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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Philip D. Zelikow is a professor of history at the University of Virginia and an expert on the predicaments of government. He worked on the National Security Council for the first President Bush and wrote a book on German reunification with his former colleague Condoleezza Rice. Recently, he took on a more demanding assignment: he was appointed the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and oversaw its staff of eighty-two.
The commission's report, which was released this past summer, tried to explain why the United States was unable to protect itself from the attacks of September 11, 2001, and it made recommendations on how to better safeguard the nation. A particularly delicate task was analyzing why the Federal Bureau of Investigation, despite its storied history in law enforcement, failed as a domestic intelligence agency. "There were some things about what the F.B.I. had become that were just really indefensible," Zelikow told me in a recent interview. The question facing the commission was simple and far-reaching: Could the F.B.I. be reformed? Or, as many commission members had argued at the outset, should a domestic intelligence agency modelled on the British M.I.5 be established, limiting the bureau's responsibilities to fighting crime?
The F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, had started work a week before September 11th (he replaced Louis Freeh, who had resigned in June, 2001), and he quickly realized that the bureau had a major problem. "He understood that the F.B.I. did not fundamentally have the mind-set, institutional culture, or organization to collect and disseminate intelligence," Zelikow said. Zelikow was not referring to the bureau's publicized missteps: from revelations about sloppy practices at its forensic laboratory in the nineteen-nineties to the latest embarrassment--a report by the Justice Department's inspector general, released in late September, which concluded that tens of thousands of hours of taped material related to terror investigations have not been translated and, in some cases, have been erased. Rather, Zelikow said, Mueller--and, subsequently, the commission--was alarmed by the bureau's basic failure to provide usable intelligence.
"They literally didn't write intelligence reports," Zelikow said. Instead, agents would describe their interviews in a report called a "302," and put it in a case file. These reports sometimes were lost because the bureau's computers were several generations out of date and there was no reliable cross-indexing system. The other issue, Zelikow said, is that F.B.I. agents "don't ask questions the way an intelligence agent would ask questions. The agent is typically interested in the facts of an event. An intelligence agent is really interested in a person's whole world."
The F.B.I., which began in 1908 as a national detective force of thirty-four, now employs about twelve thousand agents. The commission, in its report, pointed out that the bureau "has long favored its criminal justice mission over its national security mission." F.B.I. agents, trained to gather evidence in criminal cases, tend to think like policemen--operating after the fact. Intelligence, almost by definition, deals with ambiguity. "F.B.I. people generally think that the intelligence people are creative thinkers who play fast and loose with facts . . . willing to be freewheeling and speculative without being unduly burdened by rigorous attention to evidence," Zelikow said. Jamie Gorelick, a commission member and a deputy attorney general in the Clinton Administration, told me that trying to get the F.B.I. fully integrated into the national-security apparatus "was probably the greatest source of frustration for me during my entire tenure at the Justice Department." The evolution of the bureau into a counter-terrorism agency that continues to investigate major crimes, such as kidnapping or public corruption, has become Mueller's biggest challenge.
In private meetings with Mueller, the commissioners had been brutal, but they were impressed by his willingness to revamp the bureau. Mueller, Zelikow said, gave the commission "unprecedented access to bureau employees and bureau files." The commission's recommendation that the bureau be left intact, the report said, depended on the F.B.I.'s ability to make "an all-out effort to institutionalize change." The conventional wisdom, Zelikow said, is that "the F.B.I. was the poster child for the broken agency," even though the C.I.A.'s performance in assessing and coordinating intelligence before September 11th was far worse. Mueller and the bureau were undoubtedly helped by personal contrasts between Mueller and the C.I.A.'s director, George Tenet, who was less willing to acknowledge management failures. In Tenet's testimony, Zelikow said, there were "a variety of important issues on which there was little or no recollection." Zelikow also said, "We didn't believe him anymore." (Tenet, who announced his resignation in June, said he was "outraged" by that characterization of his testimony, adding, "I told the truth about everything I've done." Several commission members have defended him; former Senator Bob Kerrey called Zelikow's criticism "completely unfair.")
As a signal of the F.B.I.'s commitment to major change, Mueller, in May of 2003, hired a former Russian linguist named Maureen A. Baginski to run the bureau's new Office of Intelligence. The job is something of a work in progress, but if the bureau takes the next step and establishes a separate Directorate of Intelligence--the "service within a service" which Mueller has asked for and the commission has endorsed--Baginski would head it. In the event that Congress creates a Cabinet-level "intelligence czar," Baginski may report simultaneously to Mueller and to the intelligence chief.
Baginski had spent the previous twenty-four years at the National Security Agency, the nation's largest and most secretive intelligence service, which focusses on intercepting intelligence from abroad. In her last post at the N.S.A., she was the head of Signals Intelligence, or sigint, which oversees the interception of electronic transmissions--the heart of the N.S.A. operation in Fort Meade, Maryland. "She became a personal symbol of Mueller's reinvention of the F.B.I.," Zelikow said.
Mueller had tried a number of fixes in the year and a half before he hired Baginski, and perhaps his most fundamental reform was to centralize counter-terrorism investigations at F.B.I. headquarters. Investigations had formerly been run from...
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