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The soldier with the Kalashnikov wasn’t happy. Neither were the hundreds of comrades who had chosen him as the spokesman for their angry complaints as they milled about on a train platform somewhere in Russia. ‘There are 500 of us, we are armed, but we haven’t been assigned to any unit,’ the newly mobilised soldier complained on a video that went viral earlier this month. ‘We’ve been living worse than farm animals for a week… Nobody needs us, we’ve had absolutely no training.’ Other soldiers, most of them masked, chipped in with more grievances. ‘The officers treat us like animals,’ shouted one. ‘We’ve spent a fortune on buying food for ourselves.’

The video – and others like it – was rightly cited in the western press as evidence of the chaos that followed the ‘partial’ mobilisation announced by Vladimir Putin on 21 September. But the video also revealed something much more significant about how defeat in the field is sending cracks running through the ‘power vertical’ over which Putin presides.

Watch carefully and you can see among the ordinary forest-green camouflage army-issue uniforms several of the soldiers wearing more sophisticated kit, marked with the distinctive death’s-head badge of the Wagner private military company. The video was distributed by social media channels associated with Wagner’s founder and public face Yevgeny Prigozhin – a billionaire St Petersburg caterer and businessman better known as Putin’s chef. In other words, this video shows not only discontented soldiers but also a private army engaged in political manoeuvres.

It’s not hard to guess Prigozhin’s agenda in distributing – and possibly orchestrating – the video. The head of Russia’s largest private army is trying to undermine Russia’s beleaguered Minister of Defence, Sergei Shoigu. And Prigozhin is far from alone. Since Ukrainian advances near Kharkiv last month, Shoigu and his generals have come under heavy and public attack from patriotic pro-war bloggers, Wagner-affiliated media and the hawkish Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov and even state-controlled TV. ‘The guilty should be punished [though] we don’t have capital punishment unfortunately,’ the ultra-nationalistic TV host Vladimir Solovyov told his viewers. ‘They don’t even have an officer’s sense of honour because they are not shooting themselves.’ Aleksey Slobedenyuk, who runs a network of Telegram channels for Prigozhin’s patriot media group, was arrested by a squad of paramilitary police, and the footage was widely broadcast by pro-Shoigu media factions.

Modern Russia is not just a security state but a state that has been taken over by its own security services

So far, only Russia’s military command, not Putin himself, have come in for public criticism. But the obvious question is whether, or when, Putin will come into the firing line. The image of the good tsar surrounded by bad advisers is as old as Russian history. But history also shows that military defeat – from the Russo-Japanese war to Afghanistan – rarely ends well for regimes whose corruption and incompetence are brutally exposed by the stress-test of war.

To date, Putin has stayed one step ahead of the rising tide of military humiliation and criticism by constantly escalating the conflict. In response to the collapse of the Kharkiv front, he announced partial mobilisation and ordered hasty referendums in the occupied territories, followed by formal annexation. In response to the partial destruction of the Kerch Bridge, Putin launched more than 100 cruise missiles in two days at mostly civilian targets in more than a dozen Ukrainian cities. In July, Putin dismissively said that: ‘We haven’t even started [fighting] in earnest yet.’ Now, in response to a rising chorus of critics urging the Kremlin to take off the kid gloves, Putin has publicly gone all-in.

But what happens if the Ukrainians keep winning? Putin can continue firing commanders (as he did after the Kerch attack). He can organise some public show trials of alleged Ukrainian ‘Nazis’ from among the unfortunate Azov battalion prisoners taken after the battle of Mariupol. And he could, theoretically, make good on the renewed promise he made last month that he was ‘not bluffing’ about the use of nuclear weapons – though the West has made clear that their conventional response to a nuclear attack would make it a suicide strategy for the Kremlin.

The good news, for Putin, is that 20 years of efficient repression and media control have meant that so far there has been little public resistance to the Ukraine war. On the evening of Putin’s mobilisation call, I saw some 200 people gathered on the Old Arbat for a brave but futile protest that was almost instantly extinguished by riot police who outnumbered the protestors by at least two to one. Two mass exoduses – one following the outbreak of war and another after the 21 September mobilisation – have seen between 500,000 and 700,000 people leave Russia for good. Among them were the bulk of the urban, politically engaged ‘protesting classes’. Currently, as historian Anatol Lieven recently wrote, ‘There is no coherent or organised force in Russian society that could bring about… revolution.’

