The managers who fashioned the FBI's war on terrorism since Sept. 11 have a pointed message for agents looking to rise to the top: no Middle East or terrorism expertise required.
"I wish that I had it. It would be nice," Executive Assistant Director Gary Bald said when asked recently about his grasp of Middle East culture and history as the FBI's top official in the war on terror.
In sworn testimony that contrasts with their promises to the public, the FBI's top counterterrorism managers say Middle East and terrorism expertise wasn't important in choosing the agents they promoted after Sept. 11.
And they don't believe such experience is necessary today even as terrorist acts occur across the globe.
"A bombing case is a bombing case," said Dale Watson, the FBI's terrorism chief in the critical two years after Sept. 11, 2001. "A crime scene in a bank robbery case is the same as a crime scene, you know, across the board."
Bald agreed.
"You need leadership. You don't need subject matter expertise," Bald testified in an ongoing FBI employment case. "It is certainly not what I look for in selecting an official for a position in a counterterrorism position."
In a development that has escaped public attention, FBI agent Bassem Youssef has questioned under oath most of the FBI's top leaders, including Director Robert Mueller and his predecessor, Louis Freeh, in an effort to show he was passed over for top terrorism jobs despite his expertise. Testimony from his lawsuit was recently sent to Congress.
Those who have held the bureau's top terrorism-fighting jobs since Sept. 11 often said in their testimony that they -- and many they've promoted since -- had no significant terrorism or Middle East experience. Some couldn't even explain the difference between Sunnis and Shiites, the two primary groups of Muslims.
"Probably the strongest leader I know in counterterrorism has no counterterrorism in his background," Bald insisted.
The hundreds of pages of testimony obtained by the media contrast with assurances Mueller has repeatedly given Congress that he was building a new FBI, from top to bottom, with experts able to stop terror attacks before they occurred, not solve them afterward.
The FBI said it hired or redeployed more than 1,000 agents to counterterrorism and hired another 1,200 intelligence analysts and linguists.
Daniel Byman, a national security expert who worked on both Congress' and the presidential investigations of terrorism and intelligence failures, reviewed the Youssef case for the court and concluded that "Many of its officers -- including those quite skilled in other aspects of the bureau's work, lack the skills to work with foreign governments or even their US counterparts."
Watson, who oversaw the first two years of transformation, testified he could not recall a single meeting in the aftermath of the suicide hijackings in which FBI leaders discussed the type of skills or training needed for counterterrorism.
Pat D'Amuro, one of the FBI's most-experienced senior managers in terrorism, testified that when he was brought to Washington to oversee the Sept. 11 investigation, eventually promoted to executive assistant director, he brought lots of agents with him from New York who had terrorism backgrounds.
But rather than conducting a systematic search for the bureau's most-talented Middle Eastern and terrorism agents worldwide, D'Amuro testified, he brought to Washington the agents he personally knew had worked successfully on al-Qaeda and other terror cases.
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