F.B.I. Was Warned It Could Not Meet Terrorism Threat
A top secret report warned top officials of the F.B.I. in the months before Sept. 11 that the bureau faced significant terrorist threats from Middle Eastern groups like Al Qaeda but lacked enough resources to meet the threat, senior government officials said.

The internal assessment, one of the bureau's most closely held documents, found virtually every major F.B.I. field office undermanned in evaluating and dealing with the threat posed by groups like Al Qaeda, the officials said.

The document, called the Director's Report on Terrorism, provided detailed recommendations and proposed spending increases to address the problem, officials who have seen it said.

Despite this assessment, the bureau failed to win an increase in the Justice Department spending request submitted shortly before the Sept. 11 attacks. On Sept. 10, Attorney General John Ashcroft rejected a proposed $58 million increase in financing for the bureau's counterterrorism programs. But a Justice Department official said today that the director's report was not provided to Mr. Ashcroft's budget staff.

Even as the director's report was describing how the bureau lacked the ability to respond adequately to the wide array of significant terrorist threats facing the nation, bureau officials missed clues from at least two of its field offices about the possibility of a terrorist attack on the United States, a failure that led this week to the announcement of a sweeping overhaul of the bureau's mission by its director, Robert S. Mueller III.

…the report did provide an accounting of the abilities of each F.B.I. field office in the country to deal with the overall terrorist threat. It graded the ability of each office to deal with overall terrorist threats, and also looked ahead to try to determine how much more would be required over the next five years. Based on a color-coded system, with red meaning that a field office was unable to counter the terrorist threat in its region, most of the major F.B.I. field offices were listed as red, officials said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/01/national/01INQU.html?todaysheadlines