The main challenge to Putin’s power, then, comes not from the street but from within the regime itself. Putin turned 70 on the eve of the Kerch Bridge attack. Whether rumours of his chronic illness are correct or not (CIA director William Burns said in August that he believed that Putin was ‘far too well’), the debate over Putin’s successor has been at the forefront of the minds of Russia’s top power-brokers for at least three years. In February 2019 the chief Kremlin ideologue Vladislav Surkov dared to publish a long essay discussing what a post-Putin Russia might look like. ‘Putinism’ would outlast Putin himself, Surkov argued, attempting to reassure the ex-KGB men who were Putin’s closest confidants that they had nothing to fear from a transition of power. They were not reassured. It was Surkov rather than Putin who was later shown the door.

Institutionally, the Kremlin has for years been effectively an extension of the Federal Security Service, or FSB. The three most powerful men in Russia today are all current or former FSB chiefs – Putin himself, the Security Council chairman Nikolai Patrushev and the current FSB head Alexander Bortnikov. They met in the Leningrad KGB in the mid-1970s and have known and worked with each other for nearly half a century. Most other top Kremlin mandarins – for instance the Rosneft head Igor Sechin, the foreign intelligence chief Sergei Naryshkin and many more – are also drawn from that same tiny Leningrad KGB circle, leavened by a few of Putin’s old friends from his time as deputy mayor of St Petersburg in the 1990s.

For these people, the question of who is eventually chosen to succeed Putin is much less important than who does the choosing. In 2000 Patrushev – newly appointed as head of the FSB by his former subordinate Putin who had just become President – wrote an essay comparing the FSB to Russia’s ‘new nobility’. And over the subsequent 20 years the FSB did indeed proceed not only to take over swaths of Russia’s state and private business but also to appoint their children as ministers and even – just like the aristocracy of tsarist Russia – make dynastic marriages among themselves.

Modern Russia is not just a security state but literally a state that has been taken over by its own security services. Putin is the ultimate decision-maker and arbiter in various disputes between rival factions inside that extended FSB-connected ruling class. And insofar as a ‘collective Putin’ exists, it’s composed of a tiny group of very closely connected, very paranoid old men whose chief goal is to preserve their wealth and power and pass it on to their children and protégés.

So when we consider whether regime change is possible in Russia, what we are really wondering is whether some outside force could ever challenge the rule, not of Putin himself, but of the extended FSB clan that currently holds ultimate political and economic power.

The army has not played a decisive political role in Russia since the aftermath of Stalin’s death in 1953, when Marshal Georgy Zhukov effectively pulled off an armed coup by arresting and soon after murdering KGB boss Lavrentiy Beria. Ever since that painful showdown between soldiers and secret police, the KGB and FSB made very sure that Russia’s military had no role in internal security – most recently by creating the Russian National Guard, headed naturally by a former KGB man, Putin’s former body-guard Viktor Zolotov. The silent majority of Russia’s elite – the mid-level bureaucrats, professionals and business-people who have been robbed of their futures and their wealth by the war – are by all accounts collectively horrified by it. Notionally these people represent significant economic and bureaucratic power. But they have no organised political voice and generally have too much to lose to risk rebellion.

So when Kadyrov, Prigozhin and the other heavily armed patriotic critics attack the failed war effort, they are not so much challenging the status quo as jockeying for advantage within it. And they succeed in advancing up the chain of command to positions of greater influence. There are other critical voices – for instance the ultranationalist philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, the Orthodox Christian fundamentalist billionaire and TV station owner Konstantin Malofeev, or the novelist-turned-Donbas rebel commander Zakhar Prilepin or former Donetsk People’s Republic defence minister Igor Strelkov – who were once in the nationalist opposition to the Kremlin but now find themselves more or less aligned with the newfound radical nationalism of the Putin regime. All have called for Putin to be more ruthless and aggressive in Ukraine. Strelkov has been a vocal critic of the Russian military’s failures from the start, and last month said that the war is already lost. Such radical nationalists are the true believers, they are armed, and they have spilled blood for their country. And they will not forgive further failure on the front lines.

