Local Chiefs Want U.S. to Tell More on Safety Plans

ST. LOUIS —  State and local authorities nationwide are complaining, with mounting frustration, that the federal government is leaving them out of the loop in the drive to secure the homeland.

This is a time of intense planning, of drawing up strategies to prevent or respond to terrorist attacks. Yet from governors to county emergency directors to city police chiefs, those in charge of keeping citizens safe say they do not have the information they need to do the job right.

They don’t know what they don’t know. But they suspect they need to know more.

“The best advice [about protecting citizens] is based on your intelligence, Uncle Sam,” Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating said. But that intelligence, he warned, “is only as good as how much of it is shared locally.”

Added Tim Daniel, Missouri’s director of homeland security: “We need to know what the strategy is. And we need to know it before the last minute.”

This gripe is by no means universal: Some local authorities have expressed delight with the cooperation they have been getting. The Los Angeles Police Department, for one, has praised the FBI for its help in dealing with terrorist threats.

Those raising an alarm, however, complain that the FBI has refused to tell local detectives about suspicious characters in their communities. They grumble that they havehad to hear about investigations in their jurisdictions from the media.

Such conflict spilled out into the open this week, when the acting police chief in Portland, Ore., refused to help the FBI interview Middle Eastern immigrants, saying state law prohibited questioning of anyone not suspected of a crime.

As the cost of stepped-up security mounts, some local authorities complain they have not received adequate guidance about which potential targets truly need protection and which potential threats are most plausible. They worry that they are not being told the nation’s strategies for handling a bioterrorist attack.

“There are a lot of protocols [for sharing information] on paper, but the actual communication we have to improve,” said Missouri Gov. Bob Holden, who met recently with homeland security director Thomas J. Ridge to press that point.

Keating was less diplomatic: “I was stunned and amazed at the patronizing, if not contemptuous, attitude of the federal government toward state and local officials” during a top-level emergency drill last summer that simulated a smallpox attack in the Midwest. That attitude, he said, has not improved since Sept. 11.

The information “we ought to know to protect ourselves,” Keating said, is not always forthcoming from the federal government.

For instance, the governor met recently with the Air Force general who directs the Oklahoma National Guard to assess security threats in his state. “He said, ‘Governor, I think things are fine, but I can’t tell you why because you don’t have security clearance,’ ” Keating said. “That is a very real problem. . . . It’s not hard [to fix]. It just needs to be done--last week.”

FBI Director Robert Mueller has heard such complaints loud and clear. So has Ridge, who has met with at least half a dozen governors and talked to several more by phone. Both men have acknowledged what Ridge’s spokeswoman called “gaps in communication,” and both say they are moving swiftly to make improvements.

Last week, Mueller convened an advisory group of state and local law enforcement to discuss intelligence sharing. Addressing the group’s top concern, Mueller promised to speed up security clearances for local officials. He also pledged to set up more joint terrorism task forces. And he invited the group to send two representatives to the FBI’s strategic war room, where 250 analysts review tips around the clock.

“We’re not at war with state and local police. We’re at war with terrorists and criminals,” FBI spokesman Jim Vance said. “There are certainly enough bad guys to go around.”

Although the FBI guards its sources and techniques, Vance said, very little else is kept hush-hush: “One of the great misconceptions out there is that the FBI has this vast, vast wealth of information we’re holding on to.”

In practice, the amount of intelligence sharing seems to vary from region to region, often depending on the personal relationships that develop between FBI agents in the field and local law enforcement.

In Arizona, “we have an absolutely wonderful relationship with the FBI, and that’s only improved since Sept. 11,” said Cmdr. Jeff Resler of the Department of Public Safety. “They don’t hold anything back.”

Maine Police Chief Says FBI Told Him Nothing

But that has not been the experience of Police Chief Michael Chitwood in Portland, Maine.

His quiet city was drawn into the terrorism investigation the afternoon of Sept. 11, when the FBI learned that two suspected hijackers had flown from Portland to Boston to launch their deadly mission. Chitwood said the FBI told him nothing about his city’s connection to the investigation. Nor did federal agents let him know that a suspicious foreigner on the FBI “watch list” had entered Portland the week before to get an extra gas tank installed on a private plane.

