WASHINGTON, 21 June 2005 — The FBI vowed to build national expertise for fighting terrorists after the Sept. 11 attacks, but the supervisors who crafted that war plan now say Middle East and terrorism experience haven’t been important for choosing their agents.
“You need leadership. You don’t need subject matter expertise,” Executive Assistant Director Gary Bald recently testified in a little noticed employment case now catching the eye of Congress. “It is certainly not what I look for in selecting an official for a position in a counterterrorism position.”
The lawsuit, brought against the FBI by one of its most accomplished pre-Sept. 11 terror-fighting agents, provides sharp contrasts between the bureau’s public promises and the reality of how it has chosen the agents who run its war on terrorism.
In hundreds of pages of sworn testimony obtained by the Associated Press, senior FBI managers argued repeatedly that Middle East and anti-terrorism experience aren’t required for promotion and that they see little difference between solving a traditional crime and a terror attack.
“A bombing case is a bombing case,” said Dale Watson, the FBI’s terrorism chief in the two years after Sept. 11, 2001. “A crime scene in a bank robbery case is the same as a crime scene, you know, across the board.”
Watson couldn’t describe the difference between Shiites and Sunnis, the two major groups of Muslims. “Not technically, no,” Watson answered when asked the question.
Bald, the FBI’s current anti-terrorism chief, said his first training in that area came “on the job” when he moved to headquarters to oversee anti-terrorism strategy two years ago. When asked about his grasp of Middle Eastern culture and history, he replied: “I wish that I had it. It would be nice.”
FBI agent Bassem Youssef has questioned under oath many of the bureau’s top leaders, including Director Robert Mueller and his predecessor, Louis Freeh, in an effort to show he was passed over for top counterterrorism jobs despite his expertise. Testimony from his lawsuit was recently sent to Congress.
Those who have held the bureau’s top terrorism-fighting jobs since Sept. 11 often said in their testimony that they — and many they have promoted since — had no significant anti-terrorism or Middle East experience.
“Probably the strongest leader I know in counterterrorism has no counterterrorism in his background,” Bald insisted.
The hundreds of pages of testimony obtained by the Associated Press contrast with assurances Mueller has repeatedly given Congress that he was building a new FBI, from top to bottom, with experts able to stop terrorist attacks before they occurred, not solve them afterward.
“The FBI’s shift toward terrorism prevention necessitates the building of a national-level expertise and body of knowledge,” Mueller told Congress a year after the suicide hijackings, as lawmakers approved billions of new dollars to fight terrorism.
Daniel Byman, a national security expert who worked on both congressional and presidential investigations of terrorism and intelligence failures, reviewed the Youssef case for the court. Byman concluded the FBI overall remains woefully weak in expertise on the Middle East, terrorism and intelligence liaison.
Youssef received a special award from the intelligence community for meritorious work and was singled out by his managers for “continuous creativity and perseverance” in terrorism cases. But after Sept. 11, he repeatedly was passed over for top-level headquarters jobs in terrorism. Instead, he was offered same-rank positions in budgeting or exploiting intelligence from terrorism documents.
Freeh, the former FBI director who left that job three months before Sept. 11, testified that he believed Youssef should have gotten an important terror-fighting job in the post-Sept. 11 era.
