9-11 giving FBI a new mindset; Clinton native leads effort.

Byline: Lee Hammel

The rise in the FBI career of Clinton native Kevin Favreau has put him at the center of the most critical functions of the country's national security operations.

Mr. Favreau, who graduated from Clinton High School in 1979, has been the head of the FBI's Intelligence Directorate since April 2008. It is a job in which, he said, "failure is not an option."

Mr. Favreau rose from an unsworn FBI support worker in 1983 to command 1,200 special agents, intelligence analysts and others in FBI headquarters in Washington. He is also involved in the training and promotion of another 1,200 FBI employees in field intelligence offices across the country.

In the wake of the 9-11 attacks, they are responsible for providing information to FBI operational directorates dealing with counterterrorism and counterintelligence and weapons of mass destruction,

as well as other members of the nation's intelligence community and state and local authorities.

"If anything bad should ever happen again, it could or could not be because we handled intelligence well or we did not handle intelligence well," Mr. Favreau said. It's enough to make him the first one to leave his neighborhood in Maryland in the morning and the last one back from work at night.

The promotion by FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III to assistant FBI director could not have come at a more fraught time.

A month later the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence issued a scathing report, saying "the FBI must work harder and faster if it is to fulfill its national security and intelligence mission. Nearly seven years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the FBI has yet to make the dramatic leaps necessary to address the threats facing our nation."

It ordered the director of national intelligence to establish performance metrics and timetables and report semiannually to Congress on progress.

It should come as no surprise that changing an organization with a long history of responding to crime, which in some aspects is the opposite of preventing crime, would not go smoothly, said Timothy J. Lomperis, professor of international security at St. Louis University.

But William C. Banks, director of the Institute for National Security and Counter Terrorism at Syracuse University College of Law, said he thinks that the FBI has changed since the Intelligence Committee began gathering its information in 2007. It's "slow and incremental. It's like turning an aircraft carrier," he said.

"I think the report was written while they were changing," the national security expert said.

Mr. Favreau said there is no question that "in the old days we were more of a reactive law enforcement type of entity." Often the agency did not need or use intelligence to solve cases back then.

Without commenting on what happened before his promotion in April 2008, Mr. Favreau said there is a vast change in the culture of the FBI and "I've been living it for the past 13 months."

As the head of a directorate that did not even exist until 2005, Mr. Favreau said he meets with Mr. Mueller at least twice daily. And the sessions that Mr. Mueller has regularly with the heads of the 56 FBI field offices reflect the agency's new priorities, he said.

Years ago, in the case-driven agency the director would have asked the special agents-in-charge what their top cases were, what indictments are pending. Now, Mr. Favreau said, Mr. Mueller asks them "What are the top threats in your territory? What are you doing to develop sources? What don't you know? What are you doing to get that information?"

The Intelligence Committee said the FBI was too agent-driven with too few analysts in supervisory or senior positions. That was only a month after Mr. Favreau, who came up through the agent ranks, became the third head of the Intelligence Directorate - and the first who was not an intelligence analyst who had been sent on detail to the FBI from the National Security Agency.

But as the Intelligence Committee noted, Mr. Favreau said the FBI has been hiring highly qualified analysts in recent years. He said that the bureau is trying to get away from an "us versus them" mentality and he tells the analysts he believes as they get more experience, an analyst will head the directorate someday - because he or she is a good manager, not because he or she is an analyst.

The director's Strategic Execution Team model, implemented last year, is "driving toward insuring that analysts were at the table with agents" easing the transition from case focus to "a threat-driven, intelligence-informing organization."

While the bureau is headed in the right direction toward anticipating threats, Mr. Favreau said, its history of domestic crime fighting ensures its understanding of privacy and civil liberties, a good reason for the FBI and not a separate intelligence agency similar to Britain's MI5 to gather domestic intelligence. Former Supervisory Special Agent Ali Soufan said that FBI agents could not participate in some overseas investigations because of the FBI's refusal to use harsh interrogation techniques.

The FBI is one of the largest consumers of its own intelligence - "we need to know about the threat more than anyone else does because we need to go head-to-head with it" - and it would be inefficient to separate the functions, he said.

Mr. Favreau attributes his rise in the 30,000-employee FBI to the lessons his parents taught him, especially, "If I wanted something, all I needed was to work hard and the rest would take care of itself." But he also acknowledges "a knack to be able to cut through a lot of, well, stuff and prioritize not only my time, but everything."

"A lot of time people say we need more people, resources. I say `why aren't we prioritizing the work that we're doing?' It's about risk management and understanding the threat and vulnerability, and identifying those things that aren't that important."

ART: PHOTO

CUTLINE: Mr. Favreau