Analysts: Decisions must be made on priorities

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The planned reorganization of the FBI will force a juggling of law enforcement priorities, analysts say, and still faces a skeptical Congress.

The reorganization -- scheduled to be announced Wednesday -- will significantly bolster the resources devoted to counter terrorism, including transferring and hiring hundreds of new agents for that area, establishing a terrorism squad to oversee terrorism investigation, and increased cooperation between the FBI and the CIA.

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Speaking on CNN Wednesday morning, Oliver "Buck" Revell, ex-associate director of the FBI, said extensive resources will be required to conduct terrorism investigations, particularly pre-emptive investigations.

"It requires a great deal of physical surveillance, electronic surveillance, analysis of patterns, the assimilation of information from multiple sources," Revell said. "It's a very labor intensive activity to prevent as well as to investigate of course a crime such as those occurred on 9-11."

"The problem really lies in what the American people will expect of the FBI and how much latitude they will be given, because many of these same congressmen, senators and the news media in the past have criticized the FBI for being proactive and gathering intelligence," Revell said.

"The attorney general guidelines made it practically impossible to collect intelligence prior to a crime being committed domestically, and the foreign intelligence surveillance act required you to show information that an individual or group was either part of a foreign hostile power or part of a known terrorist organization," Revell said.

Robert Heibel, ex-deputy chief of counter-terrorism for the FBI, sees benefits from increased cooperation between the FBI and CIA. "What the FBI has lacked, really, has been that intelligence capability that you see in an organization like the Central Intelligence Agency," he said.

"Leaders in law enforcement have never really seen what intelligence can do for them ... so what you have here is you have an opportunity with the cross-pollination of the FBI and the CIA, for the CIA people to actually show the bureau.. what they should be demanding in the way of intelligence," Heibel added.

Heibel said the reorganization will force a decision by national leaders on law enforcement priorities.

"If you're taking agents away from counter-narcotics, white collar crime, bank robberies, things like that, obviously investigation of those crimes is going to suffer," he said. "And so there's got to be a balancing here.

"And then the government, the executive branch and Congress have to decide what's going to happen with those other crimes. ... There's still criminal violations that someone has to take responsibility for."

The reorganization comes as the FBI answers questions about a letter from a Minnesota FBI agent angry about failed efforts to win permission to search the home and computer of Zacarias Moussaoui in the weeks before the September 11 attacks. Moussaoui is awaiting trial on charges he was an accomplice in the September attacks.

The confusion over what the FBI knew about Moussaoui has fueled criticism of the agency and any reorganization, even within Republican circles.

"Before I can evaluate the adequacy of these changes, I have to know a lot more about the specifics of the problem," said Rep. Arlen Specter, R-Pennsylvania, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, in a report by The Associated Press. "It doesn't do a lot of good to move names around on organization charts if there aren't substantive changes. What's going to happen to the next Phoenix memo? Where's it going to end up?"