The FBI ‘Must Be Intelligence-Driven’

These are excerpts from the opening remarks of Robert Mueller, director of the FBI, to the commission:

Thank you, Chairman Kean, Vice Chair Hamilton and members of the commission for the opportunity to address you this afternoon. You have been given an extremely important mission: to help America understand what happened on Sept. 11 and to help us learn from that experience to improve our ability to prevent future acts of terrorism....

Let me take a moment before addressing the specifics of the FBI’s reform efforts to reflect on the loss we suffered on Sept. 11, 2001. I wish to acknowledge the pain and anguish of the friends and families of those we lost that day, and I want to assure you that we in the FBI are committed to doing everything in our power to ensure that America never suffers such a loss again....

Today’s terrorists operate seamlessly across borders and continents, aided by sophisticated communications technologies, they finance their operations with elaborate funding schemes, and they patiently and methodically plan and prepare their attacks.

To meet and defeat this threat, the FBI must have several critical capabilities: First, we must be intelligence-driven.... We must be able to develop intelligence about their plans and use that intelligence to disrupt those plans.

We must be global. We must continue our efforts to develop our overseas operations, our partnerships with foreign services and our knowledge and expertise about foreign cultures and our terrorist adversaries overseas. We must have networked information technology systems. We need the capacity to manage and share our information effectively.

Finally, we must remain accountable under the Constitution and the rule of law. We must respect civil liberties as we seek to protect the American people....

Prior to Sept. 11, 2001 ... various walls existed that prevented the realization of that vision. Legal walls -- real and perceived -- prevented the integration of intelligence and criminal tools in terrorism investigations. Cultural walls -- real and perceived -- continued to hamper coordination between the FBI, the CIA and other members of the intelligence community. Operational walls -- real and perceived -- between the FBI and our partners in state and local law enforcement continued to be a challenge....

The legal walls between intelligence and law enforcement operations that handicapped us before 9/11 have been eliminated. The Patriot Act, the attorney general’s intelligence-sharing procedures and the opinion from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review tore down the legal impediments to coordination and information sharing between criminal investigators and intelligence agents....

Removing these walls has been part of a comprehensive plan to strengthen the ability of the FBI to predict and prevent terrorism. We developed this plan immediately after Sept. 11. With the participation and strong support of the attorney general and the Department of Justice, we have been steadily and methodically implementing it....

This plan encompasses many areas of organizational change -- from re-engineering business practices to overhauling our information technology systems. Since you have a detailed description of the plan in the written report we submitted on Monday, I will not repeat it here today. If I may, however, I would like to take a moment to highlight several of the fundamental steps we have taken since 9/11.

1. Prioritization

Our first step was to establish the priorities to meet our post-9/11 mission. Starting that morning, protecting the United States from another terrorist attack became our overriding priority.

2. Mobilization

The next step was to mobilize our resources to implement these new priorities. Starting soon after the attacks, we shifted substantial manpower and resources to the counter-terrorism mission. We also established a number of operational units that give us new or improved counter-terrorism capabilities -- such as the 24/7 Counter-Terrorism Watch Center, the Document Exploitation Unit and the new Terrorism Financing Operation Section.

3. Centralization

We then centralized coordination of our counter-terrorism program. Unlike before, when investigations were managed primarily by individual field offices, the Counter-Terrorism Division at Headquarters now has the authority and the responsibility to direct and coordinate counter-terrorism investigations throughout the country.

4. Coordination

As I noted earlier, another critical element of our plan since Sept. 11 has been the increased coordination with our law enforcement and intelligence partners. We understand that we cannot defeat terrorism alone, and we are working hard to enhance coordination and information sharing with all of our partners, including the Department of Homeland Security....

5. Intelligence Integration

The last crucial element of our transformation has been to develop our strategic analytic capacity, while at the same time integrating intelligence processes into all of our investigative operations.