For Immediate Release
March
21, 2007
|
Washington D.C.
FBI National Press Office
(202) 324-3691
|
In Domestic Intelligence Gathering, the FBI Is Definitely on the Case
Judge Posner repeats in his March 19 op-ed commentary "Time
to Rethink the FBI" his now longstanding criticism
of the bureau as an organization that has failed to transform
in taking on an expanded intelligence mission. He says
we have not made enough progress. He says we are gathering
information to obtain convictions and without regard to
our responsibilities as an intelligence agency. He says
we need a separate intelligence service in this country,
and he critiques virtually every aspect of the bureau in
arguing that we cannot accommodate an intelligence program
within the FBI.
I joined the CIA in 1985 as an analyst, and I left on
loan to the FBI, to become second-in-charge of the National
Security Branch responsible for this intelligence transformation,
in September 2005. I watched counterterrorism operations
for years; my most recent position at CIA was as second-in-charge
of the Counterterrorist Center. There are many more important
things we do beyond watching our critics comment on the
FBI in the media, but few things in my 19 months at the
bureau have been as curious as the broad gap between perceptions
of the bureau among some critics, including Judge Posner,
and the reality I have witnessed during my time here.
Judge Posner's comments fall short, well short, in two
fundamental areas: facts and analysis. He is dead wrong
on both fronts.
First, the facts. Judge Posner points to FBI investigations
as law enforcement measures that are not intelligence operations.
This is incorrect. We have discussions at least once a
day with Director Mueller and senior operational managers
to discuss the most significant terrorist threats we see.
No discussion has ever focused solely on a prosecution
or on a need to compile evidence quickly for a courtroom.
Every discussion I've seen focuses on how much we understand
al Qaeda and its homegrown cells.
Terrorism is not about stopping plots. We can stop plots,
and do, with our partners in foreign security services,
at CIA, at Homeland Security, with state and local police,
and with Americans who help. But terrorists will plot again
if we defend against only their schemes and fail to stop
the terrorists themselves. So our focus is on what to do
about terrorists once we draw an intelligence picture of
who they are and what they are up to. When intelligence
groups use their unique tools to stop terrorists overseas,
they disrupt unilaterally and sometimes with foreign partners,
often using those partners' law enforcement tools to take
terrorists off the streets. But the end of their often
brilliant intelligence operations is disruption: stopping
people so they cannot plot again.
We operate within the U.S., and we have a different set
of tools. But we have the same end as they do: disruption.
Once we fully understand a cell, we can either let it run,
which we often do, or take it down. When we take it down,
we use tools that reflect American laws, used in ways that
reflect American values. We penetrate cells to develop
a sufficient understanding of who they are so we can limit
the prospects of surprise. And once we have that understanding,
we do what our partners do: We disrupt that cell using
the tools at our disposal. Any security service around
the world—MI5, CIA, Shin Bet—operates using
this model.
Judge Posner's arguments are equally flawed when one
actually examines how our foreign intelligence partners
operate. He argues for an MI5, a separate security service
that has only domestic intelligence responsibilities. It
is not clear to me why such an approach would be any better
than what we have. In fact, I believe it would be fundamentally
worse. First, when our sister security services overseas
operate, they do not function independently. They operate
jointly, with their police counterparts. They may run parallel
informant networks at the same time, keeping one network
focused on intelligence collection while another might
include an informant who can appear in a courtroom. We
have the luxury, in this country, of a more efficient approach:
We can sit at the table, in one organization, and talk
about the intelligence we are collecting and what we should
do about it, whether we should continue collecting or disrupt,
and what options we have under either scenario.
The FBI is a national security agency; we are not solely
a law enforcement agency. Judge Posner is right—we
are not and never will be solely an intelligence agency.
We are the federal agency responsible for national security,
combining the authority and capability to collect information
that could pre-empt a threat and to do something about
it. Dividing these combined responsibilities by creating
yet another federal agency, an MI5, would be remarkably
inefficient and terribly slow. Who would divide the tactical
responsibilities that overlap and snag? Why should one
agency manage intelligence sources on Hezbollah and another
manage sources who provide the same information but can
appear in a court of law? Who would police turf wars? And
how many more resources would we have to expend to fund
and staff an agency dedicated to collecting the intelligence
we already collect at the FBI? Such a move would be not
only inefficient but foolish.
We have had remarkable success collecting against organized
crime families, for example, so we could understand their
structures and then take them down in what was a remarkable
intelligence success. More recently, we've hired over a
thousand more analysts, trained agents in intelligence
collection programs, added national security training for
all agents, and expanded guidance to FBI field offices
on how we should conduct our intelligence mission. And
we've shifted massive resources into counterterrorism and
counterintelligence and made commensurate advances in our
relationships with state and local law enforcement, tripling
the number of joint terrorism task forces.
But we also have a ways to go to evolve our intelligence
mission. Once we do, we should determine how to get even
better. We don't train our personnel well enough yet, though
we are working closely with intelligence partners to do
so. We continue to devise policies for guidance in collecting
intelligence. I joined the bureau with questions: Can we
do this? Will we do this? And how? Nineteen months later,
these questions are answered. It is the responsibility
of those of us leading this bureau to provide the guidance,
tools, funding, and vision to accomplish this mission.
Judge Posner fails to understand what we have done, who
we are, and how we go about our mission. He simply doesn't
know.
John P. Mudd
Deputy
Director
FBI's National Security Branch
Washington
(As
printed in The Wall Street Journal, March
21, 2007)
####
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