Intelligence Powers Set for New Agency

Department Would Shape Response to Threats

The Department of Homeland Security proposed by President Bush would take over significant duties in the war on terrorism, including alerts to the public and police currently handled by the Justice Department and the FBI, administration officials said yesterday.

Rather than operating a clearinghouse for intelligence information, officials of the proposed new Cabinet-level department would be responsible for making key decisions about how to respond.

One division of the new department — Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection — would be responsible for analyzing nearly all the intelligence information on domestic threats compiled by the FBI, the CIA and other agencies, and would be charged with devising strategies to guard against specific threats as they develop, officials said.

The details of the administration's new homeland security plan make clear that the proposed department would exercise more power over intelligence matters than officials had indicated Thursday, when Bush announced one of the most far-reaching government reorganizations of the last half century.

Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, in addition to handing over the troubled Immigration and Naturalization Service, no longer would be responsible for deciding whether to issue general alerts about terrorist threats. Ashcroft would cede that power to the unnamed homeland security chief, officials said.

The FBI, which for years has issued terrorist-related warnings to local police, instead would limit its alerts to matters of domestic crime, such as bulletins about crime patterns and fugitives.

"The FBI will always have some contact with local law enforcement," said homeland security spokesman Gordon Johndroe. "But homeland security will be the one location where prescriptive measures and action items come from."

Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and homeland security adviser Tom Ridge have come under heavy criticism since Sept. 11 for the government's confusing and decentralized system of alerts, including the color-coded system used to represent the general level of threat.

One FBI official said the proposed new system, which could operate through the existing National Law Enforcement Threat network, is not fundamentally different from the current process, which involves input from many agencies.

"Most of the threat warnings going out already represent the collective wisdom and a collective decision of the involved agencies, including homeland security," the official said. "If Ridge said not to send one out, we wouldn't send it."

Bush administration officials stressed that many details related to intelligence analysis and threat warnings have yet to be decided, and must be reviewed by various committees on Capitol Hill.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a member of the Judiciary and intelligence committees, announced a plan yesterday that would essentially divide the duties of CIA Director George J. Tenet, who heads the intelligence community, by creating a separate director of national intelligence. Bush's plan, by contrast, appears to have little impact on the CIA's power or reach.

Administration officials said yesterday that a chief aim of the plan was to centralize the analysis of intelligence, which is scattered throughout the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency and other departments.

Eighty percent of the nearly 1,000 employees who would staff the Homeland Security Department's new analysis and protection division would come from the FBI's relocated National Infrastructure Protection Center.

The FBI, which just created an Office of Intelligence to correct its problems analyzing threats, and the CIA will continue to run their own operations and analyze their own data, Johndroe said. But now they would be expected to transmit nearly all intelligence gathered about threats to the United States to the new department.

A joint congressional panel examining the events leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks has uncovered a growing list of clues that were available to the FBI and the CIA prior to the hijackings, spurring calls for reform.

Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), chairman of the intelligence committee, said the reorganization would help address the long-standing unwillingness of the FBI, the CIA and other agencies to share intelligence.

If the homeland security department has the authority to make the intelligence agencies turn over all relevant information, in raw or analyzed form, the problem would be partially solved, Graham said.

Other intelligence experts are more skeptical, arguing that the plan does little to improve the chances that the flood of information would be analyzed properly.

In one example prior to Sept. 11, the FBI did not widely distribute a memo from a Phoenix FBI agent, who warned of Muslim terrorists at U.S. aviation schools, because it was viewed as largely speculative and unworkable at the time.

"It just switches the problem to another bureaucracy," said Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism official. "Does the Phoenix memo still get to homeland security with this type of structure? I'm not sure it does."

Johndroe, however, said that, "I don't think you'll get in a situation where [intelligence agencies] will be holding back a lot of information. If it has homeland security relevance, they'll hand it over."

One high-ranking intelligence official, however, said yesterday that the CIA would not be asked for raw intelligence, which the agency zealously guards for fear of revealing sources and methods.