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Whether Bush and Congress, which would have to approve any major reforms, can truly transform the FBI and the CIA is anyone's guess. Neither political party is overflowing with will--or goodwill--at the moment, and big changes have not been the capital's forte for a decade or more. Washington has not been sitting on its hands since 9/11, but the repairs it has made in the way the feds gather and share intelligence have come mostly at the margins, little fixes to huge federal bureaucracies--in the words of Tenet, evolutionary, not revolutionary, change. That's partly because Washington has been so distracted, mounting and managing two unfinished wars, that it hasn't had time to take itself apart and figure out what's broken. The other reason is that the two agencies most in need of reform--the FBI and the CIA--over the past 60 years have become famously hidebound and self-protective creatures. As four or five outside groups launched probes of--and proposed changes to--FBI and CIA activities after 9/11, the bureau and the agency played a shrewd, wait-'em-out game, allowing small changes proposed by outsiders but drawing a hidden "line of death" at anything dramatic, especially if it undercut their roles, their missions and, most of all, their budgets.
Perhaps because it was the most dysfunctional agency of all, the FBI has done the most to try to heal itself since 9/11. It is practically impossible to adequately describe how unfit the FBI has become over the past 25 years. The bureau had a long string of abysmal failures that included the botched standoff at Ruby Ridge and the betrayal by Robert Hanssen, who spied for the Russians for years while working inside the FBI. And many of the things that went "according to the book" inside the FBI made no sense at all. For years agents were barred from searching open sources, such as the Internet, without first opening a formal investigation. Agents had a deeply ingrained habit of keeping information to themselves and filing paper reports. There was no computer network permitting broad searches for terms like Arabs and flight schools. The FBI's greasy pole was tilted, leaning away from counterterrorism work and toward the traditional pursuit of such crimes as Mob activity, kidnapping and white-collar offenses. Intelligence work? That was the last thing an up-and-coming agent wanted to do. "Traditional agents who weren't good on the street were put into intelligence," said Jack Lawn, a veteran FBI agent who later ran the Drug Enforcement Administration. "There was no measure of success on that side. Convictions, fines, savings and recoveries were the things that [J. Edgar] Hoover pounded into us as important."