Reimagining the F.B.I.
The New York Times
Editorial
5/30/02
Robert Mueller, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said many of the right things yesterday in outlining his plan to transform the crime-fighting organization into a counterterrorism force. He spoke of the need to redefine the bureau's purpose, to strengthen intelligence gathering and analysis, to divert money and manpower to preventing terrorist attacks. He acknowledged past failures and even thanked a dissident agent in Minneapolis for a scalding letter she recently sent him complaining about the bureau's mishandling of warnings last summer. Yet Mr. Mueller's reorganization plan falls short of the thorough overhaul that the agency clearly requires.
The task before Mr. Mueller and his two primary patrons, Attorney General John Ashcroft and President Bush, calls for radical action. The F.B.I. today is not a smoothly running organization that requires only a little fine-tuning to make it a more effective instrument in the war against terrorism. It is a broken institution best suited to fighting conventional criminal activities like bank robberies, kidnapping and financial fraud. It has to be rebuilt from the ground up if it is going to play a pivotal role in detecting and thwarting terrorist plots unfolding within the United States.
Mr. Mueller's blueprint is too timid to get the job done. Like Tom Ridge, the director of the new Office of Homeland Security, Mr. Mueller seems to think that priorities and policies in Washington can be changed in a twinkling by well-intentioned leaders displaying multicolored reorganization charts. Unfortunately, institutions that have been around as long as the F.B.I. develop a resistance to change that is extremely difficult to overcome.
It's fine, as Mr. Mueller proposes, to create "flying squads" of terrorism experts to assist investigations and to establish a national Joint Terrorism Task Force to help coordinate the work of the F.B.I., C.I.A. and other agencies. And there is certainly a need to create a central analytical office at the F.B.I. to sort through data from field offices to see if there are connections like those about flight training programs in Arizona and Minnesota that headquarters failed to spot last summer.
But even the doubling of the bureau's anti-terror forces that Mr. Mueller plans will not remake the F.B.I. into a crack counterterrorism organization if he cannot change the bureau's insular, balkanized culture. He talked earnestly yesterday about changing that culture, but it was hard to find anything concrete in his plan that is likely to produce such a fundamental shift in attitude and performance.
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