[Infowarrior] - FBI Reorganizes Effort to Uncover Terror Groups' Global Ties

[Richard Forno]

FBI Reorganizes Effort to Uncover Terror Groups' Global Ties

By John Solomon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 26, 2007; A05

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/25/AR2007092502
291_pf.html

The FBI has begun the most comprehensive realignments of its
counterterrorism division in six years so it can better detect the growing
global collaborations by terrorists and dismantle larger terrorist
enterprises, according to senior bureau officials.

The bureau will merge its two international terrorism units -- one for Osama
bin Laden's followers and the other for more established groups such as
Hezbollah -- into a new structure that borrows both from Britain's MI5
domestic intelligence agency and the bureau's own successful efforts against
organized-crime families, Joseph Billy Jr., the FBI's assistant director for
counterterrorism, said in an interview.

The new approach is meant to channel raw intelligence and threat information
through "desk officers" with expertise on specific world regions or
terrorist groups, allowing those experts to spot trends and set
investigative strategies for field agents and joint terrorism task forces
that collaborate with local law enforcement, Billy said.

That change emulates some aspects of Britain's MI5, which bureau critics and
members of the Sept. 11 commission have frequently cited as a model for
fighting domestic terrorism. "We want to place these people together so the
intelligence is being shared across each way -- left, right, up and down --
and that, in turn, will help drive the tactical aspect of how we focus our
resources," Billy said.

Borrowing from its mob-busting strategies in the 1980s, the bureau will
encourage counterterrorism agents to forgo immediate arrests when an
imminent threat is not present, allowing the surveillance of terrorism
suspects to last longer. The aim is to identify collaborators, facilitators
and sympathizers who increasingly span across multiple groups and countries,
Billy said.

"We want to be in a position where we have [threats in] not only one area of
the country identified but have the entire picture that may be taking place
throughout the United States identified and . . . strategically focus our
resources in a way that would give us the better chance of dismantling a
group, as opposed to only identifying one aspect of a much larger threat,"
Billy said.

Counterterrorism agents were told about the changes in a closed-door meeting
at headquarters last week, but no public announcement has been made. FBI
officials hope to complete the realignments by year's end, but they
acknowledge that many details remain to be worked out.

The changes have been driven partly by a growing number of FBI cases
involving self-styled terrorist cells inside the United States that were
inspired by al-Qaeda and bin Laden but receive support, advice or
encouragement from disparate sympathizers across the globe, making group
allegiances far less important.

"You don't want to limit yourself to just assuming that one person who is a
member of a certain terrorist group won't particularly try to recruit or
bring into the fold others overseas," Billy said.

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III plans to cite examples of such
transnational collaboration in a speech on Friday in New York, mentioning
the connections between two men in Georgia charged with terrorism support,
17 suspects rounded up in Canada in a bombing plot, and terrorist
investigations in Britain, Denmark and Bangladesh. The defendants'
ethnicities are diverse, including Somali, Egyptian, Jamaican and
Trinidadian, officials said.

Officials said these suspects were linked by a lengthy investigation
involving U.S. allies -- dubbed Northern Exposure -- that tested the FBI's
ability to keep collecting intelligence beyond the traditional point when
arrests might have been made in the past.

The effort required diplomacy with cooperating countries that became
concerned that the terrorist cells might be moving toward an operational
phase. A meeting was held last winter among international law enforcement
agencies to decide when arrests should be made in each country and how to
keep surveillance going, officials said.

Other recent cases have also produced evidence of terrorist groups
transcending borders and group affiliations. Sheik Mohammed Ali Hassan
al-Moayad, a Yemeni cleric, was recently sentenced to 75 years in prison on
charges that included conspiring to support both al-Qaeda and the
Palestinian group Hamas. The cleric was caught in 2003 when FBI informants
met with al-Moayad in Germany and secretly recorded him promising to arrange
money for both groups. An FBI affidavit detailed how the sheik moved easily
between Hamas and al-Qaeda circles, including meeting bin Laden.

David Laufman, a former Justice Department lawyer who prosecuted several of
the government's major terrorism cases since the 2001 attacks, said in an
interview: "The Internet has become the most significant recruiting device
for multinational sources of Jihadist talent. It cuts across nationalities
and ethnicities."

But Laufman, who is now in private practice, cautioned that the FBI
reorganization must "overcome the agent culture of the bureau" and allow
intelligence analysts to drive the case agents, much like MI5's domestic
intelligence, which drives the investigations of Scotland Yard in Britain.

"The key to making this successful is to build a first-class analytical
cadre, give counterterrorism analysts equivalent stature to agents in the
FBI's counterterrorism culture, and create an environment where analysts and
agents continuously and seamlessly work together to identify relationships,
sources of funding and operational plotting," Laufman said.

Experts said the bureau's future success also depends on attracting more
Arabic speakers and intelligence analysts, and keeping them long enough to
develop deep subject expertise.

The concern that case agents -- rather than intelligence analysts --
dominate the bureau's anti-terrorism strategy too much has been widely
debated. Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards proposed during his
2004 campaign the creation of an MI5-like agency to supplant the FBI's
domestic intelligence work.

Likewise, the federal commission that reviewed pre-Sept. 11 intelligence
failures closely studied MI5's operation but stopped short of recommending
it as a solution. Richard Ben-Veniste, a member of that commission, welcomed
the FBI's plan to develop the subject expertise of MI5-like desk officers
and to use prolonged surveillance.

"This change makes a lot of sense to me. It's been some time coming but
welcome news," Ben-Veniste said. "One of the criticisms of the FBI in the
past has been that it has moved too quickly to make arrests, rather than
develop information."