Turnover undercuts FBI

WASHINGTON – The rapid turnover of top-level managers and highly trained specialists since Sept. 11, 2001, is causing disorder within the FBI and undercutting its efforts to meet the mandate of Congress to expand its intelligence and counterterrorism capabilities dramatically.

Its new intelligence arm, which is to form the core of a transformed FBI, is losing dozens of analysts who are supposed to connect the dots to protect the country from another terrorist attack.

All four members of the top management team announced by director Robert S. Mueller III shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks have left their jobs — as have their successors. Some other officials have had three or even four jobs since the attacks.

Since Sept. 11, five people have held the bureau’s top counterterrorism job. Five others filled the top computer job within a 24-month period. And more than 1,000 other senior FBI agents and officials are now eligible for retirement, boding a further exodus of employees who form the agency’s backbone. In figures provided recently to Congress, the FBI estimated that the number of top managers below the senior-executive rank will decline by 16 percent — about 70 people — in the next year alone.

The rush to the exits partly stems from burnout caused by the intense pace and scrutiny that followed Sept. 11, officials say. It also reflects the growing post-9/11 demand for security expertise in other fields, leading to the departure of dozens of FBI officials for more lucrative jobs.

One example: The head of the Los Angeles FBI field office left in January to become California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s head of homeland security, only to leave six months later for Walt Disney Co.

It also illustrates how the FBI, like many bureaucracies, is a graying institution. A surge of hiring in the 1970s, and the bureau’s liberal retirement rules, are being felt at an inauspicious time.

Many of the analysts are leaving for other parts of the U.S. intelligence community - wooed by fellow agencies like the CIA at a time when, in the view of groups such as the Sept. 11 Commission, they should be cooperating with each other more than ever.

Indeed, until very recently, the FBI was losing nearly as many analysts to attrition and other causes as it had managed to hire with the post-Sept. 11 infusion of cash from Congress.

A costly overhaul of the agency’s computer system has been linked to the turnover.