FBI Details Plan for Intelligence Service

The FBI pressed ahead Friday with plans to restructure its intelligence operations, even as the announced departure of CIA Director George J. Tenet stirred debate over the future shape of the nation’s intelligence agencies.

Bureau officials offered up details of a proposed intelligence service within the FBI, a “directorate of intelligence” that would have budget authority over FBI intelligence assets and programs.

The proposal amounted to a preemptive strike against congressional critics and others who said that a more sweeping overhaul of U.S. intelligence services was needed because of breakdowns exposed after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The proposal already was drawing criticism for being too timid; even bureau officials acknowledge that the approach was more evolutionary than revolutionary, a somewhat more elaborate version of its existing intelligence office.

Tenet, who said Thursday that he would leave office July 11, is a staunch ally of FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III in opposing some more far-reaching reform proposals -- including the creation of an independent domestic intelligence-gathering service, modeled after Britain’s Security Service, known as MI5, that would separate law enforcement agents in the FBI from domestic intelligence collection.

Critics of that approach argued that creating another agency would exacerbate many problems -- including a chasm in intelligence sharing -- that the Justice Department has spent three years trying to fix. They warned that any dramatic changes in the intelligence-gathering bureaucracy while the nation remained under an elevated threat of terrorist attack also could be perilous.

FBI officials said the timing of Tenet’s resignation and the new proposal, unveiled by Mueller at a congressional hearing Thursday, was coincidental.

“The proposal was not meant to blunt anything,” Maureen Baginski, the FBI’s executive assistant director in charge of intelligence, said at a briefing for reporters. “The proposal really is the next logical step in developing the program.”

Baginski, a former Russian teacher whom Mueller hired from the National Security Agency about a year ago, stands as the presumed leader of the beefed-up intelligence organization, which would require congressional approval.

Since joining the FBI, Baginski has given the bureau a crash course in how to build an intelligence apparatus. She has established new requirements for gathering information, helped the bureau assess its intelligence-gathering capabilities and figured out new ways to share its intelligence with state and local law-enforcement authorities. She also is overseeing the hiring of hundreds of intelligence analysts to assess threats and is helping develop a career track for analysts to raise their profile compared with the bureau’s better-known corps of special agents.

Under the proposal, the new intelligence chief would have added budget authority. Baginski declined to say how much of the FBI’s $4.6-billion budget that would include if the proposal were approved today.

She said the “directorate” title also would help raise the stature of the evolving intelligence community within the bureau, compared with its traditional law-enforcement duties.

“The budgeting part is huge,” she said. “And calling this a directorate ... is a big deal. It is a vote of confidence.”

The critical personnel, including the growing cadre of analysts, are largely under Baginski’s wing. The major exception is the bureau’s office of language translators, who would be melded into the operation. Baginski said she would also get additional administrative and other staff of about 100 people.

The agents in the field who collect the intelligence would for the most part still report to their field-office bosses. The FBI says having analysts and agents working side by side is one of the proposal’s great potential strengths.

But critics are concerned because analysts often end up under the thumb of agents, supporting individual criminal investigations rather than wide-ranging intelligence operations. The question is whether the FBI cops-and-robbers culture could absorb the newcomers or whether they would feel outgunned.

In theory, “analysts will take charge and ultimately drive collection, directing FBI special agents in the field to collect intelligence that will fill the gaps in our understanding of domestic terrorism,” Alfred Cumming, an intelligence and national security specialist with the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, said in testimony before the same House panel that heard Mueller on Thursday.

But, Cumming cautioned: “The jury is still out as to whether analysts will supplant crime-fighting special agents in the FBI’s pecking order.”