FBI Falls Short in Assessing Threats to U.S., Report Finds

The FBI has never done a comprehensive written assessment of the terrorist threats facing the United States, even though it promised to do so in 1999 and suffered significant criticism for intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, a Justice Department audit released Tuesday said.

The department’s Office of the Inspector General, an independent watchdog agency, was sharply critical of the FBI’s counter-terrorism program for what it described as a broad array of shortcomings.

It found, for instance, that even though the FBI has undergone wholesale restructuring since the attacks, including a massive management shake-up, the bureau has not followed through on promises made three years ago to create an overall assessment of terrorist risks--including possible attacks with chemical and biological materials or with other weapons of mass destruction.

That failure, the report suggested, has put the U.S. at increased risk of future terrorist attacks because the FBI--the lead U.S. counter-terrorism agency--hasn’t done enough to determine where future attacks might originate and in what form. That is particularly the case when it comes to the kinds of nonconventional terrorist attacks that could cause mass casualties on a scale far greater than the suicide hijackings a year ago, the report said.

Although the FBI drafted a terrorist threat report after the Sept. 11 attacks that described terrorist organizations and state sponsors, the document did not assess the likelihood of future attacks, potential targets or possible methods that terrorists might use, Inspector General Glenn A. Fine wrote.

“Because the FBI has not completed a systematic written assessment of the most likely terrorism scenarios--taking into account terrorist methods, capabilities and intent--it may not have fully identified the specific nature of the threat so that it could focus its attention and resources to prepare adequately and respond effectively,” the audit said.

An FBI spokesman did not dispute the overall findings, and he referred to the response of FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and other top officials, which was included in the audit.

“The director welcomes the comments as being constructive,” said FBI spokesman Steven Berry.

In the response, Mueller said the bureau has drafted a comprehensive assessment that is under review by senior officials within the FBI’s counter-terrorism division.

Mueller noted that he moved quickly after Sept. 11 to devote significantly more resources to the counter-terrorism effort, including appointing a senior deputy to oversee both intelligence and counter-terrorism matters--just one of the bureau’s recent improvements as it moves from a reactive law-enforcement stance into an intelligence-gathering agency that tracks terrorists and disrupts them before they strike.

But the inspector general’s office said key problems remain.

Above all, it questioned why a comprehensive audit hadn’t been completed when the FBI promised to do one in 1999 after a highly critical audit of the bureau by the General Accounting Office.

Bipartisan members of Congress reacted swiftly, calling for increased oversight of the FBI, which has suffered a series of embarrassments during recent congressional hearings into intelligence failures before Sept. 11.

“This glaring omission demonstrates clearly that better oversight of the FBI is needed,” said House Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.).

Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) agreed. FBI headquarters “handled the issues of foreign terrorism by the seat of their pants, always looking backwards instead of seriously thinking about attacks on our soil,” he said. “At the same time, Congress kept pouring more money into the FBI to use against terrorism and did little, if anything, to make sure it was used in an effective way.”

Most of the audit remained classified and available only to certain members of Congress and the Justice Department. A redacted summary was made available to the public. Even the summary, however, contained a litany of failures on the part of the FBI in assessing the terrorist threat.

In March 2001, the FBI said it was developing an assessment that would address “emerging trends, the current threat, the projected threat, FBI initiatives and future focus,” based on ongoing bureau investigations and information from other intelligence agencies. But by September 2001, Justice Department auditors concluded that a draft of the report failed to address the risk of an attack on the United States.

“In fact, the terrorist threat project had such a low profile within the FBI that it took the FBI nearly a month to identify to us anyone who was familiar with the project and the draft report,” the inspector general said. Auditors ultimately concluded that no single individual was accountable for managing the assessment.

That draft copy, the inspector general said, had many omissions, including an assessment of the training, skill level, resources, sophistication, specific capabilities, intent, likelihood of attack and potential targets of terrorist groups.

“Further, the draft report does not discuss the methods that terrorists might use,” the report said. “For example, there is no analysis of terrorists’ progress toward developing or acquiring chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons or any discussion of what the FBI has learned from its past terrorist investigations.”

Auditors suggested that little progress has been made on those fronts since September 2001 and that the FBI has not established a core training curriculum and proficiency standards for the hundreds of agents it has deployed in the war on terrorism. But Dale Watson, whom Mueller promoted to head all counter-terrorism and intelligence operations, disputed some of those findings.

Watson--who retired last month--told auditors that despite the lack of a comprehensive report, he believed that he was “fully aware of the threats, both before and after Sept. 11, 2001, based on the breadth of the FBI’s counter-terrorism cases and his frequent discussions with FBI employees.”

Robert Blitzer, who headed the FBI’s counter-terrorism unit until 1998, said in an interview Tuesday that the bureau spent significant time and resources developing a strategy, even if it wasn’t detailed in one comprehensive report.