Combating Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction

Commission notes that the FBI has identified areas for improvement in its Strategic Plan,and supports the FBI’s initiatives to address the threat of proliferation.Recommendation 5.31: The FBI should initiate training programs to raise the levelof technical expertise of its agents and analysts in detecting, countering, andinvestigating proliferation and uses of weapons of mass destruction.Based on analysis of the foreign threat in the United States, the FBI should act to improvethe quality of analysis and human source reporting through personnel training and therecruitment of new personnel with technical and language expertise required by emergingthreats. New expertise should encompass both the geopolitical and technological needsrequired to combat foreign proliferation within the U.S. effectively. FBI agents should betrained and prepared to respond to crime scenes that may involve the use of chemical,biological, or nuclear devices.Information ManagementAs noted above, effective information sharing between the IC and the law-enforcementcommunity is important to countering the WMD threat. Even within the FBI, however, muchintelligence and investigative information exists only on paper, and is often contained onlyin local files. Thus the information may not be distributed, searched, or retrievedelectronically for cross-office or cross-mission use. This system causes significant delay indistribution to the appropriate units, and does not ensure that all units receive informationpertaining to their mission. It is vital to detect a threat before it becomes a terrible reality.Timely dissemination of information to all appropriate units is essential to a coordinatedeffort to meet the threat. In addition, many attempts to acquire weapons of massdestruction span the globe. A system in which information is maintained largely in writtenform and retained primarily on a local basis is not adequate to meet this challenge.Recommendation 5.32: The FBI should develop and implement an automatedinformation management system that allows for electronic distribution, search, andretrieval of intelligence and investigative information, as well as trackingintelligence information received by its own National Security Division and otherparts of the Intelligence Community.Such a system will enhance the FBI’s ability to detect proliferation-related activities as wellas allow the Bureau to provide such information to others promptly so action can be takento detect and prevent such activities. The system could also be used to track the sharing87