Thinking Behind FBI Plan Faulted

Is the FBI pursuing a 20th century solution to a 21st century problem?

That question likely will be at the heart of the debate over the sweeping reorganization plan that FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III announced Wednesday to sharpen the agency’s focus on terrorism.

Mueller’s ambitious plan, responding to searing criticism over the FBI’s failure to correlate leads before Sept. 11’s terrorist attacks, strives to improve the analytic capacity at the agency’s Washington headquarters. But some critics question whether that model is the best way to ensure that the FBI avoids the breakdowns that prevented agents in Phoenix and Minneapolis from becoming aware of each other’s suspicions about terrorist plots before Sept. 11.

Mueller’s plan follows the hierarchical management approach that major companies and government agencies typically employed through most of the 20th century: It seeks to ensure that the right connections are made by adding a new layer of centralized oversight to process the information developed by local offices.

But that solution runs against the dominant current over the last decade in both business and governmental management reform--accelerating efforts to decentralize power and control of information so that organizations can react more quickly.

“The tendency to centralize is a classic industrial-era, 20th century habit; it happens all the time, in all kinds of organizations,” said David Osborne, a consultant whose book “Reinventing Government” inspired much of the Clinton administration’s government reform agenda. “But if you read anybody who is writing about 21st century organizations, they are all saying decentralize, flatten, get more info out to the people who do the actual work.”

With the FBI under fire for failing to link the clues developed in Phoenix and Minneapolis last year, the argument is over the best way to “connect the dots.”

For the most part, Mueller’s answer is to create a new office, and hire new analysts, who will specialize in connecting dots at one centralized point. Many companies, though, have been moving toward management structures that, in effect, encourage the dots to connect themselves by increasing the freedom of employees to share information with each other and then make decisions without approval from the central headquarters.

That’s something the FBI remains reluctant to do--partly for fear that sharing too much could allow sensitive information to end up in the wrong hands.

Indeed, the criticism the FBI has received in recent weeks for failing to share information largely inverts the charges it faced only a short time ago.

As recently as April, a commission headed by former FBI and CIA Director William H. Webster urged the agency to tighten controls over information. That commission--formed in response to the arrest of FBI official Robert Philip Hanssen as a long-time Russian spy--argued that sensitive information within the agency should be less widely available. Hanssen’s easy access to such data, the commission charged, showed that the FBI too often “violates the basic security principle that such information should be circulated only among those who ‘need to know.’ ”

Now, questions about the agency’s actions before Sept. 11 have raised the opposite problem: Agents with a need to know of other terrorist leads were not aware of them.

Critics on Capitol Hill have questioned why the FBI never linked a Phoenix agent’s warning about potential terrorists attending flight schools with the Minneapolis arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui after a flight school instructor grew suspicious of him. In a sharply worded internal memo to Mueller, Minneapolis agent Coleen M. Rowley complained that the Moussaoui investigators hadn’t seen the Phoenix memo.

Mueller directly acknowledged the breakdown Wednesday as he unveiled his reorganization plan. “We have to do a better job managing, analyzing and sharing information,” he said.

No one disputes that conclusion; the coming debate is likely to be over the best way to achieve that goal.

Malcolm Sparrow, a former British detective who now teaches public management at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, praised Mueller’s proposal. Only a centralized analytic office, he argued, will have the scope of vision to assess the international terrorist threat. “You can only see a problem from above it,” said Sparrow, who has conducted classes for FBI agents. “Being organized at a lower level never works because you can’t see it.”

But in her memo, Rowley pointedly questioned whether increased authority for FBI headquarters will produce better results. “If we are indeed in a ‘war,’ shouldn’t the generals be on the battlefield instead of sitting in a spot removed from the action while still attempting to call the shots?” she wrote.

The FBI reform plan doesn’t ignore those concerns; today Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft is expected to announce new guidelines that would provide field offices more freedom to initiate terrorist investigations without Washington approval. And Mueller went out of his way to promise that new “flying squads” of specialized anti-terrorist agents at headquarters would not “supersede” the work of field offices in terrorism investigations.

But the plan would maintain--and even intensify--centralized control of information by establishing a new Office of Intelligence to coordinate the analysis of terrorism leads.

In that way the plan sustains the agency’s current “hub and spoke” organizational model, in which the field offices funnel information into Washington, which then decides what to share with other offices.

Making those links, Mueller said Wednesday, must remain a “responsibility” for headquarters. “We cannot expect an office in the field to know what other offices are doing,” he said.

But that is precisely what much of the last decade’s management revolution in business--and to a much lesser extent government--has attempted to do.

Through “re-engineering” and other management reforms, most Fortune 500 companies, led by innovators such as General Electric Co. and Southwest Airlines, have attempted to “create much more seamless” sharing of information across the organization, said Alan Webber, a founding editor of Fast Company, a magazine that tracks business innovation. “They are trying to break down the boundaries and the barriers ... so it is not so much a hierarchy.”

With that in mind, experts like Osborne say that while adding more analysts in Washington might help discover patterns, even more important may be finding better ways for the FBI’s field investigators to communicate with each other.

Such horizontal communication would greatly increase the odds that the right linkages are made, said Bob Stone, a former Pentagon official who directed the National Performance Review, which sought to increase government efficiency, under former Vice President Al Gore.

“If the guy in Phoenix hadn’t made the connection, the woman in Minneapolis might have gotten it,” Stone said. “If neither of them got it, maybe a guy in Boston would have got it.”

He added: “When you are sharing information, you have lots of chances to get it right. If you are centralizing information, you have only one chance to get it right.”

Ultimately, some experts believe the challenge of mining the vast streams of terrorist-related intelligence flowing into the government will require not only better human connections but increased reliance on “Web services” software that allow computers to automatically search other computers for information--a possibility that Mueller may have hinted at Wednesday when he said the agency needed to increase its use of “artificial intelligence.”