FBI Director Louis Freeh announces that he is creating a new “Investigative Services Division” to “coordinate the FBI’s international activities, integrate and substantially strengthen its analytic capabilities, and oversee the Bureau’s crisis management functions.”
The reorganization is the beginning of a long road on the part of the Bureau to build up its intelligence capacities, a shift that did not really occur until after 9/11. The FBI’s importance as an intelligence producer was made all the more central given its role in investigating overseas terrorism strikes and in pursuing terrorist suspects in the United States, particularly in the terrorism expertise of the New York field office. But it saw its collection of information solely as part of building cases for prosecution and the “intelligence” derived was generally not shared with the rest of the government.
The post-9/11 Congressional Joint Inquiry (p. 113) labeled the FBI’s “chronic inability to perform serious intelligence analysis,” even internally, as a problem. There have been many post-9/11 reorganizations of the FBI’s intelligence infrastructure, and field intelligence groups have been created in every field office. But ultimately the greatest impact—two decades later—is the FBI’s domestic intelligence apparatus that is focused on immediate and not “strategic” analysis. Much of that effort has little to do with terrorism, or at least with foreign terrorism.