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CNN Live Today

Inside the New FBI

Aired May 29, 2002 - 13:01   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
CAROL LIN, CNN ANCHOR: But we begin this hour in Washington where FBI director Robert Mueller is about to announce a monumental change in focus and tactics for his embattled agency. It's all because of September 11 and the bits and pieces of clues and potential warnings that apparently were allowed to gather dust in the weeks and months before that attack. One big part of Mueller's overhaul is his redirection of agents, more than 500 of them from drug cases, violent crime and white-collar crime to counterterrorism, security and training.

Here's what Mueller told Congress earlier this month.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ROBERT MUELLER, FBI DIRECTOR: We must refocus our mission and our priorities and new technologies must be put in place to support new and different operational practices.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

LIN: While we wait for the FBI news conference, let's get some insights from an investigative reporter who specializes in espionage and intelligence.

Ron Kessler's latest book is "The Bureau: Inside the Secret History of the FBI." And he joins us from Washington.

Good afternoon, Ron, thanks for joining us.

RON KESSLER, AUTHOR, "THE BUREAU: THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE FBI": Thank you.

LIN: All right, we keep describing this as a massive change, a see change for the bureau. How big a change in your eyes?

KESSLER: It's really more of an incremental change. Over the years throughout the FBI's history, they've emphasized different areas. Organized crime at one point, espionage during the Cold War and now terrorism. This percentage increase is probably the largest in terms of additional focus. But very clearly it is needed, more analysts are needed, more computers are needed. The computers were a total wreck in the FBI. Before September 11, they were just inundated with information, with leads that they didn't -- couldn't follow, didn't know how to follow. This is a way to connect the dots and to foresee things that they should be looking at into the future.

LIN: But fundamentally, can you give us an analogy of how it changes the way the FBI does business day to day?

KESSLER: Well just having more agents isn't going to change things except that they're going to have the luxury of being able to check things out more. The computers, of course, are going to change things. You just simply can't believe how primitive the computers were in the FBI until a few months ago until Bob Mueller order thousands of new Dell machines.

Under Louis Freeh who was director for eight years, they actually had 386, 486 machines that nobody would even take as donations to churches, because of Freeh's antipathy towards technology. He didn't use e-mail himself. And in fact, he simply ignored the whole infrastructure of the FBI. He focused on a few cases that he liked to micromanage, about half of them he screwed up, and the rest of the FBI really disintegrated under Freeh. And everything that Freeh did wrong, I see as Mueller is doing right.

LIN: Well what about the expanded authority that agents are going to have out in the field? What expansion do you see? And what do you think about that?

KESSLER: Well that's an obvious attempt to prevent what we saw in Minneapolis where they were trying to get applications to search Moussaoui's computer. It went through headquarters. A supervisor there, you know, didn't approve it, should have approved it, should have gotten enough cooperation all around so that they could have approved it. This way these things can be done faster.

LIN: You're talking about the memo that FBI agent Coleen Rowley had tried to issue complaining...

KESSLER: Exactly.

LIN: ... about the roadblocks along the way. She wrote a first draft of this memo, I think back in early May, and then she spent about a week editing it. She said she hand delivered the copies to the Senate Intelligence Committee. What went wrong? I mean when headquarters finally got a hold of that memo, what exactly -- put me inside that room, what happened to it? Why didn't people take it seriously?

KESSLER: Well there was a risk adverse attitude in headquarters. Again, because of Freeh's mismanagement, his -- he would chop off the heads of FBI managers over minor issues, often not knowing the facts, So everybody just hunkered down and the idea was you know if we don't do anything, we'll be more successful. And that's...

LIN: But wasn't she specifically asking about a situation where they wanted a warrant to be able to search the computer of what agents now believe...

KESSLER: (UNINTELLIGIBLE) Moussaoui.

LIN: ... was the 20th hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui?

KESSLER: Yes. And -- right. And the supervisor rather than take the risk of trying to get cooperation all around, more information that might have been used in the application, going after Middle Easterners, all these things I think probably entered his mind. He simply ignored it or he simply rejected it.

And with that said, once they finally did look at the computer after September 11, there wasn't much there. It was a flight program -- a flight simulator program and some crop dusting information, which could or could not be interpreted as being ominous. So in the end that alone would not have uncovered the plot as she herself said. But you never know -- when you start messing around with investigations, you never know when you, as she said, get lucky and something might fall into place.

LIN: You know, Robert, with all these terror alerts, I sort of have a sense of imminence that something could happen, you know, any day, any week, any month, immediately. These changes that are being made in the FBI, how is that going to prevent something in the near term from happening here in the United States?

KESSLER: Well, first of all, the FBI is going to be much more likely to spot any lead that might lead them to a possible plot. Now they have in the past uncovered many terrorist plots, including the plan to bomb the tunnels around Manhattan, which was a bin Laden plot. So they're not total fools or bumblers. And they do, in fact, very effectively investigate about 100,000 cases a year, but in those cases they've got informative information.

This effort by Mueller to analyze, to sift through information is more to go beyond that, to look at all the information out there and foresee things before they happen. The FBI has some 93 million pages of documents just on counterterrorism alone going back over the past 10 years and they are either not on computer or if they are, they're in such primitive computers that you can't enter flight schools and come up with any retrieval. So one of the thing -- one of the things Mueller has really started to do is to put all that information in computers. And of course you have to analyze it all. And there might be a little clue here, a little clue there. The idea is to put it all together.

LIN: Right. Ron, we're keeping an eye on FBI headquarters right now because we're waiting any moment to hear directly from the FBI director as well as the attorney general. A live picture there of the briefing room, reporters waiting.

Ron, I'm just wondering, though, is there any downside to this buildup? I mean if I was a bank robber or a drug trafficker, I might be feeling pretty good today because resources are being taken away from that part of the agency.

KESSLER: Well that's true. Now you know it's obviously easier to reduce FBI involvement in bank robberies and drug cases, especially simple drug cases, than in more sophisticated, more complex crimes like a white-collar crime, organized crime where they do stings, espionage. Those are the cases where traditionally you need FBI resources. But at the same time, it's absolutely true that there certainly is going to be a reduction in crime fighting in some of these areas, maybe even in some of these more complex cases.

And I wouldn't be at all disturbed if people started thinking about doubling the size of the FBI. It couldn't be done overnight, obviously. It takes training, but the total budget of the FBI is about $4 billion, including a secret component right now, and that's about equal to one or two stealth bombers. You know if we want to really stamp out crimes, stamp out organized crime and really get after these terrorists, why not just double the budget.

LIN: Here we go, Ron Kessler, we're going to take you and our audience live now to FBI headquarters.

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