FBI finds itself under fire with discovery of memo

WASHINGTON -- A new entry in the well-thumbed index of FBI missteps is raising questions about the bureau's effectiveness in protecting Americans from international terror.

Critics inside Congress and those on the sidelines say the agency's failure to run a pre-Sept. 11 memo up the chain of command shows weaknesses in the anti-terror campaign broader than the lapses of a few managers.

"There were a lot of people who didn't have their head in the game," John Martin, a longtime chief of internal security at the Justice Department and a former FBI counterterrorist specialist, said Wednesday.

FBI veterans and bureau-watchers disagree on the significance of the memo that warned that an inordinate number of Arabs were enrolled in U.S. flight schools. They disagree, too, whether blame for the agency's problems over the past decade rests mainly on the bureau or on political leaders.

Emphasizing prevention

People on both sides of those debates say preventing crime -- the essence of counterterrorism -- has not been the FBI's strong suit in recent years.

The concept may even be at odds with a law enforcement culture that works best when a crime a crime already has occurred, said Kris Kolesnik, a former congressional investigator who worked on FBI oversight.

"They focus on an ongoing criminal case, because that's how everyone gets ahead and gets promoted," Kolesnik said. Solving crimes gets the "attaboy" letters from headquarters and most effectively burnishes the reputation of the storied bureau.

"That's why they didn't put any of their best and brightest in counterterrorism; that was a stepchild with no career path," Kolesnik said.

Kolesnik, for one, believes that started to change with Sept. 11. CIA veterans are being tapped for the FBI's reinforced responsibilities in intelligence.

As well, the FBI and CIA are coordinating intelligence findings as they did not do before.

Right now, however, members of Congress are pressing to know what more could have been done to stop the Sept. 11 terror attacks before they happened.

And the FBI, again, is being found wanting, as it was through a succession of cases from the Ruby Ridge shootout in 1992 to the belated discovery of Moscow's spy, Robert Hanssen, in the agency's counterterrorism office.

Primarily at issue now is the Phoenix memo, which FBI agent Kenneth Williams wrote in July 2001 in reference to Arab men learning to fly in Arizona.

It did not make it past midlevel FBI officials until too late.

"Every indication was that the traffic light went from yellow to red, and the FBI just kept driving," Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., said Wednesday. "They seemed to ignore what was a very clear warning."

Former FBI profiler Clint Van Zandt said the memo was a smart piece of work but, absent a crime, not enough to go on.

"The Phoenix memo is not the Holy Grail," he said. "Prior to Sept. 11, had the FBI gone out to every flight school and wanted a list of every Arab, ... the political correctness fires would have been lit all over this country."

More broadly, he blamed Congress for leaning on the FBI to investigate more and more crimes over the years -- "ducking child welfare (payments), parental kidnappings, pornography on the Internet, whatever the flavor of the week was.

"And in the background, always brewing over the mountain -- you could see smoke, no pictures -- was international terrorism."

Martin, who retired from the Justice Department in 1997, said the FBI and other agencies have exhibited consistent failures but are not entirely at fault.

"It goes back to the very heart of the political leadership, goes back over the previous administration as well," he said.

For example, he said that even after the World Trade Center terrorist bombing in 1993, some top officials wanted the FBI to focus on abortion-clinic violence, street crime and the like.

"We were not preparing for this kind of attack," he said.

Kolesnik, now executive director of the National Whistleblowers Center, said it's no surprise the FBI headquarters and its offices around the country would stumble in their relationship.

The attitude toward headquarters in the field, he said, has been: "You're not down here. You don't see where the ball is. Headquarters is calling balls and strikes from center field."

Congressional hearings are looking into Sept. 11 evidence and hints, and Democrats are pressing for a separate independent commission, which President Bush is resisting.

So far the White House has not made a rousing defense of the FBI. Some analysts believe the agency may take heat deflected from Bush's top aides, whose handling of clues to the attacks also is under scrutiny.

FBI Director Robert Mueller was brand new to the job at the time and thus far has been exempted from criticism. He has announced an expansion of the counterterror unit among other restructuring steps.

The FBI is in the midst of "a change in the way we do business," he said this week. "We are trying to be more flexible."

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EDITOR'S NOTE -- Associated Press writer Connie Cass contributed to this report.

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