FBI Takes Counterterrorism Classes

Several dozen FBI agents gathered earlier this summer in a Washington, D.C., classroom for an unusual training session. There, a roster of experts from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point led an intensive course on counterterrorism.

The instructors came from a little-known research group at West Point called the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC), where they're conducting some of the most cutting-edge research on terrorism. The course was aimed at helping law enforcement battle terrorism by better understanding the enemy.

The class was reminiscent of those real estate seminars advertised on television — except in this case, most of the students carried a badge and a gun. And the curriculum included section titles such as the Origins of Sunni Islam, A History Of Afghanistan And Pakistan And Their Links To Jihad, Lebanese Hezbollah, and Arabic Language.

The idea is to fight radical Islam in much the same way the U.S. fought communism during the Cold War — exposing key law enforcement officials to an ideology and culture that until now they have not had reason to understand.

"During the Cold War, there were centers set up to educate people who we called Sovietologists," says Bill Braniff, who is in charge of the CTC's FBI training program. "The centers were supposed to help them really understand Communist ideology — not just Soviet ideology, but also the differences between Soviet ideology and Chinese communism. The intent was to play the China card — to find divisions within the ideology and exploit those."

The FBI and CTC want to apply those same lessons to radical Islam.

Terrorism As Tactic

The thinking is that if law enforcement understands Islamic ideology, and if they are exposed to various Islamic cultures and get even a smattering of the Arabic language, they will look at the battle against terrorism with a fresh and perhaps more culturally sensitive perception. And that, in turn, will make them better terrorism fighters.

"We begin every block of instruction explaining that terrorism is a tactic," says Braniff. "It is a human phenomenon and every race, culture [and] creed has generated or used terrorism to achieve its political, religious social ends, and we put the current threat in its historical context, its proper context."

The first session kicked off with a lecture by Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown University professor known as one of the deans of terrorism research.

Hoffman walked the class through the foiled 2006 al-Qaida plot to bomb 17 American and Canadian airliners. With a step-by-step slide presentation, he described the terrorists' backgrounds and their careful planning.

The conventional wisdom at the time was that al-Qaida was so weakened by the U.S. attacks that it couldn't or wouldn't attack hard targets, according to Hoffman. But the al-Qaida plot proved just the opposite. Commercial aviation was a very hard target.

The bombers had planned to put liquid explosives on the aircraft by putting them in Oasis and Lucozade drink bottles. The bottles were still sealed; they used a syringe to inject the liquid in the bottom of the bottles after having dyed it to make it look like the bottled drinks. The plan was to detonate the explosives with the battery from a disposable camera.

Decoding A Culture

In the afternoon, Rebecca Malloy, an Arabic expert at the Center, gave language instruction. Malloy broke down key phrases agents would need in the field — like how to say Federal Bureau of Investigation in Arabic. (It is even more of a mouthful in Arabic than in English.)

"Mektab is office or bureau," Malloy says. "Hakukat is investigation. And Federal, they don't have the word federal in Arabic so they adopted that from English. So Mektab Hakukat al-Federalee."

Malloy says she isn't expecting fluency. She is just hoping for familiarity. FBI agents must decode an entirely different culture, she says, and that needs to be done linguistically.

Think about something as fundamental to an investigation as a suspect's name. Arabic names are confusing. The class is meant to help agents sort through all that.

"A lot of the investigators have never been exposed to Arabic," said Malloy. "I think we're helping them identify at least some of the components that go into these people's names. It is not random, and when it is not random anymore, I think it makes their job a lot easier."

Big Picture

All this instruction is coming out of a place that most people don't even know exists. The CTC takes up just four offices in the old Bachelor Officers Quarters at West Point, but its impact belies its size.

The dozen or so people who work here have been responsible for helping change the way law enforcement organizations like the FBI look at terrorism. The center has also affected the ongoing debate on how to combat radical Islam.

The center grew out of the idea of having some sort of virtual terrorism training center on the West Point campus. After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Vincent Viola, the chairman of the New York Mercantile Exchange, offered funding that would make the virtual center an actual one.

Maj. Reid Sawyer, the director of the CTC, says many of the people who helped to design the FBI course have actually fought terrorism themselves. Sawyer has done several tours in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"We've all served in combat — fighting a counterterrorism mission — which just gives us a unique perspective to the academic questions that we are then studying and trying to find those answers," he says.

John G. Perrin, the special agent in charge of counterterrorism at the FBI's Washington Field Office, says the FBI recognized that tapping into the center's expertise would help agents out in the field by exposing them to a new way of thinking.

"They can reach back to [the course], and they can go back to the investigative skills that they already have — and that's very good," says Perrin. "The FBI is moving into this intelligence-driven organization, and it is not only taking this information and working cases, but we're looking at the bigger picture."

And that bigger picture requires looking beyond the typical sources for training and information. About two dozen of the FBI's field offices have put agents through the West Point course so far.

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