CounterterrorismFBI needs to improve intelligence capabilities, hire more linguists: Report

The FBI needs to improve its intelligence capabilities and hire more linguists to counter evolving threats to the United States, according to a 9/11 Review Commission report examining the bureau’s progress since the 9/11 attacks, which was released Wednesday. The review commission was created by Congress in 2014 to assess the bureau’s progress since the attacks, and its implementation of the recommendations from the 2004 9/11 Commission report.

“Many of the findings and recommendations in this report will not be new to the FBI,” the report said. “The bureau is already taking steps to address them. In 2015, however, the FBI faces an increasingly complicated and dangerous global threat environment that will demand an accelerated commitment to reform. Everything is moving faster.”

The report concludes that the FBI has enough linguists in its large offices, but lacks enough of them throughout the rest of the country. Often the agency’s linguists use a virtual system to communicate remotely with agents and analysts working on cases. “Hiring additional linguists and integrating them should be a high priority,” the report said. Intelligence gathering and analysis should be improved under a five-year “top-down strategic plan,” the report said.

The New York Times reports that the review commission, headed by Bruce Hoffman, a professor of security studies at Georgetown University, Edwin Meese III, the former attorney general, and Timothy J. Roemer, a former Democratic House member from Indiana and former ambassador to India, was also critical of how the FBI treats its analysts. “Despite its stated intentions to address concerns from its analysts” the FBI does not regard them as a “professional work force” that needs to be continually trained and educated.

FBI director James B. Comey, who took over in September 2013, has said that raising the profile of analysts is one of his top priorities.

The FBI has made improvements in its intelligence collection and sharing, but its ability to gain information from people and to analyze it lags “behind marked advances in law enforcement capabilities.” “This imbalance needs urgently to be addressed to meet growing and increasingly complex national security threats, from adaptive and increasingly tech-savvy terrorists, more brazen computer hackers, and more technically capable, global cyber syndicates,” the report said.

The FBI also has to improve how it communicates with local law enforcement authorities and the private sector. The agency will be increasingly dependent on domestic and foreign partnerships “to succeed in its critical and growing national security missions — including against the rapidly evolving cyber and terrorist threats,” the report said.