With the urgency of war
The FBI is our lead domestic law enforcement agency dealing with bad guys at home. The CIA is our leading national security intelligence agency that is supposed to recognize and deal with bad guys abroad. But the two agencies have completely different approaches. The CIA fosters aggressive, active intelligence-gathering in anticipation of a threat before it arises and the planning of pre-emptive and preventive action against suspected terrorists. The FBI reacts after a crime, making arrests ex post facto and then seeking information to provide the evidentiary basis for long and arduous jury trials governed by specific rules of evidence and the protection of the rights of citizens. So when the CIA passed on information to the FBI, people at the FBI failed to follow it up because they did not think in terms of preventing attacks. Now the FBI director has announced the reorganization to quash a growing criticism, but the burden will be on him as to whether he can accomplish this job, given the close-minded, self-satisfied culture of image over substance that has typified the FBI in the past.
Connect the dots. For years, the directors of the CIA and the FBI literally didn't talk to each other. This will have to change. The dots will never get connected if they don't get collected in one place. We need a synaptic point, an agency where all of our intelligence reports can be sifted and organized for action. Americans have always been leery of creating such bodies. The premier hero of espionage fiction, after all, is an Englishman, James Bond; Americans have never liked real-life spies.
The president was right to propose a new specialized domestic agency as a part of homeland security with the specific purpose of gathering all our intelligence in order to develop effective counters to terrorism. Congress needs to support the president by providing the necessary authority to correct these vulnerabilities, rather more than it needs public hearings that will distract the top leadership of the CIA, FBI, and other relevant agencies. Let's quietly find out what went wrong, so we can fix it. There is too much work to be done to waste time on recriminations.
The third area of urgent concern was highlighted last year by a bipartisan task force, which asserted "the danger that weapons of mass destruction or weapons-usable material in Russia could be stolen, sold to terrorists or hostile nation states, and used against American troops abroad or citizens at home." What does this mean? It means that al Qaeda or some similar group could obtain just a small amount of highly enriched uranium, 40 pounds or less, or even worse, plutonium. This would enable such a group to produce a nuclear device in less than a year. Even more easily, they could then produce a radioactive dispersal device, wrapped around a conventional bomb, a so-called dirty bomb. This nuclear material would be small enough so that it could easily be sneaked into this country. It is critical that we work with the Kremlin to prevent this from happening.
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