FBI Reorganizes Effort to Uncover Terror Groups' Global Ties

Other recent cases have also produced evidence of terrorist groups transcending borders and group affiliations. Sheik Mohammed Ali Hassan al-Moayad, a Yemeni cleric, was recently sentenced to 75 years in prison on charges that included conspiring to support both al-Qaeda and the Palestinian group Hamas. The cleric was caught in 2003 when FBI informants met with al-Moayad in Germany and secretly recorded him promising to arrange money for both groups. An FBI affidavit detailed how the sheik moved easily between Hamas and al-Qaeda circles, including meeting bin Laden.

David Laufman, a former Justice Department lawyer who prosecuted several of the government's major terrorism cases since the 2001 attacks, said in an interview: "The Internet has become the most significant recruiting device for multinational sources of Jihadist talent. It cuts across nationalities and ethnicities."

But Laufman, who is now in private practice, cautioned that the FBI reorganization must "overcome the agent culture of the bureau" and allow intelligence analysts to drive the case agents, much like MI5's domestic intelligence, which drives the investigations of Scotland Yard in Britain.

"The key to making this successful is to build a first-class analytical cadre, give counterterrorism analysts equivalent stature to agents in the FBI's counterterrorism culture, and create an environment where analysts and agents continuously and seamlessly work together to identify relationships, sources of funding and operational plotting," Laufman said.

Experts said the bureau's future success also depends on attracting more Arabic speakers and intelligence analysts, and keeping them long enough to develop deep subject expertise.

The concern that case agents -- rather than intelligence analysts -- dominate the bureau's anti-terrorism strategy too much has been widely debated. Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards proposed during his 2004 campaign the creation of an MI5-like agency to supplant the FBI's domestic intelligence work.

Likewise, the federal commission that reviewed pre-Sept. 11 intelligence failures closely studied MI5's operation but stopped short of recommending it as a solution. Richard Ben-Veniste, a member of that commission, welcomed the FBI's plan to develop the subject expertise of MI5-like desk officers and to use prolonged surveillance.

"This change makes a lot of sense to me. It's been some time coming but welcome news," Ben-Veniste said. "One of the criticisms of the FBI in the past has been that it has moved too quickly to make arrests, rather than develop information."