The FBI is on Track with Its Intelligence Mission

Your article "FBI Wrestling With Remake as Intelligence Agency" (U.S. News, Sept. 16) implies that the Federal Bureau of Investigation lacks determination or direction on tackling its intelligence mission. In reality, the FBI's Strategic Execution Team has employed best practices from the private and public sectors to identify what was working well in our intelligence efforts and how we could strengthen those efforts. We have standardized the intelligence work roles and processes across all field offices. We have added several weeks of updated hands-on training for field-office personnel, developed new policies and handbooks for field intelligence, and tasked the field offices to use these tools in new assessments of the potential threats in their areas.

The field offices also need to know what they don't know and have a plan to fill in those gaps. To improve the number and quality of our human sources, we created special squads in every field office that will focus entirely on developing human sources and intelligence collection. In addition, we launched an effort to recruit, train and enhance the roles of intelligence analysts.

All of this progress in the field is vetted personally by Director Robert Mueller on a regular basis over a classified video link. These sessions reinforce the need for leadership in the field and accountability. Some of the critics quoted in the Journal's piece seemed unaware of all this. We thought it would be useful to let them and your readers know.

John Miller
Assistant Director
Federal Bureau of Investigation
Washington

(As printed in The Wall Street Journal)