DAN K. THOMASSON FBI is not the answer to terrorism

WASHINGTON -- On the day George Tenet resigned as director of the CIA, his counterpart on the domestic side, FBI Director Robert Muel-ler, was asking Congress to consider creating a new agency within his own to handle all the homeland counterintelligence activities.
The Mueller proposal was actually offered by Rep. Frank Wolf, a Virginia Republican, several months ago as a means of preserving the bureau's counterintelligence responsibilities rather than creating an entirely new agency patterned after Britain's MI5, which the FBI and the Justice Department oppose for quite obvious reasons.
The MI5 proposal would diminish the bureau's power and relegate it to just another law enforcement agency, which is what it is primarily anyway. Wolf chairs the House appropriation subcommittee that oversees the FBI and would lose some power and influence if the bureau is downsized. It is a good bet the FBI had a hand in hatching his plan.
But as the mistakes pile up it is becoming more and more evident that the bureau may be incapable of smoothing out its intelligence-collecting wrinkles, and just establishing an independent directorate for that task within its own borders would do nothing to solve the problems.
The two latest, highly publicized goofs came in a false fingerprint identification in the Spanish bombing case that resulted in the unwarranted confinement of an Oregon lawyer, and an alert about five alleged terrorist suspects in the United States that was thoroughly debunked -- much to the dismay of Attorney General John Ashcroft, who had used it as a major production to point to the department's prowess in terrorist hunting.
Setting up a new bureau within a bureau would allow Mueller to once again add to the FBI's numbers. The force already has nearly 12,000 agents and thousands more technicians, clerks and support personnel. It would create a bureaucracy within bureaucracy and probably result in worse rather than better cooperation with other federal and state and local agencies.
How long would it be before there would be major wrangling between those assigned to law enforcement and those involved in the new directorate? The plan once again seems little more than an ill-conceived insurance policy against turf encroachment.
The MI5 alternative in some modified form still is the most promising solution. The new agency should be part of the Department of Homeland Security, which was created for just such a purpose, after all. There would be seamless communications between the department's other agencies, the Border Patrol, Secret Service, Customs, and so forth, all key to intelligence collection. To hold down the costs of the new domestic intelligence agency, many of the FBI agents and analysts assigned to counterintelligence could be transferred to it. No more turf wars and finger pointing.
To take this one step further, the FBI's law enforcement responsibilities should be limited to white collar and fraud crimes. Jurisdiction for most other crimes, including drugs, explosives and guns, should be left to the agencies that already have primary responsibility for them. The nation can no longer afford the kind of empire-building for which the bureau has become notorious.
Most important
Solving the intelligence dilemma is probably the most important task facing us. The bickering and backbiting and jealousies and accusations in that system must be eliminated before there can be any hope of winning the war on terrorism. The Justice Department and its aggressive attorney general must understand that it is not the lead agency in protecting the country's vast borders. That job has been given to Homeland Security, and if it is to do what Congress and the White House designed it to do, it must be given the opportunity.
Merely putting a new face on an old system, which is what Mueller would do with the Wolf proposal, certainly is not the solution. In fact, it would continue to keep America's domestic intelligence operations out in the cold.
XThomasson is former editor of the Scripps Howard News Service.