Searching For Spies

FBI Director Robert Mueller on Wednesday promised broader use of lie detectors and a closer check of employee financial records to help deter or catch spies within America's elite law enforcement agency.

Mueller acknowledged delicate issues of privacy and trust. But he said FBI employees must realize that security needs to be improved after last year's arrest of FBI agent Robert Hanssen, who has pleaded guilty to selling secrets to Moscow for nearly two decades.

"Every employee should recognize that in the wake of Hanssen, we have to emphasize security more than we have," Mueller told reporters during a wide-ranging interview at FBI headquarters. "I will say, anybody who looks at our organization realizes that security was not a priority. We've moved to address that."

Mueller's remarks precede the release of a study on security within the FBI by a commission led by former Director William H. Webster. The report is expected to harshly criticize lax security inside the agency.

The seven-person commission - some of whose members met with Hanssen over four days - expects to deliver its report to Attorney General John Ashcroft as early as Thursday or Friday. Webster is to testify next week about the findings before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Mueller and his new chief for internal security, Kenneth H. Senser of the CIA, said the FBI will soon administer new lie-detector tests to 1,000 more employees. Earlier results of 700 found that fewer than 10 raised red flags, such as possible deception, that warranted additional scrutiny. Mueller declined to discuss whether those who flunked were still working with top-secret documents.

Both Mueller and Senser said they are studying the best way to broaden use of polygraphs across the FBI's roughly 28,000 employees but are focusing for now on testing agents and others with access to the most sensitive secrets. Mueller pledged that the FBI is "not going to polygraph people indiscriminately across the bureau."

"Nobody likes taking a polygraph," he said. "I didn't particularly enjoy taking a polygraph."

Senser said the FBI will expand its use of commercial records, such as listings of property sales or other transactions, to compare against the disclosures agents make about their finances. The bureau also is considering how to use psychological profiles of employees to detect behaviors that might lead to spying.

"Our goal is to deter those people, if they're thinking rationally. In some cases they don't," Senser said. "If we can't deter them, to try to minimize that time between when they make the decision to go bad and when they actually get detected, and along that way, minimize the damage that's done."

Webster said in an interview Tuesday that tighter security against possible spies inside the FBI will require sophisticated "electronic tripwires" activated when employees try to review off-limits secrets.

The tripwires "will make it more difficult (for spies) in a deterrent sense - knowing they'll be more apt to be observed," Webster said.

The commission's focus over 13 months was "to examine the (FBI's) security techniques in light of what (Hanssen) was able to do, focusing on prevention and earlier detection," Webster said. Webster said he did not meet with Hanssen.

Webster said that in the past, when sensitive materials typically consisted of paperwork tucked inside metal filing cabinets, government librarians could prevent an investigator or employee from seeing off-limits documents.

In an increasingly digital age - when documents, maps or photographs reside on computers and can be more easily copied or stolen - the FBI must rely on a new generation of computer tripwires that can monitor employees reading, downloading or printing sensitive documents.

"This is only a small piece of what we're talking about, but it's an important one," Webster said.

The FBI already is at work on such a system, part of its "Trilogy" technology overhaul, but officials acknowledge that it is years from widespread use throughout the bureau. The FBI's Robert Chiaradio said that the new system of tripwires will tell investigators "who left a footprint in my case."

It will closely limit access to sensitive electronic documents to those agents approved to look at them, and it will track who prints copies, said Chiaradio, the FBI's executive assistant director for administration. He said the agency's current technology can't keep track of who is looking at what online.

"We don't know what we don't know," Chiaradio said during a demonstration for reporters several weeks ago.

Even while bemoaning the FBI's inadequate computers - some of which are generations out of date - Mueller told a congressional oversight panel last month: "It is critically important that you have the adequate security. ... We are in the process of doing it, but it is not a simple process. But we are getting there."