FBI's growing portfolio requires new leadership, Graff tells NPC book rap

As the Obama administration chooses the next FBI director, it should look for someone with strong managerial skills _ a chief executive rather than a law enforcement or intelligence official, Garrett M. Graff told a National Press Club audience Tuesday.

The bureau “is now a $9 billion a year organization, 34,000 employees, equivalent to a Fortune 300 company, larger than Visa, larger than Campbell Soup, roughly the size of E-Bay. This is a big organization. Operations in 80 countries, 106 joint terrorism task forces here at home. This is a huge portfolio – everything from bank robberies to stolen automobiles to spies and terrorists and pirates,” Graff said.

The current FBI director’s 10-year term expires Sept. 3.

“If the Obama administration had its choice, it would just leave [Robert] Mueller there. If there was a way to ask him to stay on, they would. Who know? That may end up happening but it would take a special act of Congress,” Graff said.

Graff, editor-in-chief of Washingtonian magazine, spoke at the Club to launch his new book, The Threat Matrix: The FBI at War in the Age of Global Terror, which went on sale Tuesday.

The threat matrix is the internal government document prepared by the counterintelligence community detailing terrorism threats and plots. In the days immediately following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the threat matrix was 15 to 20 pages long in “fairly small font,” and was used as the basis for several daily meetings culminating with the president. It was “in no one’s interest to vet information before it went to the president,” Graff said.

Nearly a decade after 9/11, the threat matrix still exists but is no longer used daily rather it is the basis of the Obama administration’s “Terror Tuesdays” where counter-terrorism officials gather weekly in the White House’s Situation Room for in-depth briefings. “More weekly deep dives rather than the daily water torture of going over every single terror plot,” Graff said.

Graff predicts there will be more terrorist attacks in the future because the FBI will be unable to stop them without implementing tactics that violate civil liberties.

“There will be attacks, big and small, but that is the trade-off that we are willing to make as a society in order to live the rest of our lives without thinking that the government is reading every e-mail and listening to every telephone call,” he said.

Graff isn’t sure the 9/11 attacks could have been stopped but he believes “there were certainly several major missed opportunities that could have unraveled 9/11," including a May 2001 incident in which the CIA didn’t tell the FBI that two known al-Qaeda operatives were in the United States. If the FBI had known the operatives were here Graff believes the FBI would have been able to disrupt some of the plans.