The Answer? A Domestic CIA. by Fareed Zakaria

May 27, 2002, U.S. Edition

The Answer? A Domestic CIA.
In an age of terror, when the enemy will often be inside America, we can't remain blindfolded.
By Fareed Zakaria

Never did we imagine what would take place on September 11," said Ari Fleischer last week, "where people used those airplanes as missiles and as weapons." Actually, as is becoming increasingly clear, many people did imagine it. Forget about government reports. Tom Clancy closed his 1994 best seller "Debt of Honor" with an enraged pilot loading an airliner with fuel and crashing it into the U.S. Capitol during a joint session of Congress, killing most members as well as the president of the United States. But even if George W. Bush had read his Clancy and taken heed of his intelligence reports, he would not have been able to prevent September 11. For that, this country needed something else, something that we have always shied away from--a domestic intelligence agency, a CIA that spies on Americans.

There is a scandal about the events leading to September 11, but it does not involve the Bush White House--nor, for that matter, the Clinton White House. It's a couple of blocks over, at the FBI. How could the bureau, given all the bits of information it had received, not have aggressively investigated the suicide bombers? Why did it not connect the pieces of information into an incriminating whole?

It's simple. No one at the FBI had the job of strategic analysis--i.e., of connecting the dots. And even if someone had made the connections, what could the agency have done? The answer, in hindsight, is clear. Tap phones, raid computers and track bank accounts. (In this case, following the money would have been the real tip-off, since Zacarias Moussaoui was being funded by the same source as the other terrorists.) But the FBI needed court approval to do most of this, and it had scant evidence to make its case. And peeping into bank accounts wasn't easy; the American system is not set up to investigate people at whim. It is not simply a matter of a bad organization. The FBI is a law-enforcement agency, not an intelligence outfit. To begin a massive operation, a crime needs to have been committed.

To have properly analyzed and investigated the leads that pointed to 9-11, the FBI would have had to have been a different organization, a kind of domestic intelligence agency, focused not simply on investigation after the fact but pre-emption and prevention. "The paradox is that once someone enters the United States, they become invisible, shielded by all our laws and restraints," explains Philip Zelikow, director of the University of Virginia's Miller Center. "The National Security Agency and the CIA can keep tabs on people around the world--but not here. We just caught a terrorist in Pakistan. Had he been in America, he'd have been safe."

The FBI is already changing. Director Robert Mueller has created an Office of Intelligence. He is hiring 100 "strategic analysts" and setting up a college to train more of them. The bureau is now coordinating counterterrorism activities in 56 cities across America. Recent legislation has made it easier to track bank accounts and share information among agencies, including the CIA.

So the FBI will now tap phones, track bank accounts and work with the CIA. Does this sound familiar? The last time the FBI got involved in "political intelligence," during the Johnson and Nixon years, it was more politics than intelligence. (Remember the phone taps on Martin Luther King Jr.?) In fact, it was those abuses of power that produced many of the restraints that prohibit the FBI from acting as an intelligence agency.

We must learn from those errors and get it right this time. We need a domestic intelligence capability. Every major power in the world has one, most with too much power. Britain's M.I.5 and France's Renseignements Generaux can open mail and tap phones at will. (Many in Washington believe that one reason that so many terrorists operated out of Germany is that--fearful of creating another Gestapo--it has a weak internal-security agency.) In an age of terrorism, when the enemy will often be operating inside America, we can't remain blindfolded.

There's only one way to get security and liberty at the same time. Authorize the FBI to engage in domestic intelligence with clearly demarcated powers; put the agency under much stronger "civilian" oversight, including from Congress, and let it know specifically what it can and cannot do. "Without a national reorganization, every agency in government will get into domestic intelligence furtively, and that will be much worse for civil liberties," says Zelikow. "As last week's frenzy makes clear, no one will want to be blamed for missing a lead after the next terrorist attack."