, and the attorney general’s push to strengthen the FBI appears to be based at least in part on his strong personal confidence in Mueller.

Ashcroft made Mueller his acting deputy after he took over at the Justice Department last year. He then lobbied aggressively for President Bush to tap Mueller for the FBI post last summer. And he sang his praises so effusively last week at a news conference--recapping Mueller’s long resume and military career and saying he was “the right man for the job” of reorganizing the FBI--that Mueller later said he was embarrassed.

Pressure on Mueller is likely to intensify this week, as he is scheduled to testify at a Senate hearing regarding Sept. 11. A government source who asked not to be identified said that Coleen Rowley, the Minneapolis agent who wrote the scathing letter blasting the FBI headquarters’ handling last summer of suspected “20th hijacker” Zacarias Moussaoui, also is expected to testify.

Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said he wants Ashcroft and Mueller to appear before his committee to answer questions about why “regulations on domestic spying that have worked so well for the last 25 or 26 years have to be changed.”

“I believe that the Justice Department has gone too far,” Sensenbrenner said Saturday in a CNN interview. “I get very, very queasy when federal law enforcement is effectively ... going back to the bad old days when the FBI was spying on people like Martin Luther King Jr.”

Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), one of the FBI’s toughest critics in Congress, says he sees no immediate push to oust Mueller, who he believes has taken positive steps to right a troubled agency.

“Maybe a year from now I’ll say he should have been fired, but I think with him in office only a week before Sept. 11, and all that’s been dumped on him, it’s ill-considered to say he has to go,” Grassley said in an interview.

But, noting that the breakdowns that allowed FBI headquarters to largely ignore pre-Sept. 11 warnings from Phoenix and Minneapolis, Grassley said: “I think there’s people in the agency that aren’t serving [Mueller] well. He’s got to get rid of them.”

Moreover, Grassley said that Congress bears part of the blame for “rewarding” the FBI with more money--its budget is now $4.2 billion--and more responsibility to investigate an expanded base of federal crimes over the years, despite its recent history of missteps.

“The basic problem at the FBI is not that they need more help but that they need to use the resources they have now,” he said. “We have to change the mind set ... and turn this battleship around.”

For better or for worse, the events of Sept. 11 have forced the FBI to drastically alter its mission. But is the agency up for the task?

“The FBI has always had to evolve to meet challenges,” said William M. Baker, who was a top official in the bureau until his retirement in 1991. “But it’s never been faced with a challenge, in my experience, as great as this one.

“We’re at war. Yes, there have been failures at the FBI, and they’re clear. But there have also been a ... lot of accomplishments, and what’s critical now for the FBI is to show that it has the capability to get the job done.”

At the revamped FBI, a force of more than 11,000 agents that has become renowned over the years for chasing down bank robbers, kidnappers, drug traffickers and white-collar criminals now will make counter-terrorism its main and overriding mission, Mueller said last week. About 400 agents who now are investigating narcotics will be pulled to track down terrorist leads instead.

Investigators who have concentrated primarily on looking into crimes that already have occurred will be asked to take a more aggressive approach and anticipate terrorist attacks.

And agents who have been generally prohibited from using hunches to surf the Internet or stake out mosques in search of terrorists now will be given free rein to do so--often without reporting to FBI headquarters in Washington.

Portland, Ore., FBI agent Nancy Savage, head of the agents’ association, said Ashcroft’s overhaul of bureau guidelines “is one of the most significant things that they’ve done” in the war on terrorism.

“It’s something that the agents in the street have been screaming about, saying, ‘Hey, let us take the gloves off and do what we have to do in these investigations,’” she said. “It’s been hugely frustrating. You have to go in [to a supervisor] and say, ‘This is what I have seen. Please, please, Mother may I go into a further investigative stage?’”

Robert Blitzer, who was head of the FBI’s counter-terrorism unit until 1998, recalled the absurdity of his agents being prohibited from collecting and filing newspaper articles on terrorism cases.

The restrictions grew out of Hoover-era abuses in the bureau’s monitoring and retention of records on such figures as King and singer-songwriter John Lennon.

“Those were [bogus] restrictions, and they never should have been put in place in the first place,” Blitzer said. “It really hurt us from the perspective of being able to do collection and analysis” of “open source” material that is available publicly.

The changes could be productive. Hate crime experts such as Brian Levin, head of Cal State San Bernardino’s Center on Hate and Extremism, say that terrorist- related groups have been known to use the Internet and public meeting places for recruitment and fund-raising.

“Today’s terrorists take advantage of the public domain, and so should [the FBI], as long as it’s done in the most narrowly tailored way possible. That’s the key--not allowing broad and unending fishing expeditions that can lead to abuses,” Levin said.

But detractors say the FBI’s history gives them little reason for confidence.

For instance, Ashcroft’s overhaul of law enforcement guidelines, including a measure to strengthen the use of confidential informants, came just two days after a former FBI agent in Boston was convicted of racketeering and obstruction, charges that grew out of his use of confidential Mafia informants who were linked to as many as 20 murders.

Moreover, civil rights advocates say that, while Ashcroft and Mueller are demanding a more aggressive FBI, it is the over-aggressive “cowboy” mentality of a select few agents that has led to some of the bureau’s most damaging gaffes in recent years.

Among the high-profile episodes, critics point to Lee, the nuclear scientist at the Los Alamos, N.M., facility who was jailed for nine months without bail before all but one of 59 counts against him were dropped in 2000. Also noted are the investigation of Richard Jewell, identified as a “prime suspect” in the 1996 Olympic park bombing in Atlanta before he was cleared, and an FBI sharpshooter’s fatal 1992 shooting of a survivalist’s wife in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and the alleged cover-up that followed.

Nojeim, the ACLU official, said that an FBI with overreaching powers is not the answer to terrorism. “Sure, if everyone’s conversations are monitored, certainly something [about possible terrorists plots] might turn up. But that’s not how our criminal justice system is built to work. That might be how it’s done in China or Cuba, but not here.”

But FBI supporters said that, for all the talk about potential abuses, the agency has to be given the power to fight domestic terrorism for one simple reason: No other U.S. agency has the personnel or the resources to do it.

“Who ... else is going to do it?” asked Blitzer, the former FBI counter-terrorism chief. “The FBI has to be up to the task, and that’s all there is to it.”