FBI TO ANNOUNCE HUGE OVERHAUL TO BETTER COMBAT TERROR THREAT

WASHINGTON -- The Federal Bureau of Investigation will reassign
hundreds of agents from local drug and violent-crime investigations
to counterterrorism and intelligence in a sweeping reorganization to
be announced Wednesday.

The changes include a new Office of Intelligence to analyze foreign
and domestic terrorist threats, as well as a new cybercrime division.
The FBI promises closer coordination with the Central Intelligence
Agency and will seek expanded authority to conduct investigations
abroad and pursue potential threats at home.

The changes follow intensifying criticism of the crime-fighting
agency's management and procedures. Those include new details that
have emerged in recent days about FBI headquarters' lack of response
before Sept. 11 to reports by field agents about religious extremists
taking flight training in the U.S.

Reorganizing the agency has become an urgent priority for FBI
Director Robert Mueller, a former federal prosecutor who took over
the bureau a week before the Sept. 11 terror attacks transformed the
nation's law-enforcement priorities. The changes he will detail
Wednesday draw together a number of proposals that are under way or
are being accelerated. One of those is an overhaul of the agency's
long-maligned computer networks, most recently criticized by the
Justice Department inspector general and an independent commission.

The bureau plans to seek new authority, through legislative or
administrative changes, to expand its use of wiretaps under the
foreign-intelligence surveillance law; share criminal and grand-jury
information with the intelligence community; conduct interviews
abroad; and detain aliens for as long as 90 days under immigration
rules.

The FBI's ability to handle wiretaps under the foreign-intelligence
surveillance law came under new fire Tuesday. A court-ordered release
of FBI e-mails appeared to describe an investigative error by the
task force tracking followers of terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.
One of the e-mails, obtained by the nonprofit Electronic Privacy
Information Center here, recounts how a problem with the Internet
monitoring software Carnivore led to the destruction of wiretap
information. Because the system captured e-mails from people besides
the court-ordered target, "The FBI technical person was apparently so
upset that he destroyed all the e-mail take, including the take on"
the suspect, said a March 2000 FBI memo e-mailed to agency
headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Referring to a second, undisclosed investigative error, the memo
cites "a pattern of occurrences which indicates ... an inability on
the part of the FBI to manage" its foreign-intelligence wiretaps. An
FBI spokesman on Tuesday night had no comment.

The planned reallocation of resources moves almost 500 field agents
to counterterrorism from other details, diminishing the FBI's
involvement in local murder, kidnapping and drug cases and returning
a greater burden for these prosecutions to local law enforcement. The
planned reassignments would affect FBI drug-enforcement efforts most,
bureau documents show. Efforts to combat white-collar crime,
including health-care fraud, also will be trimmed.

The bureau, in briefing materials prepared for Wednesday's
announcement, also says it will restructure counterterrorism efforts
and "redefine [the] relationship between HQ and field," shifting from
"reactive orientation to proactive orientation."

This appears to be a tacit acknowledgment of the harsh criticism made
public last week by a lawyer in the Minneapolis field office, Coleen
Rowley, who accused an FBI supervisor of "thwarting" an investigation
before Sept. 11 of Zacarias Moussaoui, who has been linked to the
World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks by the al Qaeda terror group.
Her letter infuriated lawmakers, who were already upset over the
FBI's handling of a warning from a Phoenix field agent that Middle
Eastern men linked to al Qaeda were enrolling in flight schools.

The FBI director has been working closely with Attorney General John
Ashcroft to assert greater control over the fiercely independent
agency in the wake of a string of botched investigations and rising
congressional criticism. A bill to overhaul the FBI is pending in the
Senate and some lawmakers have called for more far-reaching reforms.

Clinton Van Zandt, a former FBI counterterrorism expert who now heads
a security firm in Fredericksburg, Va., estimated that agents who are
transferring into counterterrorism will need "five years to get up to
speed, to learn who the bad guys are, what the guidelines are in
counterintelligence and how to work surveillance."

Lawmakers were briefed by Mr. Mueller last week on the reorganization
plan and some took issue with the details, including Iowa Republican
Sen. Charles Grassley, who raised questions about how terrorism units
will be centralized in Washington. "Making technology and
intelligence analysis priorities are no-brainers, but a new
organization chart alone won't work," said Sen. Grassley.

Other critics of some of the proposals to redirect FBI resources have
included local law-enforcement officials. But most were expected to
support the redeployments, said Gene Voegtlin, legal counsel for the
International Association of Chiefs of Police. Mr. Voegtlin said
there is some concern that there will be lost experience and manpower
with the shift, but added, "I think state and local officers are
ready to step up to the plate."