FBI did not shift human resources accordingly.Although the FBI's counter-
terrorism budget tripled during the mid-1990s, FBI counterterrorism
spending remained fairly constant between fiscal years 1998 and 2001. In
2000, there were still twice as many agents devoted to drug enforcement as
to counterterrorism.
senior managers in the FBI's operational divisions.The new division was sup-
posed to identify trends in terrorist activity, determine what the FBI did not
know, and ultimately drive collection efforts. However, the FBI had little appre-
ciation for the role of analysis.Analysts continued to be used primarily in a tac-
tical fashion--providing support for existing cases. Compounding the problem
was the FBI's tradition of hiring analysts from within instead of recruiting indi-
viduals with the relevant educational background and expertise.
FBI's information systems meant that such access depended in large part on an
analyst's personal relationships with individuals in the operational units or
squads where the information resided. For all of these reasons, prior to 9/11
relatively few strategic analytic reports about counterterrorism had been com-
pleted. Indeed, the FBI had never completed an assessment of the overall ter-
rorist threat to the U.S. homeland.
equately trained. Only three days of a 16-week agents' course were devoted to
counterintelligence and counterterrorism, and most subsequent training was
received on the job.The FBI did not have an adequate mechanism for validat-
ing source reporting, nor did it have a system for adequately tracking and shar-
ing source reporting, either internally or externally.The FBI did not dedicate
sufficient resources to the surveillance and translation needs of counter-
terrorism agents. It lacked sufficient translators proficient in Arabic and other
key languages, resulting in a significant backlog of untranslated intercepts.
capturing or sharing its institutional knowledge. FBI agents did create records of
interviews and other investigative efforts, but there were no reports officers to
condense the information into meaningful intelligence that could be retrieved
and disseminated.
sion, recognized the urgent need to increase the FBI's counterterrorism
capability. His plan, called MAXCAP 05, was unveiled in 2000: it set the goal