FBI demonstrates how-not-to

Jul 1, 2001 12:00 PM, Larry Anderson www.securitysolutions.com

It's been a tough couple of months for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with several recent incidents continuing to erode the image of the Bureau in the eyes of the public. When news of some 4,000 pages of documents emerged just days before the scheduled execution of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh — documents that should have been made available to McVeigh's defense attorneys during his trial — the public reaction could only be puzzlement. That and further erosion of their confidence in the nation's top law enforcement organization.

Confidence in the Bureau took another blow in the announcement that an FBI counterintelligence agent was arrested and charged with spying for Moscow for 15 years. It was another episode in a continuing saga of high-profile debacles that date back to Waco and Ruby Ridge.

More and more people are publicly criticizing the FBI and questioning whether, in the words of Sen. Patrick Leahy, it has “become unmanageable, unaccountable and unreliable.” With FBI Director Louis Freeh leaving office as we go to press, and with President Bush on the verge of naming Freeh's successor, it is a defining time — or maybe a redefining time — for the Bureau once personified by the high-profile J. Edgar Hoover.

The latest incident in the precipitous decline of the Bureau is charges that an FBI security analyst and former agent in Las Vegas has been stealing classified information and selling it to mob figures and lawyers in New York. According to The New York Times, the security analyst allegedly used computers to steal classified records and documents relating to criminal cases.

Security directors striving to build the credibility of their departments in the corporate and institutional environment can find a lot to learn from the FBI's recent mistakes.

From the long list of lessons to be learned, here are just a few:

• always own up to your mistakes, as soon as they happen, and begin immediately to repair the damage.

• a department's reputation is only as strong as its weakest link; any mistake by any employee can impact the overall credibility of the department.

• any security department must be fully answerable to the community it serves.

• sometimes when things go wrong, it's because of a lack of leadership.

Perhaps an appropriate reaction among security professionals to the FBI's decline is a troubling sense of their own department's vulnerability. As we all struggle to keep our departments operating smoothly and professionally, the pitfalls are all around us. The job of security director takes constant vigilance.

And if the kind of security problems we have seen in the news can happen at the FBI, they can happen anywhere.

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