YOUR SPIES COULD BE MORE LIKE OUR SPIES

HERTFORD, England -- For students of that arcane world called covert
intelligence gathering, the FBI has always been a bit of an enigma.

Its fame, its glamour, the basis of a thousand movies and TV
thrillers, whether fact-or fiction-based, has always rested on its
crime-fighting role. Indeed, it was founded to tackle the burgeoning
gang-crime spawned by the Prohibition era and that appears still to be
its primary function.

Then it appears someone tossed in a kind of afterthought. The bureau
also handles national counterintelligence, the task of keeping the
U.S. safe from foreign spies and hostile espionage. That is the
enigma. So far as I know, there is no other country that corrals these
two utterly different disciplines under one roof.

Did J. Edgar Hoover, whose name is still synonymous with the bureau,
struggle for this extra responsibility? Were John Dillinger and
Babyface Nelson not enough for him? Certainly in the corridors of
power the old cross-dresser was pretty insatiable. The problem was, he
knew jack-diddly about counterespionage but thought he did -- the
worst of all combinations.

America was fortunate in this sense; during the 1930s the rise of
fascism and Nazism was far enough away as not to concern the young and
idealistic generation. In Europe, Hitler's horrors harvested a crop of
young men who thought communism was the antidote. That is how we got
our Philby, Burgess, Maclean; starting as idealistic youths, ending up
as traitors. There were few such, west of Long Island.

In the post 1945 Cold War the U.S. came up against a seriously
professional, experienced, skilled and ruthless enemy in the Soviet
NKVD, later KGB. And frankly, to start with, Moscow Centre ran rings
round the bureau.

The reaction was over-reaction: McCarthy, Hoover. It was said at one
point there were so many G-men infiltrated into the American Communist
Party that it was only their membership fees that kept the ACP alive
at all.

After the British MI6 disgraced itself in 1951 with Philby and Co.,
the too-complacent presumption arose that all the U.S. intelligence
agencies were "clean," inasmuch as ideological traitors were such a
rarity. With hindsight, we now know the U.S. hosted an awesome litany
of foreign spies and traitors, mostly seduced by money, not principle.
Even at the very end, the dying U.S.S.R. probably had the last laugh
with Aldrich Ames inside the CIA and Robert Hanssen beavering away in
the bureau.

Now the world map has changed radically. Yesterday's enemy may be our
Muscovite pal. New monsters loom: proliferation of high-tech,
mega-danger weaponry; narcotics and gangsterdom reaching
planet-destabilizing levels; nuclear creep; religion-based terror
networks. How do we cope?

The wishlist way would be to draw neat lines separating the various
dangers and have one agency to cope with each. It is not that easy.
Narcotics , weapons, currency swindles, terror bombs -- all are, or
can be, linked to each other.

The Drug Enforcement Agency will specialize in narcotics , but may
well turn up a major arms deal in the process; money-laundering in the
Caribbean, of interest to the Treasury, could be funding a training
camp in the Pakistani mountains, of keen concern to the CIA.

The U.S. has at least 13 major intelligence-gathering agencies plus
the FBI's counterintelligence role. Ah, but other agencies like the
CIA also do a bit of their own counterintelligence, and the bureau has
38 legal attaches abroad, who are in the intelligence-gathering
business too. It's a patchwork quilt.

What went wrong before Sept. 11 was not that nobody knew anything; it
was that various agencies knew (or suspected) bits of something
looming but could not put the jigsaw together alone, and had no
in-place mechanism for cross-indexing what they had.

Since then the whole West has been on a huge learning curve, a
catching-up exercise. Enormous progress has been achieved. Our
technology is almost science fiction. The space-ears of the NSA can
almost hear them break wind in the Tora Bora mountains. Six bad guys
were recently blown away in the Yemeni wilderness by a rocket-toting
Predator, all watched in real time on screen in Tampa.

We are getting on top of their funding, perfecting interrogation,
expanding the lists of names and faces, locating the bank accounts,
gathering defectors. There are two things missing.

Counterintelligence is based on knowing the enemy, who he is, where he
is, what he plans and when. That means penetration. With Islam-based
terror that is hard. Surveillance alone will never be enough. But a
penetrator cannot be a WASP; he has to be raised Muslim, look the
part, act the part, speak the part. Or, we just subvert and "turn"
existing terrorists, not to defect, but to stay in place.

The other thing we have to learn is to abandon turf wars, jealousies,
rivalries between agencies. I know many senior U.S. intelligence
veterans look with approval at the British Joint Intelligence
Committee, where a trusted mandarin can convene the Secret
Intelligence Service, the Security Service (inland
counterintelligence.) Government Communications headquarters (the
listeners) and Scotland Yard's Special Branch round one table. They
trust each other just enough to cross-index what they have and share
knowledge. It helps comprehension and prevents damaging duplication. I
think the U.S. has to go the same road.

There is talk of yet another agency for counterterrorism. There are
enough agencies. What lacks is a clear recognition that they exist
solely to fight America's enemies, not each other.