The War Within Keeping The Peace Fbi Scrambles To Meet Increasing Threat Of Home-Grown Terrorism
Part Two
The FBI, facing the tough job of protecting national security, hastily is reorganizing to meet the growing threat from domestic terrorists.
The agency is using $116 million it received from Congress in September to hire and train 500 agents. Half of them will investigate domestic terrorism.
It also is opening a Domestic Counter-Terrorism Center at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., to better coordinate investigations among local, state and federal law enforcement agencies.
The Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995 sparked this new campaign by the FBI.
But the increasing number of small anti-government groups turning to crime and violence is creating a growing sense of urgency.
“In some ways, it’s becoming a more volatile environment out there,” says Stephen Sloan, a University of Oklahoma political science professor who studies terrorism. “Many more groups are willing to play.”
These rebel cells, which usually have about six members, are harder to detect and infiltrate than large, foreign-sponsored terrorist organizations that traditionally capture the nation’s attention.
“These cells certainly are a problem because if you have a large group of these people, it’s easier for us to penetrate,” says Assistant FBI Director Robert Bryant, who’s in charge of national security for the agency.
“It’s like touching a sea anemone,” says Kenneth Piernick, who supervises the FBI’s domestic terrorism unit. “The tentacles pull back in as soon as they sense that’s what you’re looking at.”
Complicating anti-terrorism efforts is the balance that law enforcement must strike between protecting the public and maintaining civil rights.
The FBI must follow guidelines that forbid the agency from beginning an investigation until it believes a crime has occurred.
Informants infiltrating antigovernment cells also must be careful to only document an unfolding conspiracy, not create one.
Just last month, attorneys representing a West Virginia militia leader questioned whether undercover agents had enticed militia members into a plot to blow up the FBI’s national fingerprint center.
“It raises a very, very complex issue,” Sloan says about terrorist investigations. “The local intelligence community has a difficult dilemma - infiltrating local groups without violating due process.”
Uniting to combat terrorism
The FBI hopes its new terrorism center will strengthen ties with other law enforcement agencies and provide a better overall view of the anti-government movement.
At least 55 local, state and federal agencies will assign representatives to the center, some on a rotating basis. The mix includes branches of the military and big city police and county sheriff’s departments.
The goal is better coordination among agencies that investigate domestic terrorism and antigovernment crime.
“I don’t want to see the terrorism issue fragmented, where everybody is doing their own thing and there is no coordination,” Bryant says.
A 1995 Rand study found that local and state law enforcement agencies report far more terrorist acts than what the FBI officially classifies as terrorism.
One reason for the discrepancy, the study says, is the FBI’s narrow definition of domestic terrorism, which doesn’t include many hate crimes or religiously motivated acts of violence.
But another reason, the study says, may be that many local and state law enforcement agencies don’t even know that the FBI is responsible for domestic terrorism investigations.
Local agencies routinely call in the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms on bomb, weapons and arson cases.
If those cases involve antigovernment groups, the FBI doesn’t always hear about it. Major militia cases were handled by the ATF this year in Arizona and Georgia.
Another obstacle is the legendary rivalry between the FBI and ATF at least on the national level. The FBI is under the Department of Justice; ATF is part of the Department of Treasury.
At times, informants working for the two agencies have infiltrated the same group. In one case, FBI and ATF informants were spying on the Aryan Nations in North Idaho at the same time, but neither agency apparently knew the other was investigating the group.
The ATF developed firearms cases that led to the Randy Weaver siege at Ruby Ridge in 1992 and the standoff with the Branch Davidians at Waco in 1993. The FBI was brought in after both those situations turned sour.
But at Ruby Ridge it was the FBI, not the ATF, that ultimately drew the most public criticism. One FBI supervisor has pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice and four other agents are suspended and under investigation.
Tension between the two agencies continues. The ATF still hasn’t decided whether it will participate in the FBI’s new counter-terrorism center.