If the Russian army suffers a serious collapse and the country moves into a revolutionary situation, such nationalist firebrands will be the Kremlin elite’s most dangerous foes. It is much more likely, however, that the FSB clique around Putin will respond to a rising tide of nationalist anger and frustration by becoming more nationalist and authoritarian themselves. They may make Kadyrov defence minister or appoint Prigozhin to a senior ministerial post. But Kadyrov’s and Prigozhin’s ambitions in themselves do not present a fundamental challenge to the power of the ruling FSB clan which controls serious military force, and has a stronghold on Russia’s media and politics.

The power of the extended FSB dwarfs that of any potential challengers except for one: a rising, angry people who feel cheated of victory by their corrupt leaders. That revolution is likely to be as chaotic and ugly as the one which followed Russia’s last catastrophic military defeat in 1917 – and will doubtless begin, as the previous one did, with angry soldiers on remote train platforms railing against the tsar’s corrupt ministers.

The man accused of breaking into the home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and assaulting her husband told the police that he also planned to confront other state and federal politicians.

District Attorney Brooke Jenkins and Chief Bill Scott of the San Francisco Police Department announced the state’s charges against David DePape.Credit…Jim Wilson/The New York Times

The Justice Department is examining ties among the far-right Proud Boys, Roger Stone and others over their roles in 2018 “Stop the Steal” demonstrations.

Prosecutors involved in the Jan. 6 investigation have also been asking questions about connections between Roger J. Stone Jr. and a protest related to the 2018 elections in Florida.Credit…Al Drago for The New York Times

The FBI is not the answer to the problem of domestic intelligence. As demonstrated by the 9/11 Commission’s report, the bureau turned in the most lackluster performance of any agency in the run-up to 9/11, even though it had (and has) the primary responsibility among police and intelligence services for preventing terrorist attacks on the nation from within. A request by one of the FBI field offices to apply for a warrant to search the laptop of Zacarias Moussaoui (a prospective hijack pilot) was turned down. A prescient report on flight training by Muslims in Arizona was ignored by FBI headquarters. There were only two analysts on the bin Laden beat in the entire bureau. Director Louis Freeh’s directive that the bureau focus its efforts on counterterrorism was ignored.

As Senator Richard Shelby, the vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, pointed out in the wake of 9/11: “The bureau did not know what information it possessed, it did not approach this information with an intelligence analysis mind-set, and it too often neglected to inform other agencies of what it did know or believe.”

After 9/11 the bureau, under a new director, Robert Mueller, vowed to do better, but its efforts have fallen far short of success. In part because the bureau has been plagued by excessive turnover in the executive ranks of its intelligence and antiterrorism sections, and even more so in its information technology staff, it took the bureau two years after 9/11 just to devise a plan to reform its counterterrorism program. We know now that the plan was a failure, otherwise President Bush would not have forced the bureau, over its fierce opposition, to create (in 2005) the National Security Branch—a consolidation of the intelligence, counterterrorism, and counterintelligence divisions of the bureau. The NSB, however, has so far failed to change the bureau’s traditional culture.

The Structural Roots of the Problem

I am generally skeptical of organizational solutions to intelligence problems, most of which are not organizational problems. But the FBI’s inadequate performance of the domestic intelligence function is a genuine and serious organizational problem. Placing the domestic intelligence function in a criminal investigation agency ensures, as other nations realize, a poor fit.

Criminal investigation is retrospective. A crime has been committed and the investigators go about trying to find the criminal; when they do, they arrest him and continue gathering evidence that will be admissible in court to prove his guilt. If the criminal activity under investigation is by nature ongoing, as in the case of gang activity, the investigator may decide to allow it to continue until the activity generates irrefutable evidence of guilt. But then he will pounce. And at every stage he’ll take great care not to commit a procedural violation that might jeopardize a conviction. He will also balk at sharing with others any of the information that he obtains in his investigation, lest a leak tip off a suspect or make it easier for the suspect to defend himself in court should he be prosecuted. All that the sharing of information about a case can do from the FBI agent’s perspective (as well as that of the local U.S. Attorney, for whom the agent works, in effect) is to weaken his ability to control the future of the case.

