Smarting from media and congressional criticism of the FBI's pre-September 11th failures, the Bush administration yesterday announced a sweeping redeployment of the bureau's resources to the fight against terrorism.
Speaking at a press conference the Attorney General, Mr John Ashcroft, and the FBI's director, Mr Robert Mueller, were expected to announce the transfer of 480 agents from drugs and criminal investigations to counter-terrorism.
The transfers will shift the responsibility for major inquiries to state or local police forces and the Drug Enforcement Agency, all of which already claim to be overburdened.
The bureau will also see a major upgrade in its computer systems and is "aggressively" recruiting some 900 extra linguists, computer experts, and scientists to assist in intelligence gathering.
Responding to sharp criticisms of the failure of the bureau to liaise with its foreign intelligence counterpart, the CIA, new formal links between the two are to be established.
And while the FBI will move to centralise the analysis of data collected by the bureau's field offices, it will also give local officers more powers to act independently of HQ.
The strongest criticism of the FBI has been focused on the hamstringing of the investigations by its Minnesota agents into the alleged "20th hijacker", Zacarias Moussaoui, arrested last summer on visa violation charges after a flight school became suspicious of him. The local office unsuccessfully sought permission to search his personal computer, but, according to a leaked memo from the office head, Ms Coleen Rowley, was stymied by repeated refusals by a Washington-based middle-ranking official.
The office was also reprimanded for its unofficial approach to the CIA asking for information about Mr Moussaoui.
The changes come in addition to measures recently announced to set up Washington-based "flying squads" to co-ordinate national and international investigations, and Mr Mueller has announced his intention to draft CIA officers to local FBI offices to act as liaisons to HQ and to work on analysis.
The new proposals will see some 2,500 of the FBI's 11,500-agent workforce devoted to counter-terrorism. Before September 11th only 1,000 agents were attached to that work.
"We must refocus our mission and our priorities, and new technologies must be put in place to support new and different operational practices," Mr Mueller told a Senate panel this month. "We must improve how we hire, manage and train our workforce, collaborate with others and manage, analyse, share and protect our information."
But state and local police convinced Mr Mueller that a wholesale shift of some crimes away from the FBI was a bad idea. Some bank robberies, for example, are committed by thieves who are active inter-state and might be stealing money for domestic terrorism. "The bureau needs to be in that circle," the president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, Mr William Berger, told AP.
Mr Mueller also was expected to announce a new cybercrime division that will include the bureau's National Infrastructure Protection Centre, which tries to protect the country's most important computer networks from attacks.
