FBI Races the Clock to Reinvent Itself

Not so long ago, before the war on terrorism, Carlos Barron was a foot soldier in the war on drugs.

As an FBI narcotics investigator, he tracked Mexican drug lords who were importing cocaine and marijuana into the U.S. His sleuthing and testimony led to the conviction of a renowned kingpin who, after serving time, was found stuffed in the back of an SUV, shot 27 times in the head.

“It used to be immediate gratification,” Barron says of the old days fighting drug trafficking. “We had a case, and we took it all the way. You put cuffs on him, and you put him in jail.”

Today, the culprits he is pursuing are not so recognizable, and the rewards have never been more elusive. Barron now heads an FBI intelligence team that gathers evidence about suspected terrorist plots.

The mission, ultimately, is to make possible the sort of preemptive strike that British authorities pulled off this month in disrupting a suspected plan to blow up U.S.-bound passenger jets. That plot, which officials said was intended to match the enormity of the Sept. 11 attacks, was thought to be in its final stages of preparation.

But that dramatic operation was in sharp contrast to the day-to-day business of terrorist-hunters like Barron. For every credible threat, there are thousands of leads that have to be evaluated. They often lead nowhere.

Barron regularly tracks reports of lost or stolen police uniforms and airport security passes, and the countless people observed taking photos of the oil refineries that make the Houston area a focal point for a possible terrorist attack.

The work often leaves him chasing ghosts rather than identifiable suspects. But every single lead must be checked out and reported.

“That is a shift completely from when I was an agent working a case,” he says, adding that the FBI has no choice in its diligence. “One of these incidents could be the stages of a terrorist attack. It could be preoperational. It could be rehearsal. It could be planning.”

It could be -- and usually is -- nothing at all.

A metaphor for the hazy and unpredictable nature of his job sits on a desk outside his office: a collection of fortune-telling novelty eight balls.

The FBI has been behind the eight ball since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when widespread and long-standing deficiencies in the way the bureau operated were exposed. The agency was accused of blowing opportunities to identify and possibly apprehend some of the 19 hijackers. Among the troubles: a shoddy analytical program, problems sharing intelligence information, and inattention to counter-terrorism in general.

In a way, the FBI had changed little since it was established the same year that Henry Ford introduced the Model T. Its mission was to investigate crimes that had already happened. Although it did not always get its man, it succeeded enough to be considered the premier law enforcement agency in the world, at least when it came to catching bank robbers, drug dealers, con artists and spies.

Now, under pressure from Congress and several bipartisan commissions, its business model is being turned upside down, with a focus on preventing crime rather than apprehending criminals.

Barron’s transitional experience is widely shared throughout the agency. More than 2,000 agents -- or 15% of the total workforce -- have been switched from traditional crime-fighting jobs to terrorism-tracking positions over the last five years. Whole areas of enforcement -- including pursuit of the sort of narcotics operatives that Barron handled in the 1990s -- have been largely abandoned or left to other agencies.

The FBI says things are going well. It cites the fact that there has not been another terrorist attack on U.S. soil in five years.

But many experts have doubts and question whether an agency so steeped in crime-fighting can switch to an intelligence operation. Some wonder whether the FBI would have had the same success as British authorities in preventing a major attack.

Some experts doubt that the FBI can succeed in its new role because it is incompatible with the bureau’s historical law-enforcement culture. The FBI has measured success on the number of arrests leading to successful prosecutions; intelligence work focuses on the amorphous job of examining trends and recruiting sources.

“Approaching five years after 9/11, we still do not have a domestic intelligence service that can collect effectively against the terrorist threat to the homeland or provide authoritative analysis of that threat,” said John Gannon, a former career CIA officer, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee in May.

“It is not enough to say these things take time. We should be asking why it is so hard for the FBI to develop a national intelligence capability, and opening ourselves to the possibility that we have asked too much of an otherwise capable criminal-investigation agency. We should be looking seriously at other options.”

For now, the new FBI is pushing ahead with its Field Intelligence Groups -- or FIGs, as they are known in the bureau.

Dozens of the groups in field offices around the country were created to collect, analyze and disseminate information about possible terrorist activity. Instead of targeting specific cases, each group is supposed to cast a wide net for information, analyze it and share conclusions not only within the FBI but also with other agencies.

Hundreds of analysts have been hired to evaluate threats and other information. Unlike the agents, they do not carry guns, and they are likely to have advanced degrees in international relations or mathematics rather than law enforcement.

Although the FBI has had analysts, they were used mostly to help agents solve existing cases by performing relatively menial tasks, such as conducting computer word-searches for names and addresses of suspects. Many were glorified clerks. Their job now is to anticipate threats and eventually drive what the agents do in the field.

The groups are “scanning the horizon, where the gatherers cannot see,” said J. Stephen Tidwell, assistant director of the FBI office in Los Angeles.

“That is the crucial value of the FIG: I have got managers who are telling me where to find the next threat,” Tidwell said.

“I am counting on those folks in the FIG as much as I am counting on the street agents to find the next 19,” he said, referring to the 19 hijackers from Sept. 11.

