By David Johnston and Douglas Jehl, The New York Times
WASHINGTON -- The Central Intelligence Agency has begun a series of terrorism briefings for state and local law enforcement personnel, for the first time dispatching counterterrorism experts to cities and small towns to warn of the possibility of an attack by Al Qaeda this year, government officials said this week.
The C.I.A. briefings, which are being coordinated by the F.B.I., are conducted by intelligence analysts from the agency’s Directorate of Intelligence. They have visited small cities and towns across the country, the officials said, with more meetings planned.
Many of the briefers are analysts from the C.I.A.'s Counterterrorism Center at the agency’s headquarters at Langley, Va., which sifts through thousands of pieces of information to track terrorists worldwide. Sometimes they have been joined by the C.I.A.'s officers who work in several large cities in the United States, one intelligence official said.
The center started the briefings in recent weeks to advise local authorities about the terror threat as part of an effort “to put some context and flavor into the current threat environment,” which government officials have described as the most serious since the months before the Sept. 11 attacks, the intelligence official said.
In part, the briefings are a direct response to rising fears of a Qaeda attack sometime this year and reflect the government’s willingness to take previously untried steps to detect and possibly deter an attack. This week, the country’s new acting intelligence chief, John E. McLaughlin, was the latest senior administration official to warn that the threat of terrorist attack on the United States is more significant than at any other time since Sept. 11.
So far the C.I.A. officials have briefed law enforcement officials in about a dozen American cities and the effort is continuing, the intelligence official said. F.B.I. officials in the Midwest have contacted local authorities in many more cities and are trying to arrange briefings for sheriff’s offices and police departments throughout their jurisdictions.
The intelligence official would not say what information the C.I.A. analysts were providing to law enforcement officials, but indicated that it was similar to information that C.I.A. officials provided to members of Congress and others in recent classified briefings.
Other officials who have attended the briefings said the content of the meetings tracked closely with what had recently become publicly known about Al Qaeda’s intentions. Authorities have said that the reports of Al Qaeda’s designs on the United States are continuous, worrisome and corroborated by informants who are believed to be highly credible.
The arrival of a C.I.A. analyst in a small town appears to be a stark contrast from the agency’s past approach, some local police chiefs and sheriffs said. Few of them have ever met an intelligence analyst or ever received more than a dry, often uninformative intelligence bulletin containing information already made public by the news media.
“I wouldn’t say I was shocked that they were there,” said George G. Kehl, who for 26 years has been the police chief of Fishers, Ind., a suburb of 55,000 people north of Indianapolis. “But I was surprised. It was a first in my career.”
He said that at the meeting he attended early this month, the briefers identified themselves by what he thought were their true names. “These guys were not the underground people,” he said, referring to the agency’s clandestine services officers. “I don’t think the day will ever come when we see them - and I don’t think I’d want to.”
Chief Kehl said the meeting provided him with a fresh perspective about the threat, the capabilities of Al Qaeda and the insistent reports that Al Qaeda hopes to carry out a terror attack in the United States sometime this year. “There’s so much concentration on large cities that there is always the possibility of being targeted in a smaller area,” he said, even as he gauged the possibility of an attack in Fishers as low.
Other officials said C.I.A counterterrorism experts in large cities like New York or Los Angeles have met with local authorities at least periodically over the years, and more often since the Sept. 11 attacks. But they said the briefings in smaller communities represented a significant shift in approach for the C.I.A.
Legally, the C.I.A. is barred from engaging in intelligence collection activities inside the United States, but there is no prohibition on its analysts providing information to local law enforcement officials about subjects like terrorism. Increasingly, local officials, even Chief Kehl, have security clearances to be advised of classified information.
Earlier this week, the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, said at a meeting with New York Times editors and reporters that while the intelligence was not clear-cut, concern about possible attacks was growing outside of cities like Boston and New York, where the Democratic and Republican national political conventions will be held. “Both will be hard targets,” he said, referring to security at the convention cities. He suggested that the terror network might look elsewhere.
Mueller said analysts who had studied past attacks believed that Al Qaeda would not begin an attack without meticulous planning and said its operatives appeared to be deterred by security that diminishes their chances for success. With access heavily restricted at the two conventions, Mueller said authorities must anticipate that the terror network might seek alternative sites for an attack.
But he said that New York and Washington remained high on the suspected list of Osama bin Laden’s top targets. “Al Qaeda wants to go after the financial center of the country, which is New York, and the political center of the country, which is Washington,” he said.
One intelligence official said the C.I.A. briefings, which came about at the invitation of the F.B.I., represented a major change for the C.I.A., which in the past has had little interaction with local law enforcement officials. The intelligence officials said the briefings were being arranged in some areas by the more than 80 Joint Terrorism Task Forces around the country, which include F.B.I., Homeland Security, Secret Service and other federal, state and local law enforcement agencies.
In the past, state and local law enforcement officials complained that federal authorities refused to provide them with relevant intelligence. Inquiries by Congress and an independent commission into lapses by the C.I.A. and F.B.I. in the months before Sept. 11 have criticized the agencies for not sharing information and not coordinating their activities.
In addition, the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. have been criticized since the hijackings for not doing more to act on information that has emerged from intelligence reports, including the possibility that Qaeda terrorists might be considering a hijacking or using airplanes as a weapon, or might use outlying towns and cities as staging bases for their operations.