FBI overstated investigations

WASHINGTON -- The FBI's investigations of Al Qaeda before the 2001 terrorist attacks amounted to monitoring fund-raising activities and conducting surveillance of a handful of suspects, even though the CIA reported to President Bush in August 2001 that the bureau had "70 full field investigations" underway related to the terrorist network, the 9/11 Commission was told yesterday.

That contention, made in a presidential daily briefing declassified over the weekend, apparently referred to each individual and fund-raising entity under scrutiny as a different investigation, according to Thomas Pickard, a former acting director of the FBI.

A Republican member of the commission, John Lehman, argued that way of counting overstated the FBI's counterterrorism activity during a surge in intercepted Al Qaeda "chatter" about terrorist threats in the summer of 2001.

Moreover, the FBI's abilities before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were impeded by a culture that viewed counterterrorism as a career backwater, regulations against sharing intelligence information within the agency, a shortage of translators and analysts, and an antiquated computer system that kept agents from learning what their colleagues knew, the commission's staff concluded in a new report released yesterday.

In his testimony, Attorney General John Ashcroft said the FBI was caught off guard because the Clinton administration had not been prepared for the Al Qaeda threat.

During questioning of Pickard , who ran the FBI during the summer of 2001, and J. Cofer Black, a former CIA Counterterrorism Center director who oversaw drafting of the declassified briefing, Lehman said the FBI appeared to be telling Bush "we've got it covered" and no further action was necessary to stop an Al Qaeda attack.

"Our understanding is that this was, to put it nicely, a bit of an exaggeration, because 70 full-field investigations have the aura of being a major, massive 'going to battle stations,' " Lehman said. "It was an exaggeration which gave a wrong perception at a time when the threat we now know was really much further along."

During the past week, both President Bush and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice have answered questions about what, if any, action they took in response to a CIA briefing about the Al Qaeda threat in the United States by noting that the Aug. 6, 2001, document indicated the FBI was pursuing a relatively large number of investigations, suggesting that the situation was under control.

But Pickard noted that the FBI did not sign off on the language used by the CIA analyst in writing the briefing.

"I would find it a mischaracterization to say that anyone in the FBI said 'We've got them covered,' " he said. "We only knew what we knew. The intelligence had led us to those 70 individuals, and we worked on them as best we could."

Asked about the overstatement of FBI efforts, Bush said at a news conference last night: "My response is I expect to get valid information . . . I can't make good decisions unless I get valid information."

The new details about the limited extent of the FBI investigations in the summer of 2001 , adding to a series of disclosures in the past week about what the federal government's response to the Al Qaeda threat in the months before the attacks, were released on a day when Attorney General John Ashcroft stoutly defended the Bush administration's performance, blaming Clinton-era policies and budgets for any failure on the part of the FBI to detect or disrupt the Sept. 11 plot.

Ashcroft brought with him a set of newly declassified intelligence-sharing guidelines apparently drafted in 1995 by former Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, who is now a Democratic member of the 9/11 Commission. Those guidelines forbade the sharing of intelligence between investigators handling surveillance of suspected foreign agents and those handling domestic criminal probes.

Ashcroft said the guidelines were based on a faulty interpretation of the law, which was revised in the USA Patriot Act in October 2001, a change later affirmed by a secret federal court that reviews domestic intelligence wiretaps.

Gorelick, who was present at the hearing, declined to respond, having recused herself from discussions of Justice Department policies developed during her tenure in the Clinton administration.

Ashcroft also said the Bush administration inherited a bureau whose information management systems were "in terrible shape," with agents not even having access the Internet, let alone the technical ability to share information with each other and state and local law enforcement agencies.

He said that was why a now-famous memo from the Phoenix FBI office about possible terrorist infiltration of aviation schools did not reach decision-makers until after the attacks.

"We did not know an attack was coming because, for nearly a decade, our government had blinded itself to its enemies," Ashcroft said. "Our agents were isolated by government-imposed walls, handcuffed by government imposed restrictions, and starved for basic information technology."

Ashcroft also rebutted a claim by Pickard that Ashcroft lacked interest in counterterrorism before the attacks. In its staff report, the commission said that in a private interview, Pickard recounted that Ashcroft said "he did not want to hear this information anymore" when Pickard tried to brief him about Al Qaeda threats.

Ashcroft denied that he ever made such a statement, and emphasized that he had moved early in his tenure to amend a Clinton-era legal policy that authorized the capture of Osama bin Laden to state that Al Qaeda's leader should be killed.

In one of the testier exchanges of the day, former FBI director Louis Freeh disputed commission chairman Thomas Kean when he described the staff's report as "An indictment of the FBI over a long period of time."

Freeh, in response, said: "I would ask that you balance what you call an indictment, which I don't agree with at all, with two primary findings of your staff. One is that there was a lack of resources. And two, there were legal impediments."

Black, for his part, told the panel that he knew that he would eventually have to answer questions about a successful terrorist attack on US soil when he took the job of running the CIA's Counterterrorism Center in 1999 because the center was chronically short of funds until after the attacks.

Black also conveyed a message from the staff of the center that began as an apology but quickly shifted to the problem of insufficient resources.

"We are profoundly sorry," he said. "We did all we could. We did our best. And, they said, make them understand how few we were and what we had to deal with. The shortage of money and people seriously hurt our operations and analysis."

Arguments over budgets dominated much of the day's testimony. Freeh, who ran the bureau from 1993 to June 2001, began his testimony by noting that in the last few years of his tenure he asked for funding to hire hundreds of new counterterrorism agents and analysts but received only a handful of new positions.

Earlier, Pickard accused Ashcroft of blocking an increase in counterterrorism funds he had sought in the summer of 2001. Pickard appealed the decision; notice of Ashcroft's denial of the funds reached him on Sept. 12, 2001. Ashcroft, however, said that the FBI was still operating under a Clinton-era budget in 2001 and that the Bush budget request was still a work in progress that would end up with substantial counterterrorism increases.

One of the recommendations the commission is considering is to model the nation's domestic counterterrorism effort after the British MI-5 agency, which is separate from Scotland Yard, the FBI's law enforcement equivalent.

Both Freeh and former attorney general Janet Reno opposed the idea, saying that it would take a long time to create a brand-new agency and that such a structure might only reinforce the problem of information sharing.

"I think that would be a huge mistake for the country," Freeh said. "Americans I don't think like secret police. And you would, in effect, be establishing a secret police."