And when his officers tried to pursue a suspected terrorist for questioning the day after the attack, Chitwood said, the FBI ordered him to back off--obliquely threatening to charge him with obstruction of justice. (Detectives tracked the man down anyway and determined he posed no threat.) The relationship between the agencies is so bad, Chitwood said, that whenever he gets a tip, he instructs his officers to chase it to the ground first and tell the FBI about it only later. That way federal agents won’t hush it up.

“The FBI doesn’t share anything,” Chitwood said bitterly. “I don’t want the top secrets. I don’t want the wiretaps. But if there’s something that impacts the public safety of a community, the police chief ought to know.”

The FBI would not comment on Chitwood’s complaints but emphasized that it does keep local police informed of potential dangers. “Any information involving a specific, credible threat to a specific community is going to be given to them right away--lock, stock and barrel,” Vance promised.

Such assurances don’t hold much water in some communities.

In Florida’s Miami-Dade County, emergency management director Chuck Lanza said that the one time he was warned of a threat to his community--during the Olympics in Atlanta in 1996--the FBI would not tell him the type of threat, the likely target or the time frame. Agents are no more open now. “All we get is what the rest of the nation gets: ‘This is a bad week. Be ready.’ That’s not enough to prepare any community,” Lanza said.

North Miami Beach Police Chief Bill Berger remembers a recent warning to be on the alert for terrorist strikes against bridges. Although the warning was too vague to be much use, departments across the country tried to tighten bridge security. Only later, he said, did it emerge that the alert was based on explosives found under a bridge in a tiny Mississippi town--clearly not the work of international terrorists. If police chiefs had been given that information from the start, he said, they could have decided for themselves whether it was worth increasing security.

‘We’re Getting a Lot of Mixed Messages’

Officials also cite the confusion over the threat to West Coast bridges as an example of poor federal-state communication. When California Gov. Gray Davis went public with a confidential security alert, the federal government swiftly backtracked, calling the threat uncorroborated. “We’re getting a lot of mixed messages,” Vermont Gov. Howard Dean said.

Part of the frustration stems from a restless feeling among patrol officers and their commanders that, if they were just let in on the investigations, they could do much to stop terrorism. After all, local law enforcement can muster 650,000 cops across the nation, compared with the FBI’s 11,000 agents.

“This is how it should work,” said Daniel J. Oates, the police chief in Ann Arbor, Mich. “I have a sergeant here who reviews every crime that happens in this town every day. He knows everything there is to know about Ann Arbor. He should be briefed in full on the terrorism investigation . . . so if something crosses his desk, he knows enough to make the connections. And there are thousands like him around the country.”

Police departments have been asked to help the FBI with one particular task: interviewing 5,000 Middle Eastern men who have entered the U.S. in recent years from countries with suspected terrorist links. To some, that smacks of racial profiling. And they fear it could stir resentment among immigrant communities. Portland, Ore., police will not participate. Commanders in a few other cities have expressed doubts as well.

While the FBI has been the chief target, state and local officials have expressed concerns about poor communication from other federal agencies.

In Missouri, public health director Maureen Dempsey says her staff can’t draft sound plans for handling a bioterrorist attack without more information about the federal strategy.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta has assured her that its teams would respond to any call for help with vaccines, antibiotics and expertise. But Dempsey said that without more details she can’t plan Missouri’s response.

Similarly, Dempsey was unsure how to handle the news last week that the CDC would be vaccinating dozens of its employees against smallpox. It seemed to be evidence of some kind of national strategy but one she had not been let in on. “If there’s a credible threat of smallpox, that is information that all states would need.”

In response, CDC spokeswoman Kathy Harben said that her agency is vaccinating just the personnel who would be sent to handle any suspected smallpox outbreak; the agency maintains that the risk of a smallpox attack is very low.

Harben added that the CDC feels its communication system, especially e-mail alerts to public health officials, “has let us reach out and provide them with the information they can use to become better prepared.”

State and local officials who have met with federal officials, including Ridge, in recent weeks said that they seem eager to establish closer ties. But that goodwill has not yet translated into better communication or true cooperation.

“So far, it’s a lot of words,” said Berger, president of the International Assn. of Chiefs of Police. “We’re waiting.”