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Some things have changed. Under Director Robert Mueller, who took over the FBI a week before 9/11, the bureau has made counterterrorism one of its top three priorities and tried to get its 11,881 agents to do something they were for years warned against: work proactively. Meanwhile, the bureau has increased the number of counterterrorism agents from 1,344 to 2,835, counterterrorism analysts from 218 to 406 and linguists from 555 to 1,204. Mueller has made a priority of finding people who don't want to wear a badge or a gun and are simply good thinkers, people who can look at seemingly unrelated events and connect the dots. Agents are now permitted to attend public gatherings in mosques and other religious and academic settings, search the Internet and mine commercial databases used by the financial-services industry. And "the wall"--a set of legal rules that kept agents working on secret intelligence-gathering missions from talking to prosecutors about their observations--has been bulldozed. "Mueller is changing the culture," says Representative Frank Wolf, who oversees the bureau's budget on Capitol Hill. "He's changing attitudes." Will that be enough? Wolf pauses a minute, and then says, "There is a passage in the Bible about putting new wine in old skins."
Other FBI experts echoed this, saying Mueller has the right idea but adding that the layers of agents and bureaucracy beneath him are reluctant to follow his direction. The bureau has been slow to recruit sources in Islamic circles in the U.S., and a top FBI official told the 9/11 panel that while the FBI knows "10 times" more about Islamic militants in the U.S. than it did before 9/11, "its knowledge is at about 20 on a scale of 1 to 100." Despite its recent hiring boom, the bureau still lacks sufficient Arabic, Urdu, Farsi and Pashto linguists. In a preliminary report, the commission said the FBI fails to translate "thousands of hours" of audio-surveillance tapes "in a timely manner." When conversations of suspected terrorism-related subjects are translated, the commission concluded, they are "usually not disseminated broadly, not uploaded into a searchable database and not systematically analyzed for intelligence value." Mueller responded that all counterterrorism tapes are reviewed within a day, while translations in criminal cases such as fraud may be postponed.
A shortage of surveillance specialists makes round-the-clock monitoring of suspects difficult, if not impossible, in many cities. This means that if the FBI tracks down someone dangerous in, say, San Antonio, Texas, it might not be able to keep an eye on him. Despite Mueller's focus on terrorism, agents are sometimes pulled away to handle traditional criminal cases. A long-awaited and badly needed computer overhaul is overbudget and behind schedule. Which means, the commission stated, "the FBI still does not know what's in its files." A longtime FBI analyst put it this way: "The FBI director wants to change. The question is whether anyone below agrees with him."
"HEY, WE'RE THE CIA ... "