Criminal investigation is case oriented, backward looking, information hugging, and fastidious (for fear of wrecking a prosecution). Intelligence, in contrast, is forward looking, threat oriented rather than case oriented, and freewheeling. Its focus is on identifying, and maintaining surveillance of, suspicious characters and on patiently assembling masses of seemingly unrelated data into patterns that are suggestive of an emergent threat but that may be based on speculative hypotheses far removed from probable cause, let alone from proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

When intelligence is working well, the spy or traitor or terrorist is detected early, before he or she does damage, and often he or she can be turned to our advantage. The orientation of intelligence toward preventing crimes from occurring or even from being contemplated, rather than toward prosecution after they occur, would prevent a domestic intelligence agency from obsessing over procedural missteps that might jeopardize a conviction.

The FBI argues that because terrorist acts are criminal and intelligence is an element of criminal law enforcement, counterterrorism intelligence can be assimilated to the FBI’s criminal law enforcement responsibilities. But the activities with which national security intelligence is concerned differ greatly from ordinary federal crimes. Terrorist activities are politically motivated (in a broad sense of “political” that includes motivations founded on religious, class, racial, or ethnic hostility) and are potentially much more dangerous than nonpolitical crimes because they aim to injure or destroy the nation as a whole or otherwise wreak havoc on a large scale. To counter terrorist activity requires knowledge—of political movements; foreign countries and languages; the operational methods of terrorists, spies, and saboteurs; and the characteristics and availability of weapons of mass destruction—that criminal investigators do not possess. It also requires a different mind-set.

Good police officers learn to think like criminals; good intelligence officers learn to think like terrorists and spies. The hunter must be empathetic with (as distinct from sympathetic to) his quarry, but cops and spies have different quarry.

As explained by intelligence veteran William Odom,

FBI officials want arrests and convictions. They want media attention and lots of it. . . . They have little patience for sustained surveillance of a suspect to gain more intelligence. To them, sharing intelligence is anathema. Intelligence is something to be used, not shared. . . . Intelligence officials do not want public attention. They want to remain anonymous. They do not need arrest authority. They want to follow spies and terrorists secretly, allowing them to reveal their co-conspirators. Their reward comes from providing intelligence to others, not hiding it. . . . [They] tend to be more thorough, taking their time to develop evidence both for trials and for operational use. They know that they cannot let spies or terrorists get away without risking considerable danger to the country. Cops worry much less that a criminal will get away. Criminals are abundant and there are plenty more to arrest. Spies and terrorists will almost always defeat police officers.

Punishment and Prevention

Criminal law enforcement is oriented toward punishment, but punishment cannot undo the consequences of a catastrophic attack. Criminal law aims to deter crime by punishing a large enough fraction of offenders to make the threat of punishment credible, as well as to incapacitate those offenders whom the threat of punishment did not deter from committing crimes, by locking them up or in extreme cases by executing them. Especially because many of the most dangerous modern terrorists are largely undeterrable, notably suicide bombers, law enforcement alone cannot defeat terrorism.

Law enforcement can actually impede the struggle against terrorism: sometimes by prematurely revealing what the government knows, thus giving the terrorists a chance to elude capture by changing their methods or locale; at other times by failing to intervene early enough (that is, before a crime has been committed). Identifying, assessing, and tracking activities in the preparation stage are quintessential intelligence tasks, but the activities themselves often are too ambiguous to be readily provable as crimes. Some are only minor crimes, some not crimes at all. Prosecuting persons suspected of being involved in the early stage (discussion, target surveillance, etc.) of preparing a terrorist attack may, when feasible, have value in deterring entry into that stage. Yet often the more effective strategy is not to arrest and prosecute at that stage but rather to monitor the suspects in an effort to learn the scope, intentions, membership, and affiliations of the terrorist or prototerrorist cell.

