CREATING
AN INTEL SERVICE WITHIN THE FBI
Director Mueller Testifies Before Congress
07/27/05
In years past, the
FBI has developed and used intelligence to tackle new and evolving threats—from
Depression-era gangsters to Nazi agents...from '70s mobsters to Cold
War spies.
This intelligence
work enabled us to 1) penetrate the national and international scope
of these and other threats, and 2) bring the most serious players (both
individuals and organizations) to justice through our investigations.
But the world has
changed. To protect America from today's complex, globally networked,
and increasingly interconnected terrorist groups and criminal syndicates,
we've taken our intelligence operations to the next level. After 9/11,
we created a national program that centralized and unified our operations;
staffed up, trained, and better equipped our intelligence professionals;
and meshed our operations and information sharing with intelligence and
law enforcement partners worldwide.
To build on that progress,
the President recently announced the
creation of an intelligence service within the FBI that will further
unify our intelligence resources and more fully integrate our operations
into the broader intelligence community.
On 7/27, Director
Mueller outlined the broad concepts of this plan and our work to build
up three areas—our foreign language program, Information Technology,
and human capital—that will directly impact the success of the
new service.
We call your attention,
in particular, to his detailed description of improvements in our translation
capabilities. A few highlights:
- We now
have the capacity to "promptly address all of our highest
priority counterterrorism intelligence, generally within 24 hours."
- Since 9/11/01
we've doubled the number of onboard linguists in key languages like
Arabic and increased the number of overall linguists by 69%;
- Backlogs
have been significantly reduced. Only 1.8% of audio, 0.8% of electronic
data files, and 0.1% of text from the last two years now exist as
accrued backlog.
- A recent
review of the backlog indicates that 93% is "attributable to
either elongated 'white noise' microphone recordings from certain
techniques not expected to yield intelligence of tactically high
value" and to "highly obscure languages and dialects" rare
in the intelligence community. We're addressing the latter with intense
recruiting and recently "hired 9 additional linguists
in one very rare language."
We encourage you to
read the full statement for
all the details. And stay tuned for more stories on the FBI's intelligence
service and its people.
