Did the FBI work closely enough with other law enforcement agencies when it was investigating Omar Mateen in 2013? Local police in Florida have said that the FBI should have given them more information about the man who went on to commit mass murder in Orlando last month, claiming his actions were guided by ISIS.
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This issue is likely to be a focus of future congressional inquiries into the events of Orlando — because when America suffers a terrorist attack, members of Congress tend to criticize the nation’s security agencies for not working together closely enough to prevent it. Just days before the Orlando shooting, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) was highlighting the “disturbing lack of collaboration” among agencies in the wake of another attack — the San Bernardino shooting last December.
U.S. counterterrorism professionals, meanwhile, tend to believe that such coordination problems are inevitable and are found among the security agencies of every democratic state.
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Both views are wrong. Congress fails to recognize that its own actions likely contribute to interagency failures, while security officials are misguided to believe that every country’s intelligence and law enforcement communities battle with turf wars.
There’s more to this story than bureaucratic politics
Are turf wars inevitable? A number of scholars of bureaucratic politics suggest that parochial self-interest affects the priorities and performance of government security agencies. Amy Zegart, for instance, writes that clashes of interest helped create the intelligence failures that led to 9/11. These interagency conflicts are an intrinsic feature of the national security landscape, she argues.
But is this really the case? My research, published recently in the European Journal of International Security, suggests that the answer is no. I analyzed U.S. counterterrorism operations in comparison to operations in the United Kingdom, based on numerous interviews with security officials in the two countries.
Security agencies in Britain and the United States most likely have a similar interest in maximizing their spheres of activity. In the post-9/11 era, however, turf wars have been rare among the British security agencies. I also found that the British agencies have achieved a higher level of operational integration than their counterparts within the U.S.
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To understand these differences, we need to look at two factors — state institutions and the organizational routines of security agencies.
The United States divides institutional power both federally and between the executive and legislative branches. Powerful congressional committees divide up key missions such as counterterrorism, so that they and the agencies that they oversee are all involved. As a result, there’s a proliferation of individual agencies with unclear and overlapping jurisdictions, which leads them to step on each other’s toes.
For example, since 9/11, intelligence units of both the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Defense (DOD) have stepped into key areas of the FBI’s domestic intelligence work on terrorism.
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In contrast, Britain has a centralized set of state institutions, including a more subservient Parliament, which tends to follow the government’s lead on security issues. The government has concentrated key counterterrorism responsibilities in a relatively small number of security agencies, each with a clear and distinct mission.
Within these different institutional contexts, security agencies in the two countries have developed quite different routines for ground-level inter-agency work.
The United States has an ad hoc approach
In the United States, security agencies negotiate over their overlapping mission space, often on an ad hoc basis. Relations between entire agencies can hinge on personal relations between individuals. While there are formal mechanisms for information sharing, informal ties are crucial for interagency counterterrorism in the United States. Such informal arrangements can work well at times — but they have a tendency to break down.
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Take the case of Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, who was under FBI investigation in 2008-2009 for his emails to a known inciter of terrorism, Anwar al-Awlaki. The FBI at that time tended to share information informally with DOD about investigations into DOD employees. In the Hasan case, however, the FBI did not communicate with DOD counterintelligence officials.
This was a significant error because DOD counterintelligence was better placed to evaluate the threat posed by its service member — and would likely have mounted a deeper probe into Hasan. Hasan slipped through the cracks and went on to kill 13 DOD employees at Fort Hood in Texas in November 2009.
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While the FBI and the Pentagon have since taken steps to improve their information-exchange procedures, the U.S. system has broader problems. The lack of clarity concerning mission space gives the FBI, DOD, DHS and other agencies free rein to make incursions into each other’s areas of responsibility.
As one FBI officer told me some years ago: “[DHS intelligence] were trying to get their oars in the water in a way that I think … actually hurt the mission, because people were spending time away from actually doing things to now having to coordinate with somebody who really had nothing, no value added.”
Britain takes a more formal approach
British police officers have also been known to bad-mouth other U.K. security agencies — but they rarely are in conflict with each other. The reason? The government gives each agency a clear and distinct mission, which encourages the development of more collaborative routines.
MI5 is responsible for domestic intelligence, while MI6 handles foreign intelligence. The London Metropolitan Police has the mandate to lead law enforcement investigations into terrorism anywhere in the United Kingdom. Unlike the Pentagon, the U.K.’s Ministry of Defense is not heavily involved in domestic counterterrorism. There’s little confusion over the agencies’ respective roles — and less likelihood of conflict over who has jurisdiction.
In Britain, interagency collaboration is also more formal and regularized, in contrast to the U.S. process. For example, MI5 desk officers have a mandate to task operatives from both their own agency and from the police. MI5 and the police work together even on sensitive tasks like the recruitment or handling of informants. When a particular case reaches a critical point, an Executive Liaison Group of MI5 and police investigators is formed to decide whether the suspects should be arrested or not.
Good interpersonal relationships are helpful in these contexts, but the formalized collaboration structure means they are not so crucial in the U.K. for coordination between entire agencies as they are in the United States.
Are there lessons to learn?
It is important to remember that the United States has strengths in counterterrorism that Britain cannot match. The immense capabilities of its individual intelligence agencies enable the United States to be effective in many cases. So coordination is not the only thing that determines the effectiveness of counterterrorism — but it plays a significant role, and it is an area where the United States can do better.
The formal routines and clear missions of Britain’s security agencies do offer some lessons for the United States. Indeed, the creation of the National Counterterrorism Center in 2004 introduced some useful formal mechanisms for threat analysis and information-sharing among U.S. agencies. However, the center is not an entity that can stamp out turf wars — nor has it changed the agencies’ general reliance on informal routines and interpersonal relationships.
In fact, these ways of working are unlikely to undergo significant change. Organization theory tells us that long-established routines largely go unquestioned in their particular contexts and are reproduced through the power of habit. The institutional conditions that led to these routines — for example, in Congress — are also unlikely to change.
The deficiencies in the coordination of U.S. counterterrorism have deep roots. Rather than simply blaming the agencies, members of Congress would do well to acknowledge the complex origins of the problem and their own role in helping to create it.
Frank Foley is a lecturer in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, and author of the book Countering Terrorism in Britain and France. This article draws from his recently published “Why inter-agency operations break down: US counterterrorism in comparative perspective” in the European Journal of International Security.