An agency that is not responsible for bringing criminals to justice can concentrate full time on pursuing terrorists without any of the distractions created by the complex demands of criminal justice (including concerns with discovery and proof). Success from the standpoint of intelligence can be chasing terrorists out of the country and making sure they don’t return, or even leaving them in place but turning them into government infor-mants. But detecting threats and preempting them before they are carried out may leave no room for successful prosecution—which is a clue to the difficulty of adapting a law enforcement agency to the intelligence role. Prosecutable crime is the lifeblood of law enforcement.

The proper aim of counterterrorism is to penetrate and control terrorist cells, not to cause their members to scatter as soon as the arrest of one rings a warning bell to the others. Penetration, “turning,” control, and disinformation are delicate intelligence operations requiring specialized skills, training, and aptitudes unlikely to be acquired and honed by FBI special agents converted temporarily into intelligence operatives.

Consider the FBI’s 2002 arrest in Lackawanna, New York, of six men of Yemeni descent who had attended an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. A domestic intelligence agency might have tried to infiltrate the group or to “flip” one of its members, turning the group into an asset against Al Qaeda. Instead, the suspects were arrested and charged in a highly publicized case. The same pattern of premature arrest and prosecution recurred with the “Miami 7,” a group of wannabe terrorists apprehended earlier this year.

The law enforcer’s approach to terrorism has the further disadvantages of causing intelligence data to be evaluated from the too-limited perspective of its utility in building a criminal case, and of retarding the sharing of information lest full credit for a successful prosecution be denied the field office that began the investigation. These disadvantages illustrate the difference, which is fundamental, between collecting information for the sake of knowledge and collecting it for the sake of building a case.

An incident involving the arrests in New York of two Muslim teenage girls whom the FBI suspected of wanting to become suicide bombers, and held in custody for six weeks, illustrates how emphasis on a criminal-law response to terrorism can impair vital “hearts and minds” strategies as well as (as may have happened in the Lackawanna case) shut down inquiry prematurely. The arrest of the two girls caused indignation in the New York Muslim community—whose loyalty and goodwill (as the FBI recognizes) are vital safeguards against domestic terrorism. It is natural for a law enforcement agency to want to arrest a person suspected of criminal activity. An intelligence agency, rather than wanting the girls arrested, would want to discover who had put the idea of becoming suicide bombers in their minds (maybe no one). Its low-key investigation might culminate in simply a chat with the girls’ parents. If the girls had a connection, however indirect, with a terrorist cell, the publicity from their arrest doubtless caused the members to scatter—and to reconstitute the cell elsewhere, out of sight of the FBI.

Clashing Cultures

The problem at base is related to the very different “cultures” of law enforcement and intelligence. The performance of criminal investigators, unlike that of intelligence officers, can be evaluated by objective, indeed quantitative, criteria, such as number of arrests weighted by successful convictions, with successful convictions weighted in turn by length of sentence imposed, amount of property recovered, and amount of favorable publicity generated. Intelligence officers cannot be evaluated by such objective criteria; their successes are often invisible, indeed unknowable. For example, the earlier a plot is detected and disrupted, the more difficult it is to know whether it ever had a chance of success. And information obtained by intelligence officers may be only a small part of the total information that enabled a threat to be detected and thwarted.

This asymmetry of performance measurement makes it difficult for a police department to hire and retain able intelligence officers. Able employees prefer objective to subjective performance criteria; they know they’ll do better if they are judged by such criteria than if their performance is evaluated by nonobjective, nonquantifiable, criteria that may include personality, appearance, personal connections, and sheer luck. Thus in an agency such as the FBI that combines criminal investigation with intelligence, the abler recruits will gravitate toward criminal investigation. They may be required to undergo some intelligence training and to do stints in intelligence jobs, but always they will be looking to return to the main career track.

Henry Kissinger has remarked that “intelligence personnel in the real world are subject to unusual psychological pressures. Separated from their compatriots by security walls, operating in a culture suspicious of even unavoidable secrecy, they are surrounded by an atmosphere of cultural ambiguity. Their unadvertised and unadvertisable successes are taken for granted, while they are blamed for policies that frequently result from strategic rather than intelligence misjudgments.” This does not sound like the description of an FBI agent, and it casts grave doubt on the wisdom of the FBI’s method of obtaining intelligence officers, which is to provide intelligence training to its special agents, all of whom are hired and trained as criminal investigators.

