acknowledged its responsibility.
also showed again how--given a case to solve--the FBI remained capable of
extraordinary investigative success.
In 1993, President Clinton chose Louis Freeh as the Director of the Bureau.
Freeh, who would remain Director until June 2001, believed that the FBI's
work should be done primarily by the field offices.To emphasize this view he
cut headquarters staff and decentralized operations.The special agents in charge
gained power, influence, and independence.
urged agents not to wait for terrorist acts to occur before taking action. In his
first budget request to Congress after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing,
he stated that "merely solving this type of crime is not enough; it is equally
important that the FBI thwart terrorism before such acts can be perpetrated."
Within headquarters, he created a Counterterrorism Division that would com-
plement the Counterterrorist Center at the CIA and arranged for exchanges
of senior FBI and CIA counterterrorism officials. He pressed for more coop-
eration between legal attachés and CIA stations abroad.
cials said that FBI leadership seemed unwilling to shift resources to terrorism
from other areas such as violent crime and drug enforcement; other FBI offi-
cials blamed Congress and the OMB for a lack of political will and failure to
understand the FBI's counterterrorism resource needs. In addition, Freeh did
not impose his views on the field offices. With a few notable exceptions, the
field offices did not apply significant resources to terrorism and often repro-
grammed funds for other priorities.
nomic security, including counterterrorism, as its top priority. Dale Watson, who
would later become the head of the new Counterterrorism Division, said that
after the East Africa bombings,"the light came on" that cultural change had to
occur within the FBI.The plan mandated a stronger intelligence collection effort.
It called for a nationwide automated system to facilitate information collection,
analysis,and dissemination.It envisioned the creation of a professional intelligence
cadre of experienced and trained agents and analysts.If successfully implemented,
this would have been a major step toward addressing terrorism systematically,
rather than as individual unrelated cases. But the plan did not succeed.