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American Morning

Attorney General and FBI Director to Outline Plans for Overhaul of Bureau Today

Aired May 29, 2002 - 09:11   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.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: The attorney general and FBI director are going to outline plans for an overhaul of the bureau today. And joining us now from Washington to talk about this shuffle is Buck Revell, former associate deputy FBI director.

Good to see you again, Buck. Good morning.

BUCK REVELL, FMR. ASSOC. DEP.FBI DIRECTOR: Thank you.

ZAHN: I wanting to put up on the screen some of the shifting of manpower and womanpower to give people a better sense of what's going to be unveiled later today. But I the guess the idea is to involve moving agents from drugs and white-collar crime and violent crime units to counterterrorism and security divisions. What kind of a difference do you think this would make?

REVELL: Well, certainly, resources are required to conduct terrorism investigations, particularly preemptive investigations. It requires a great deal of physical surveillance, electronic surveillance, analysis of patterns, the assimilation of information from multiple sources. It's a very labor-intensive activity to prevent as well as to investigate of course a crime such as those occurred on 9/11.

ZAHN: You no doubt know that esteemed members of Congress are already showing some doubts about how effective the changes will be long term. Senator Grassley basically warning the FBI should -- quote -- "not try to investigate terrorism out of bureaucratic central FBI headquarters." Is he right? Is that not the way to go?

REVELL: Certainly, the investigation across the country will have to be carried out by the field offices, and they will have to be focused on the most serious issues. But there does need to be centralized collection collation and analysis of information, and certain specialities will have to be provided from a central location.

We've long had the hostage rescue team, which is deployed nationwide, based at Quantico, and certainly the Washington field office and the New York office have sent agents around the world to investigate the crimes against Americans overseas.

So I see this as intensification of a capability that was already in place, but will certainly be reinforced. ZAHN: In spite of what you're just saying, though, what do you see as the FBI's continuing Achilles heel?

REVELL: Well, I think the problem lies in what the American people will expect of the FBI and how much latitude they will be giving, because many of the same Congressman, senators and the news media in the past criticized the FBI for being proactive and gathering intelligence. The attorney general guidelines make practically impossible to collect intelligence prior to the crime being committed domestically, and the foreign intelligence surveillance act required you to show information that a individual or group was either part of a foreign or hostile power, or of a known terrorist organization. So there's been some fairly substantial barriers to collection of intelligence.

Plus, the FBI has been an investigative agency, not an agency focused on analysis, and I think that's going to have to be shifted as well.

ZAHN: So how do you think the fiasco in the Minneapolis office happened?

REVELL: Well, think that here you have a situation where -- the office reacted very appropriately and quickly to a situation. They collected information. They sent it to headquarters, and headquarters determined that it didn't meet the criteria of the FISA (ph) statute. There can be debate whether or not that was accurate, but that's essentially what happened.

Now, you know, some of the nuances to the letter that was sent from the legal counsel in Minneapolis will have to be investigated as to whether or not there was a supervisor in the counterterrorism section that was opposed to their operation. I don't know the facts on that, but certainly, the inspector general's investigation should get to the bottom. Headquarters should always facilitate, support and assist field operations as long as they're within the legal parameters.

ZAHN: Senator Grassley also made the point that because the FBI has been very effective in handling bank robberies, and thefts and things of that nature -- and those are his exact words -- that we need to point out that bin Laden and his gang are not Bonny and Clyde here.

REVELL: Well, that's a very lame statement. In the fist place the FBI priorities have been on organized crime, white-collar crime, terrorism and counter-intelligence since Clarence Kelly and Bill Webster were directors. During my time in Washington, we prevented more acts of terrorism than actually occurred. The FBI has always preferred and worked to prevent terrorism, and only responded after the fact when we couldn't prevent it. So I think that is a very inept description of the FBI today, and certainly over the past 20 years.

ZAHN: All right, Buck Revell, we're going to have to leave it here.

Thank you so much for joining us this morning with your perspective. Appreciate it.

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