May 10, 2008	Saturday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 4, 1429

WASHINGTON: Nearly seven years after the terror attacks of Sept 11, 2001, the FBI “has yet to make the dramatic leaps necessary” to become an effective intelligence-gathering organisation and protect the country from terrorism, a congressional analysis released on Thursday found.

The Senate Intelligence Committee recommended that the bureau yield more of its historic autonomy to the Director of the Office of National Intelligence and that “performance metrics and specific timetables” be established to address shortcomings.

The panel found widespread problems in the FBI intelligence programme, including gaps in the training and deployment of hundreds of analysts hired since Sept 11, to assess threats to the homeland. Field Intelligence Groups, which are considered the front lines of the intelligence effort in FBI field offices, are “poorly staffed, are led overwhelmingly by special agents, and are often ‘surged’ to other FBI priorities,” the report found.

The bureau also has struggled to fill key national security and intelligence positions at FBI headquarters. The report found that more than 20 per cent of the supervisory positions in the section at headquarters that covers Al Qaeda-related cases were vacant.

The critique is the latest to question whether the bureau, which is celebrating its centennial this year, fully and effectively can transform itself from a law-enforcement organisation to one that also roots out terrorists before they strike. Its progress was questioned by the bi-partisan Sept 11 commission, which gave the FBI a “C” in a December 2005 report card it issued grading implementation of its recommended reforms.

The bureau itself recently acknowledged pressure from the White House Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which gives advice to the president on the quality and adequacy of intelligence operations. It has conceded that it is having trouble initiating a programme to collect intelligence on foreign powers operating in the United States two years after the Office of National Intelligence directed it to start collecting the information.

“There is an enormous gap between current and future capabilities,” the bureau said in documents supporting its 2009 budget request to Congress.

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III told the House Judiciary Committee in April that the bureau was taking steps to “accelerate our progress”. Those moves, he said, included hiring the consulting company of McKinsey and Co. and creating a “Strategic Execution Team” of field and headquarters personnel to drive changes more quickly.

The latest assessment was contained in a report accompanying a bill that sets out the intelligence community’s policies, programmes and spending for fiscal year 2009. An unclassified summary was released Thursday. Among its other findings:

The FBI is still without an effective training programme for intelligence analysts despite “revamping” training almost every year since 2002.

Most intelligence analysts are supervised by special agents who have little or no experience conducting intelligence analysis.

The bureau has hired just two “senior intelligence officers” two years after getting authority from Congress to fill 24 of the “critical” positions.

Only one-third of special agents and intelligence analysts have access to the Internet at their desktops. FBI personnel lack the ability to store and share images and audio files associated with intelligence investigations.

A new weapons of mass destruction directorate within the bureau is "poorly positioned to work across FBI programmes that are likely to encounter WMD threats and investigations”.

The report recommended that the Director of National Intelligence be required to submit semi-annual reports to Congress assessing the progress of the FBI. The committee said it also expected the FBI to “engage in a credible study” to identify why it has been unable to address “permanently the high position vacancy rates” in its national security and intelligence programmes at FBI headquarters.

“It is just slow and bureaucratic. You have a lot of people trying hard. But there is a fair amount of turnover, and a lot of junior people in jobs,” William C. Banks, a national security expert at Syracuse Law School, said of the FBI.

“The technical problems are just legion, and they really haven’t gotten better. They are inexcusable. What can you say?”Last week, Mueller named Kevin Favreau, a 25-year FBI veteran, to head the Directorate of Intelligence, the FBI section that manages its intelligence activities. Favreau succeeds Wayne Murphy, a longtime National Security Agency official who returned to that agency.

—Dawn/ The LAT-WP News Service (c) Los Angeles Times