Barron transferred from working in the narcotics department to terrorism after Sept. 11, 2001, to help trace phone numbers associated with the hijackers. He now runs one of the bureau’s largest intelligence groups. The FBI permitted The Times access to his office, including secret law enforcement bulletins, to show what it is doing in the Houston area.

His team of about 160 people shows how the FBI has switched gears: A financial analyst who once helped chase bank bandits now works on terrorism financing. Arabic speakers were recently added to a corps of translators. Other analysts include a retired Navy intelligence officer and a onetime emergency medical technician.

Most are new to the FBI, and some say that the transition has been less than seamless and that they have not always felt welcome. One of their jobs is to pick the brains of agents about subjects and discuss new ways of looking at issues, but the agents have in some cases brushed them off.

“People would hide stuff from you,” said Murray Stockinger, an analyst who writes intelligence reports that are circulated to other agencies. “You could be sitting next to someone who would take a call somewhere else -- so you could not tell what they were talking about.”

After about a year, things improved, he said, although for a while he was “questioning whether or not I had chosen the right organization to go with.”

A big part of the office’s purpose is producing a monthly intelligence bulletin summing up the latest threat information that has been picked up in the Houston region.

The latest bulletin reveals that a man arrested during a bar fight in College Station, Texas, had the word “jihad” on the screen of his cellphone. Two Mexican nationals jailed in South Texas were carrying large amounts of Iraqi currency.

The bulletin is distributed online to many of the roughly 700 state and local law enforcement agencies that operate in the 40-county region.

The state and local police are also encouraged to feed tips they have received to the FBI, essentially extending the long arm of its collection effort.

These local law enforcers include sheriffs of small towns and school district police who have had little or nothing to do with the FBI until now. But they are seen as key figures because many intelligence experts believe state or local police will probably be the ones who pick up the tip that could head off the next terrorist attack.

The FBI has been giving free training in terrorism tracking to hundreds of police officers in the hope that they will give the bureau a hand.

More than 500 officers turned out for a recent two-day session at a civic center in Humble, Texas, that featured classes on “International Terrorism in Transition” and “Explosives and Explosive Devices.”

There was also a session on Islamic culture, with the message that knowing something about Islam will help agents gain the trust of otherwise skeptical sources. The instructor, Samer Issa, is a Jordanian-born terrorism investigator from the Los Angeles Police Department.

“If you earn their respect and loyalty, it is like a gold mine,” Issa said.

He teaches basics, such as the difference between Arab and Muslim countries and the historical differences between Shiites and Sunnis. He also offers tips, such as shaking the hand of a Muslim woman only if she offers it and avoiding stepping on prayer rugs.

The police officers apparently appreciate the attention. They now supply about half the information that the Houston FIG reviews.

Even seemingly incidental information can sometimes add up to intriguing theories. The FBI not long ago started getting reports of break-ins at cellphone towers throughout the Houston region. After publicizing the episodes, analysts eventually determined that some two dozen had occurred over a 10-month period. One of the towers was used to determine aircraft vectors at the George Bush Intercontinental Airport. Another controlled some of the FBI’s own communications.

Whether someone was systemically casing the towers was never established, and no one was ever charged. But an analysis of the phenomenon was prepared and circulated, the sort of thing that the FBI had never done before.

Such work occasionally leads to arrests. Houston was under a heightened alert in the months before the 2004 presidential election because of intelligence showing that terrorists were considering an attack on the refinery complexes here. The FBI got wind of a counterfeit-document ring that was printing bogus industrial safety training cards, giving holders access to the petrochemical facilities.

Even before the ring was busted, the office shared details of its investigation with the intelligence community. For FBI agents accustomed to jealously guarding their work product, it was a sea change in attitude.

“We never, ever, released information before in an ongoing sensitive undercover operation,” said Shauna Dunlap, the FBI special agent who handled the case. “We wouldn’t do it.”

Some civil liberties groups question the aggressive tack.

Alamdar Hamdani, a Houston lawyer who has represented many Muslims who have been questioned by the FBI and other investigators since Sept. 11, 2001, said that the FBI’s “threshold for interviewing individuals has been very low.”

Though the bureau had tried to portray its interviews as innocuous and informal, he said, it had also been aggressive about prosecuting people who make misstatements during the sessions.

“I tell people the FBI is not in this to make friends,” Hamdani said. “They are in this to get vessels of information.”

But Barron, who acknowledged that the bureau’s new mission may seem amorphous, said the FBI also had an obligation to follow every lead.

“Our job is just to collect it and report it and get it out,” he said. “Will it have value to somebody? We don’t know. Maybe it will. Maybe it won’t.”

When it does, sometimes there are concrete results.

Barron’s work tracking telephone calls of the 19 hijackers in the U.S. after Sept. 11, 2001, helped lead to the detention of a Qatari man -- Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri -- who was suspected of being a “sleeper-cell operative” working to settle foreign terrorists in the U.S.

“My job,” said Barron, “is to find the next Ali Al-Marri.”