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Saturday, April 2, 2005

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  The most serious issue the panel identified was a lack of cooperation between the CIA and FBI on terrorism cases that shift from overseas to American soil.

"The failure of CIA and FBI to cooperate and share information adequately on such cases could potentially create a gap in the coverage of these threats, like the one the September 11 attack plotters were able to exploit," the commission said.

Since the attacks, FBI Director Robert Mueller has made counterterrorism the FBI's paramount mission, establishing a new Directorate of Intelligence, vastly increasing the number of intelligence analysts, and placing them throughout FBI headquarters and field offices.

But the panel recommended giving Ambassador John Negroponte, nominated by President Bush to be the director of national intelligence, more control over FBI intelligence-gathering.

"In our view, the FBI has not constructed its intelligence program in a way that will promote integrated intelligence efforts, and its ambitions have led it into unnecessary new turf battles with the CIA," the report said.

The FBI's only comment so far has been a brief, guarded statement: "We are pleased that the commission recognized that we have made progress, and we agree with its judgment that we have more work to do."

But FBI officials have said previously that they think there is a high level of cooperation between the agencies, while acknowledging scattered lapses.

Richard Falkenrath, a homeland security and national security adviser to President Bush until last year, said he did not encounter the problems the report described after the Sept. 11 attacks.

"The two agencies sort of knew their lanes, mostly stuck to them and cooperated pretty darn effectively," said Falkenrath, who is now a visiting scholar at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington.

Some civil liberties advocates warned against blurring the line between the roles of the CIA and FBI. "We've always recognized in this country that the methods that the CIA can properly use overseas should not be used in the U.S. against Americans, and that's why we have two separate agencies," said Kate Martin, director of the Washington-based Center for National Security Studies.

Keeping the FBI's domestic intelligence operations independent is "essential to the preservation of civil liberties," Martin said.

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