Homeland Security system: Much assembly required

The president's proposed agency demands the blending of agencies with long histories of distrust and even hostility.

By BILL ADAIR, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published June 16, 2002

WASHINGTON -- As a CIA field officer for 21 years, Robert Baer lived the life of a spy. He recruited foreign agents, drank vodka with informants and dodged gunfire on the streets of Beirut.

He also filed paperwork, lots of it. He wrote thousands of pages of Disseminated Intelligence Reports, the encrypted memos that summarized his work. He wrote about embassy bombings in Lebanon and terrorists in Syria. Some reports were so secretive they were written on manual typewriters, so there would be only one copy.

Now Baer worries that the president's proposal to create a Homeland Security Department, if enacted by Congress, will allow sensitive information to be seen by too many people outside the spy agency.

"If they can get into your databases, you're in trouble," said Baer, who retired in 1997 and recently published a memoir of his CIA career called See No Evil. Allowing outsiders to see the databases could jeopardize the identities of an agent's most important sources, he said.

Baer's concerns are among many issues to be resolved as Congress debates whether to create the new department. President Bush and Tom Ridge, his director of homeland security, say the agency should be a central place to analyze intelligence reports from the CIA, FBI and a dozen other groups. That will better enable the government to "connect the dots" and prevent future attacks, they say. Some in Congress have even suggested the new department should take over portions of the CIA and the FBI.

But skeptics say there are many difficulties in carrying out the president's plan because of inter-agency rivalry and the possibility of creating a new bureaucracy that would do little to enhance security.

Todd Foster, a former FBI agent, said: "The problem is never the field agents, the people on the street who are writing the reports and getting the information. The problem comes when that information has to pass through the bureaucracy. It goes through these filters and has to be processed and sits on a desk."

Old computers

Never mind the cloak-and-dagger mystique.

When the government collects intelligence about terrorists -- or any other potential villain, for that matter -- it's just paperwork.

At its purest level, intelligence is no sexier than an interoffice memo. Inside the government's computers are thousands of Disseminated Intelligence Reports and other memos and cables, all filled with names and places, rumors and tips. Or as the critics might say, the database is filled with millions of dots just waiting to be connected.

But linking them isn't easy.

The FBI uses computers so antiquated that many agents have difficulty searching by more than one word at a time, according to testimony from Coleen Rowley, a lawyer in the FBI's Minneapolis office who has criticized the agency's failure to spot the Sept. 11 terrorist plot.

Also, many different agencies collect intelligence. The Bush administration published an organizational chart showing more than 100 agencies involved in domestic security, with 14 given responsibility for intelligence gathering.

That helps to explain why FBI agents may not see reports at the Immigration and Naturalization Service about suspicious foreign students, or a CIA report about future terrorist attacks.

Says Ridge: "There's no place in the federal government where all the pieces of the puzzle (come together), whether they are generated by the CIA, the FBI, the Coast Guard, INS, Customs, the National Security Agency or anybody else."

The new Homeland Security Department would solve that problem, Ridge said. It would receive intelligence reports from the 14 agencies and have a team of analysts that could spot trends and patterns that might have been undetected by any one of the agencies.

Ridge said the department could provide an independent assessment of reports from the disparate sources to sift out "disinformation, misinformation, just crazy information, rumor, speculation, and recycled stuff."

Many people in Congress say they support the plan.

"There have been too many dots -- many on separate pages in separate cities -- that cannot be connected," said Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.V.

Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., said the new agency could have "analysts who could really think outside the box."

Sibling rivalry

Todd Foster, a former FBI agent, says intelligence and law enforcement agencies don't like to share.

They often limit what they tell other agencies because they want to protect their informants. Foster says that was especially true with the FBI, Customs Service and the Drug Enforcement Administration.

"For years, the FBI didn't see what DEA had and DEA didn't see what the FBI had and neither would see what Customs had," said Foster, now a defense attorney in Tampa. "There was a jealousy."

Foster says there is a "competitiveness' that made them reluctant to share.

"They wouldn't want to disclose informants to each other and there were a lot of jurisdictional battles," he said.

There is a long history of tension between the FBI and CIA that is largely due to their different historic missions: the CIA collects intelligence overseas while the FBI has been a domestic law enforcement agency.

President Bush mentioned the culture clash in a speech last week in Kansas City: "It used to be they didn't talk very much. There was kind of a -- I guess, a structural problem."

The agencies have quietly tried to blame each other for lapses in intelligence before Sept. 11, which prompted Sen. Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, to criticize them for their "schoolyard fight."

But Bush says relations have improved since the Sept. 11 attacks. He meets with top FBI and CIA officials every day and says they are cooperating with each other. In late May, director Robert Mueller announced a major reorganization of the FBI and said preventing terrorism was the bureau's top priority.

Some members of Congress suggested last week that it might make sense to combine parts of the FBI and CIA into the new agency. But others are wary of that idea.

Graham, co-chairman of a House-Senate inquiry into Sept. 11 intelligence failures, says it's important to separate the FBI's law enforcement role from its domestic intelligence-gathering on foreign nationals to ensure the privacy rights of U.S. citizens are protected.

"My leaning is toward a separate agency . . . that does not mix law enforcement with intelligence," Graham said.

The need for power

Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, the top Republican on the intelligence panel, supports most aspects of the Bush plan, but says the new department should have an active role in directing intelligence-gathering.

"If they are just consumers and not collectors -- that's what we have now," Shelby said.

Andy Messing, executive director of the National Defense Council Foundation, said that the new department must be able to fire people who make mistakes. "If you don't have accountability and responsibility, all you're doing is creating a new bureaucracy and another circus tent."

Larry Wortzel, a foreign policy expert at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, says the CIA and FBI should remain separate but be willing to share what they know.

"You don't let hundreds or thousands of Americans get killed because some agency wants to play James Bond," Wortzel said.

Rep. David Obey of Wisconsin, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, told the Washington Post last week that the Bush plan "does nothing to change the mind-set of the FBI and the CIA with respect to their reluctance to talk to each other. The CIA was created to be the Central Intelligence Agency. Instead it becomes just another agency funneling information into another layer of bureaucracy."

Baer, the former CIA field officer, says the challenge in analyzing intelligence is sifting the real threats from the others.

"The problem is that so much of the information you get in terrorism is bogus," Baer said in an interview last week. "They tended to over-disseminate things."

Foster, the former FBI agent, likes the Bush plan but says the new department must shake up the culture of the bureau and other agencies.

"There is a lot of jealousy and infighting that goes on among agencies. That can be fixed, but it has to be fixed at the management level."

-- Staff writer Bill Adair can be reached at (202) 463-0575 or adair@sptimes.com

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