CHANGES TO FBI MAKE ANTI-TERRORISM ITS TOP TASK

STUNG by accusations of neglect and incompetence before September 11, the
FBI has announced sweeping reforms that make protecting the United States
from terrorist attack its top priority.

Up to 900 new agents are to be hired and more than 600 existing ones taken
off narcotics and other duties to create a permanent counter-terrorism force
of 2,600, Robert Mueller, the FBI Director, announced yesterday.

In a move that signals an historic shift away from the bureau's traditional
law enforcement role, Mr Mueller promised a "redesigned and refocused FBI"
that would respond to post-September 11 realities with better recruitment
and training and more collaboration with other agencies, especially the CIA.

His announcement came as yet more pre-September FBI failures emerged. First
a leaked memo described how thousands of e-mails intercepted in 2000 as part
of an electronic eavesdropping operation against al-Qaeda were destroyed
because they included innocent messages that the experimental software being
used should have ignored.

The FBI also released a memo in which an agent, the chief pilot in the FBI's
Oklahoma City division, said that he had observed large numbers of Middle
Eastern men receiving flight training at Oklahoma airports in recent months,
according to the memo dated May 18, 1998. The agent said "this may be
related to planned terrorist activity", according to the memo titled Weapons
of Mass Destruction. The agent speculated that light aircraft "would be an
ideal means of spreading chemical or biological agents".

Mr Mueller prefaced his reforms with a new list of FBI priorities on which
protecting the United States against foreign espionage and "cyber-based
attacks" joined the terrorist threat above public corruption, civil rights
and violent crime.

Fourteen new terrorism-related task forces are to be set up in Washington
and Mr Mueller has asked Congress for the money to staff them with hundreds
of linguists, computer experts and scientists. He confirmed plans for
counter-terrorism "flying squads" ready to be sent at short notice to help
FBI field offices in local investigations.

Such "super squad" plans "fly in the face of an honest appraisal of the
FBI's pre-September 11 failures", Colleen Rowley, an FBI lawyer based in
Minneapolis, wrote last week in a scathing 13-page letter to Mr Mueller. Mrs
Rowley's central complaint was that Washington-based agents actively
thwarted a Minneapolis investigation into Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called
twentieth hijacker, by failing to help to obtain a warrant to search his
laptop computer.