FBI lagging in intelligence capabilities, report finds

The FBI must improve its intelligence-gathering and analysis capabilities to keep pace with new threats to the United States’ national security, a report released Wednesday found.

The report, from a commission established by Congress to determine how well the FBI had complied with the recommendations of the so-called 9/11 Commission, found that the agency’s intelligence operations lag behind its criminal investigation capabilities.

“The FBI has made measurable progress over the past decade in developing end-to-end intelligence capabilities and in significantly improving information sharing and collaboration with key partners at home and abroad,” the report’s authors wrote, before noting limitations in the FBI’s intelligence gathering and analysis operations.

“This imbalance needs urgently to be addressed to meet growing and increasingly complex national security threats, including from adaptive and increasingly tech-savvy terrorists, more brazen computer hackers, and more technically capable, global cyber syndicates,” they added.

As the FBI has quickly grown to increase its corps of intelligence analysts, there have been clashes between the special agents traditionally tasked with the agency’s law enforcement duties and those employees devoted to its burgeoning intelligence mission, the report found.

Authors wrote that there is friction between some special agents who are used to gathering intelligence from human sources themselves and the new groups specifically devoted to that task.

“Some operational squads valued the support they received from the [human intelligence] squads, while others questioned these squads’ existence, given the FBI’s long history of special agents themselves handling human sources,” they wrote.

The authors found that improving the FBI’s intelligence capabilities would take a cultural shift driven by agency leaders and supported by Congress. But they cautioned that the bureau’s criminal investigation units should remain robust.

“Achieving these ambitious goals should not be a zero-sum game between intelligence and law enforcement,” they wrote.

There were positive elements to the report’s findings: The authors said that the FBI has greatly expanded its information-sharing capabilities with other agencies within the national security apparatus.

It also found that potential reforms were hampered by sequestration, which took some funds away from the agency.

Congress established the FBI’s 9/11 Review Commission in 2014. Its three members are former Attorney General Edwin Meese; Bruce Hoffman, an academic who writes about terrorism; and former Rep. Tim Roemer (D-Ind.), who also served as ambassador to India.

It was tasked with determining how well the FBI had responded to the recommendations put forth by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States — known more commonly as the 9/11 Commission. That group combed through the record to determine how the 9/11 attacks occurred and why intelligence agencies failed to disrupt the plot.