Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
November 28, 2001
WASHINGTON -- Until Sept. 11, the FBI employed a distinctive strategy for fighting domestic terrorists: By using informants and wiretaps, the bureau monitored suspected cells -- sometimes for years -- before making any arrests. The theory was that only such long-term investigations reveal useful information about potential plots.
Since the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, that strategy has undergone a wholesale revision. Under the new approach, the FBI will focus chiefly on preventing terrorist acts by rounding up suspects before they get a chance to act.
The aggressive FBI dragnet -- championed by Attorney General John Ashcroft -- has provoked much commentary and criticism for its impact on civil liberties. Now, in a series of on-the-record interviews, a number of former high-ranking FBI officials have offered the first substantive critique of the Ashcroft program, questioning whether the new approach will have the desired effect.
The executives, including a former FBI director, said the Ashcroft plan will inevitably force the bureau to close terrorism investigations prematurely, before agents can identify all the members of a terrorist cell. They said the Justice Department is resurrecting tactics rejected in the late 1970s because they did not prevent terrorism and led to civil liberties abuses.
"It is amazing to me that Ashcroft is essentially trying to dismantle the bureau," said Oliver "Buck" Revell, a former FBI executive assistant director who was the primary architect of the FBI anti-terrorism strategy during the 1980s. "They don't know their history," he said, "and they are not listening to people who do."
Former FBI director William Webster said Ashcroft's policy of pre-emptive arrests and detentions "carries a lot of risk with it. You may interrupt something, but you may not be able to bring it down. You may not be able to stop what is going on."
In the past, Webster said, when the FBI identified a person or group suspected of terrorism, agents neutralized the immediate threat of violence and then began a long-term investigation using informants, surveillance or undercover operations "so when you roll up the cell, you know you've got the whole group."
Ashcroft declined to be interviewed for this article, as did FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III. Justice Department Public Affairs Director Mindy Tucker defended the change in tactics as part of a wartime mobilization at the Justice Department prompted by the Sept. 11 attacks.
Webster and others contend that Ashcroft's conviction that FBI counterterrorism operations require radical surgery ignores a record that includes 131 prevented terrorist attacks from 1981 to 2000.
"We used good investigative techniques and lawful techniques," said Webster, who left the FBI in 1987 to take over the helm at the CIA. "We did it without all the suggestions that we are going to jump all over the people's private lives, if that is what the current attorney general wants to do. I don't think we need to go that direction."
Many of the prevented attacks were potentially catastrophic, with targets that included a 747 airliner, a gas pipeline, a crowded movie theater and a visiting world leader, Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.
"Interdiction (of planned terrorist attacks) became an investigative-planning tool, and we were rather successful at it," said former FBI assistant director Kenneth Walton, who established the first Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York City.
The sharp increase in FBI intelligence wiretaps and terrorism investigations after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing led to the prevention of 15 attacks in 1997 and 10 in 1998, FBI documents show.
Although none of the former officials interviewed questioned the value of fine-tuning FBI operations in light of Sept. 11, they contended that Ashcroft's new policies will weaken the FBI's primary strategy for penetrating terrorist cells.
"It's the Perry Mason School of Law Enforcement, where you get them in there and they confess," Walton said of the plan to interview 5,000 Middle Eastern men. "Well, it just doesn't work that way. It is ridiculous. You say, "Tell me everything you know,' and they give you the recipe to mom's chicken soup."
While Revell and others said the 5,000 interviews may have a short-term deterrent effect, they said the tactic is problematic. "One, it is not effective," Revell said. "And two, it really guts the values of our society, which you cannot allow the terrorists to do."
Through years of trial and error, the FBI has found that intelligence-gathering rarely deterred terrorist acts unless it was combined with long-term criminal investigations.
"You obviously want to play things out so you can fully identify the breadth and scope of the conspiracy," said James Kallstrom, former chief of the FBI office in New York, who oversaw two large investigations of al-Qaida. "Obviously, the most efficient and effective way to do that is to bring it down to the last stage."
Former FBI assistant director John Otto described a long-running FBI investigation in Chicago of a Serbian nationalist terrorist cell prevented the death of nearly 300 Serbian American children attending a Christmas party at a church. An informant tipped off an agent to the plot.
"Long-term successful investigations are our forte," Otto said. "I don't think there is ever a need to get away from them. Look at the track record over time."