The two worlds of law enforcement and intelligence don’t fit comfortably together in the same agency—let alone in the same individual, the special agent with intelligence training who shuttles between the two worlds.

Most of the FBI’s employees, including 90 percent of its special agents, as distinct from its support staff, are stationed in the bureau’s 56 field offices rather than in its Washington headquarters. This geographic dispersal is another reflection of the bureau’s emphasis on criminal investigation and another impediment to the conduct of national security intelligence. Most federal crime is local and is prosecuted locally by one of the 96 U.S. Attorneys’ offices, which like the FBI’s field offices are scattered across the nation. The FBI agents in these offices essentially work for the U.S. Attorney, who is a prosecutor, not an intelligence official. But although most federal crime is local, the principal dangers to domestic security at present emanate from international terrorist groups. Clues to their activities may be scattered all over the world. Effective intelligence requires combining scraps of information regardless of geographic origin rather than allowing information to be sequestered in local offices.

I use “scraps” advisedly; it brings out still another problem with confiding domestic intelligence to the FBI. Because of the gravity of threats to national security, intelligence officers must track down any lead, however implausible, that might point to an attack that would endanger national security. Most of those leads lead nowhere, let alone to an arrest, prosecution, conviction, and sentence. Chasing such will-o’-the-wisps is simply alien to the police mentality.

The marriage of criminal investigation and domestic intelligence within the FBI has complicated the coordination of domestic and foreign intelligence. Often the same suspects are tracked outside the United States by the CIA and inside by the FBI’s intelligence divisions. Yet the CIA and FBI have a history of mutual suspicion and antipathy. This had begun to diminish even before 9/11, especially at the top of the two agencies. But the cultural and procedural gulf between criminal investigations and intelligence operations remains, has been aggravated by recent efforts of the bureau to snatch turf from the embattled CIA, and impairs coordination between the two agencies, just as it does within the FBI.

An agency 100 percent dedicated to domestic intelligence would do better at it than the FBI, which is at most 20 percent intelligence and thus dominated by the criminal investigators.

All this is unlikely to change. The effective control of an organization requires some uniformity in compensation methods, recruitment, evaluation, promotion, and working conditions in order to minimize conflict, foster cooperation, and avoid confusion and uncertainty.

If the missions assigned to the organization are too disparate—if their optimal performance requires different methods, personnel policies, supervisory structures, information technology, and so on; if indeed, as in the case of criminal investigation and domestic intelligence, the missions are incompatible—the compromises necessary to impose the requisite minimum uniformity will cause performance of the missions to be suboptimal.

If shoes came in only one size, they would be cheap to manufacture but most people would be poorly shod. Because criminal investigation is the dominant mission and prevailing culture of the FBI, the inherent tensions between criminal investigation and national security intelligence will continue to be resolved in favor of criminal investigation.

Current polls show a growing mistrust of the FBI among nearly half of America due to a spate of investigative activities that appear politically one-sided. Some pundits and politicians have piled on with invidious characterizations of the entire bureau as “fascist,” “Gestapo-like,” “thoroughly corrupt,” and a tool of the Democratic Party that should be completely disbanded.

While the hyperbole is not helpful, the public’s frustration is certainly understandable following disclosures by special counsel John Durham of abuses stemming from the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, the shocking search of a former Republican president’s home over a document dispute, the highly tactical home arrests of pro-life protesters and other conservatives, and the unjustified early morning search of journalists’ homes for the politically embarrassing diary of President Biden’s daughter — to name just a few. 

A prominent over-rotation proposal fronted by some in the media and on Capitol Hill is the complete dissolution of the FBI and distribution of its mission to other federal law enforcement agencies. This is a feel-good sound bite, but it will never happen. It is irresponsible to feed it as a possibility to that half of the country that traditionally admired the FBI but now is deeply concerned. Here’s why.