ATF Assistant Director Patrick Hynes says a final decision hasn’t been made, but his agency probably will assign a representative to the center as long as it is “a full partner with the FBI.”
The center isn’t completely up and running.
It has two units: one handling foreign terrorism and the other specializing in domestic terrorism.
Eventually, the units will be located next to a command center used during crises or field operations involving terrorism.
The agents and civilian experts collect and analyze information about terrorist activities, and make “threat assessments” to help the FBI set priorities.
The experts collect police intelligence reports, read hate-group publications and Internet postings, monitor the news media and file field reports from the FBI’s 10,500 agents.
“We want to make sure that critical information, wherever it is in government, comes to the FBI so we can get it out and try to prevent acts of terrorism,” Bryant says.
The center appears to have done just that three weeks ago when agents received a tip about a racist telephone hotline message in Oklahoma that the FBI apparently didn’t know about.
The telephone recording made references Robert Mathews, a Metaline Falls, Wash., man who led the terrorist group The Order. He died in a 1984 gunbattle near Seattle with the FBI.
The message said Mathews’ racial war continues, and warned that bombs could go off by Dec. 15 in 15 U.S. cities.
FBI agents at the terrorism center listened to the recording and determined it posed a national security threat.
They launched an investigation that led to a neo-Nazi skinhead, who was arrested at his Tulsa home two days later. A search turned up partially assembled pipe bombs and bomb-making components, including ammonium nitrate and an accelerant.
Agents also found a list and pictures of federal office buildings that they believe were potential targets.
Authorities say the suspect, his wife and as many as two or three others apparently were involved - evidence of yet another antigovernment cell.
Liberty and justice for all
The FBI can’t begin an investigation simply because a militia or white supremacist group criticizes the government or its leaders.
Usually, words must turn into action before agents step in.
“We’re walking a fine line here between protecting people and getting into their Second Amendment rights and a whole lot of things,” Bryant says. “But when it turns to violence, that’s when we’re very much involved.”
The FBI is forbidden from investigating domestic organizations, including religious groups like the Aryan Nations, unless criminal activity is suspected.
The restrictions are spelled out in guidelines first issued by the U.S. attorney general in 1976 at the direction of Congress.
They grew out of hearings chaired by the late Idaho Sen. Frank Church into abuses by the FBI under former director J. Edgar Hoover.
Hoover had ordered agents to spy on Vietnam War protesters and civil rights leaders, and kept private dossiers on various people.
Under the attorney general’s guidelines, FBI field offices can conduct 90-day “preliminary inquiries” of suspected terrorists without headquarters approval.
During that period, agents can conduct interviews, contact confidential sources and informants, and secretly watch suspects.
They cannot track or open mail, or use electronic surveillance such as hidden microphones.
Those techniques can be used if a “full investigation” is launched with headquarters approval.
On average, the FBI opens two dozen full investigations into suspected domestic terrorism each year, and nearly two-thirds of those begin before a crime is committed, says the Center for National Security Studies, based in Washington, D.C.
Since the mid-1980s, the FBI has conducted an on-going, full investigation of various associates and members of the Aryan Nations in North Idaho.
Dozens of those targets have been arrested for crimes that include counterfeiting, bombings, robberies and murders.
Bryant, the FBI’s No. 3 official, doesn’t believe the guidelines are too restrictive or need changes in light of current terrorist threats.
He says the FBI must be ahead of the domestic terrorism problem and not play catch-up as it did with organized crime.
After ignoring the mob for years, the FBI began fighting organized crime only after learning about a meeting of Mafia leaders in 1957 in New York from a state policeman.
“It finally dawned on us that they’re holding a conspiracy here,” Bryant says.
“The thing we’ve got to do is make sure, where there are acts of violence - and you’ve got them all over the country - we’re investigating them, or ATF, or we’re doing them together hopefully.
“When you use violence to promote a political cause, law enforcement should be involved. The FBI better be there.”
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 4 color photos Graphic: Fighting domestic terrorism