Getting Smart: Three steps toward a more intelligent intelligence community

National Review, July 29, 2002 by Mark Riebling

This problem is far older than the recent bungles. In 1948, Republican presidential nominee Thomas Dewey made FBI-CIA rivalry an issue in his campaign. Since then there have been no fewer than twelve White House initiatives to defuse the interagency conflict. All have failed, because they've been based on the bad idea of melding law enforcement and intelligence.

"Intelligence and law enforcement," British spy Ian Fleming wrote in a June 1941 memo, "simply do not mix." The two functions proceed from opposite and irreconcilable imperatives. Intelligence takes pains to protect sources; law enforcement uses sources to convict criminals in public. Secret intelligence goes on offense to stifle nascent threats; law-enforcement agents react to crimes that have already occurred. In Britain, these dual purposes are effectively detangled: Domestic intelligence (MI5) is separate from criminal investigation (Scotland Yard). But in the U.S. the functions have been smashed together, and each has been turned to purposes for which it was not designed. The bad results could fill a book.

The Bush administration is continuing to enforce this unnatural union, and demanding of cops that they be spies. The Homeland Security Plan states unequivocally: "The Department of Justice, and the FBI, will remain the lead law enforcement agencies for preventing terrorist attacks." Attorney general John Ashcroft has given the FBI a "new mission of preventing future terrorist activities." But a new mission does not, in itself, provide the new tools and methods necessary to fulfill the mission. To have obtained and interpreted the leads that could have helped prevent 9/11 -- to have searched Zacarias Moussaoui's laptop computer, and connected its contents with clues from other sources -- the FBI would have had to be a radically different outfit. It would have had to be a domestic spy agency, like Britain's MI5.

Terrorism is secret warfare, and it must be countered by a corps of secret warriors. Accordingly, the FBI's secret intelligence work should be severed from its public law-enforcement functions. Instead of being absorbed by the new Homeland Security agency, all internal-intelligence officers should be spun off into a new agency with spy powers but no law- enforcement mandate. The result would be a British-style system, in which criminal investigation would be handled by the national police (FBI), foreign intelligence would be managed by a foreign-spying unit (CIA), and internal security would be done by a domestic-espionage agency (the new unit). Sen. Bob Graham, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has already suggested splitting law enforcement and domestic intelligence into two agencies; so have others, including Newt Gingrich. The Bush administration should get on board.

Creation of a domestic spy unit, however, would be only a medium-term fix. The third reform we should undertake -- the most long-term measure of the three -- is junking the distinction between domestic and foreign intelligence. As money, technology, information, and people cross borders with increasing ease, attempts to distinguish foreign- from domestic-based threats make progressively less sense. The 9/11 hijackers lived in Florida but were supported from Germany, and met contacts in the Czech Republic and Spain. Was their conspiracy, then, a domestic or a foreign phenomenon? The impossibility of answering that question coherently shows the bankruptcy of the paradigm.