Keep in mind that 99 percent of the FBI had no involvement in any of the troubling investigations and actions listed above. The majority go about their daily business working the kinds of cases we would want them to. If whistleblower and other anecdotal reporting is to be believed, there is significant concern among current and retired FBI agents that some in the bureau are unduly cooperating with abusive Department of Justice (DOJ) political agendas. The responsibility for the present erosion of trust in the FBI by millions in this country lies at the feet of a very few.

Second, parceling out the FBI’s investigative and intelligence jurisdictions to other agencies is immensely impractical. These agencies are small compared to the FBI, are single threaded in their missions, and would be years if not decades away from being able to absorb authorities with which they have no experience or training.  

Some have suggested simply reconstituting the FBI under a different name. This makes no sense. Like it or not, the FBI is a brand cultivated over a century, generating deep cooperation domestically and around the world that helps solve tough cases and save lives. The FBI, because it’s the FBI, is still attractive to tens of thousands of good candidates for very few positions every year. Effective reforms that don’t blow up the positive effects of the FBI are possible.

What is clear is that some type of prudent reform mitigating concerns that the FBI can be manipulated politically is in order. A historical perspective may be useful.

Eighty percent of Americans were not born or are too young to remember the last time the FBI came under intense fire for politically motivated investigations that were found to be constitutionally out of bounds. These investigations came to a head in the 1960s and early ’70s under the Kennedy/Johnson/Nixon administrations. At that time, the executive branch launched intelligence investigations and operations with little constraint.

As a result, wiretaps ordered by the DOJ of Martin Luther King Jr. came to light, as well as surveillance and undercover penetration of anti-Vietnam War and civil rights protest groups.  Protections guaranteed by the First and Fourth Amendments were abused. And it wasn’t just the FBI that drew attention as it was revealed that the CIA was attempting sanctioned assassinations overseas, the National Security Agency (NSA) was routinely listening in on American conversations, and the IRS was casually sharing taxpayer records of perceived administration enemies.

In 1975, a bipartisan special Senate committee colloquially known as the “Church Committee” was formed and subsequently exposed all these adventurous executive branch excesses. Arising from that were a number of reforms ranging from presidential executive orders to the establishment of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court and its protocols and, eventually, to the articulation and promulgation of Attorney General Guidelines that dictated the constitutionally safe thresholds the FBI needs to meet to start an investigation. 

All of this was good because it led to measures that strengthened constitutional protections while preserving the positive native capabilities of key national security agencies. There was understandable public indignation and loss of trust at that time 50 years ago because of these exposed abuses, but prudent reforms reigned, and we were better for it as a nation.  

Now, generations have passed, and the imperatives of those old reforms have seemingly turned evanescent. And so, further reform is necessary to curb a current executive branch that appears to be targeting political opposition with an inordinate forcefulness that insults and possibly violates constitutional protections. Refreshed reforms are now likely as power is poised to shift in Washington, but the FBI can get out ahead of some of this by unilaterally instituting a few basic new protocols designed to restore trust.

First, any high-profile investigation involving political campaigns, candidates and political figures should be subject to objective General Counsel review to ensure adequate predication required by the Attorney General Guidelines is clearly present in order to avoid another Crossfire Hurricane debacle. Contrary to Inspector General assertions, the Crossfire Hurricane case file articulated no basis for legitimate initiation required by the guidelines.  

Second, FBI agents and analysts should be required to sign employment contracts agreeing to avoid politically charged or revealing statements on internal communications and social media platforms under penalty of discipline, to include dismissal. The public should have faith that the FBI is apolitical.

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Third, arrest and search plans involving politically sensitive suspects should undergo prior review by an independent entity within the FBI to ensure that the level of tactical response fits the violation and relative risk presented by the subject. Safety is important but so is a response strategy that doesn’t foster perceptions of heavy-handedness, if not extrajudicial punishment or “message sending.”  

Trust is the currency that enables successful FBI investigations that all law-abiding Americans desire. Less trust, less success. Hyperbolic caricatures and impractical “disband the FBI” drumbeats are useless. Positive reform is normally helpful, welcome, and vitally needed to reestablish lost trust.  

Kevin R. Brock is a former assistant director of intelligence for the FBI and principal deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). He independently consults with private companies and public-safety agencies on strategic mission technologies.