The FBI says it "gets" intelligence and does it well now, but recent history says otherwise.
Consider Maj. Nidal Hasan's attack in 2009 on fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, which killed 13 people. The FBI "investigated" Hasan, all right, but it wasn't pretty. Nearly a year before the attack, the bureau learned that he was emailing Anwar al-Awlaki, the dangerous and inspirational al Qaeda cleric in Yemen who was later killed in a drone strike. Yet the FBI's investigation of Hasan took just four hours. One Joint Terrorism Task Force member in Washington ran his name through some databases and found nothing alarming. He decided not to interview anyone, including Hasan himself, and his FBI supervisor agreed. He reviewed Hasan's two emails to Awlaki (including one that asked whether Muslim soldiers who commit fratricide would be considered martyrs) and concluded that Hasan must be okay because he was emailing using his real name. The investigator, who was a Defense Department official temporarily assigned to the FBI's terrorism task force, had almost no counterterrorism experience, and it showed. The investigation was viewed entirely through a law enforcement lens, asking whether Hasan was a terrorist at that moment, not whether he could be heading down a dangerous path to radicalization and violence. The investigation was looking to close a case, not pull an intelligence thread.
There were plenty of threads to be pulled. Hasan was no clever jihadist operating in the shadows. For years, he had been openly spewing extremist rhetoric that alarmed numerous peers and superiors inside the Army. A colleague and instructor each described him as a "ticking time bomb." In oral presentations, class papers, and casual conversations, Hasan justified suicide bombings, charged that U.S. military operations were a war against Islam, defended Osama bin Laden, and declared that his religion took precedence over the U.S. Constitution he was sworn to defend as an Army officer. Just about the only thing Hasan did not do was wear a T-shirt that said, "I am an Islamist extremist contemplating acts of violence against my fellow soldiers."
There's more. As soon as the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force concluded that no active terrorist activities could be found, the investigation ended, even though Hasan's emails to Awlaki continued for the next six months and demonstrated growing radicalization. None of this was known to the FBI because nobody was asking. The case was closed. Hasan was not a terrorist. But he was becoming one.
I have to wonder: Is this what happened in Boston? Were FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force investigators looking for evidence of a current crime when they should have been looking for intelligence about a potential future threat? Did they even know enough about Chechen violent Islamist extremism or Tamerlan Tsarnaev to ask the right questions? Did they tap FBI analysts to gain background knowledge or a broader understanding of the evolving terrorist threat environment? Nearly half of all personnel on FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces are loaned to the FBI from other agencies and most come with law enforcement backgrounds and skills. As one former senior FBI counterterrorism official told me, "They bring strengths...but those guys, most of them, are wired to look for evidence, just like agents. Let's be honest."
Perhaps Boston was a horrific, unpreventable tragedy. Maybe the two suspects did not have enough of a trail for the FBI to have stopped them in time. Maybe the Russian government withheld too much information for too long. Maybe we did all we could, the best we could, and it wasn't enough. As more information comes to light, however, more light needs to be shined on the craggy hold of the FBI's law enforcement culture and whether it played a role. In post-mortems, like most intelligence matters, getting the right answers hinges on asking the right questions.
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