"A Clear and Present Danger"

(4 of 5)

Coordinate is the key word here. Against the recommendations of the recent commission on national security chaired by former Senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman, Ridge will not be in charge of a superagency into which have been folded operational arms of the Federal Government like FEMA. That may be a mistake. If there is one thing more depressing than the number of reports on homeland security, it is the unanimity of their conclusions. At present, coordination simply doesn't happen; homeland defense is a patchwork quilt made by an inept seamstress. Some stories would be funny if they weren't being told against a backdrop of tragedy. There was the recent joint exercise of the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, during which agents argued for an hour over who was in charge, while actors playing the dead and dying got hypothermia. There is the sad tale of the Center for Defense Preparedness run by the Department of Justice, which "trains trainers" to respond to toxic emergencies--and whose current budget allows it to operate at 25% of capacity. There is the rivalry--or is it hatred?--between the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Customs Service, neither of which seems ever to have willingly shared a piece of information with the other.

For old hands, though, one rivalry dwarfs all the others. A senior adviser to President George H.W. Bush says that the historic tensions between G-men and spooks at times seem insurmountable. "One of the things we need," says Senator Harry Reid, "is someone with the authority to force the CIA and the FBI to cooperate."

The incompatibilities run deep. The bureau's job is to find evidence that will stand up in a criminal court, while the agency just wants intelligence. But some observers think the old enmities have abated. The deputy director of each agency's counterterrorism division comes from the other one, and joint FBI-CIA operations have had a few notable successes. The real problem, says Representative Saxby Chambliss, a Republican who chairs the House Subcommittee on International Terrorism and Homeland Security, is that the heroes of Langley and the Hoover building won't share information with agencies like the INS and the Federal Aviation Administration--both vital to Ridge's mission. "The dialogue between federal agencies," says Chambliss, "is not at the level that it should be."

And the dialogue between federal and state officials? Ask Governors that question, then duck. Governor Dirk Kempthorne of Idaho says that the adjutant-general of his state National Guard is not allowed to share intelligence with him. Governor Frank Keating of Oklahoma, a former FBI agent who took part this summer in a disastrous war game of a smallpox attack, says he was "stunned" at the level of ignorance displayed by the feds about what goes on at a state and local level. And Philadelphia police chief John Timoney says, "The feds actually think that the locals, you can't trust them, they're corrupt, they'll sell information." When working with federal agencies as a senior officer in New York, he says, "there was always a sense that you were not fully briefed on everything that was going on."

This isn't just whining. If homeland security has shock troops, they work for state and city governments. "The best response is local," says Keating. "You have to have doctors and nurses and emergency services and police and National Guard who are trained to respond." At present, there are huge holes in that training. Keating freely admits that "doctors and nurses in my state know nothing about anthrax and smallpox."

Can Ridge bring order to this chaos and make an anxious nation believe its government can actually stop--or at least manage--another disaster? The omens aren't good. Without operational authority, successive drug czars have found it extraordinarily difficult to get the relevant agencies to work together. Ridge has an extra problem. If counterterrorism is one of his chief missions, he will have to work closely with the armed forces. Yet not only is the military--properly--barred from performing law-enforcement duties, it also has spent little time figuring out how to discharge any new functions. "I never thought we'd see fighters over our cities defending against a threat that came from inside," Air Force General Richard Myers, the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said. "This whole issue of homeland defense needs a lot more thought."