By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor

Breaking silence and defying warnings from his FBI bosses, the agent whose internal protests revealed the bureau’s illegal use of secret National Security Letters went public Saturday, blasting the agency for discrimination in the ranks and a lack of interest in Arab language and culture.

Bassem Youssef, 49, once the FBI’s top Arab-American Middle East expert, told a conference of the American Library Association conference in Philadelphia that the bureau’s emphasis on traditional crime-fighting skills over understanding the culture of the communities targeted by al Qaeda undermines the fight against terrorism.

“The FBI has publicly stated that expertise in working counterterrorism matters, and cultural understanding of the Middle East and the radical Islamic groups, as well as the language, are not necessary to run the counterterrorism division,” Youssef said.

“Why would any Arab-American who may be the target of (FBI) recruitment ... be interested?” he asked, according to an Associated Press account.

FBI officials last week demanded that Youssef clear any prepared remarks for the association’s conclave in Philadelphia early Saturday morning, Jan. 12.

In response, Youssef, whom the CIA honored with a National Intelligence Medal for his undercover work against Islamic terrorists in the early 1990s, scrapped plans for a speech in favor of responding to questions from the audience.

An FBI spokesman confirmed that Youssef had been warned not to give a speech without clearance, a process can take days, if not weeks, but which was necessary to protect employees and classified information.

“He has his First Amendment right,” said spokesman Richard Kolko.

Youssef’s lawyer, Stephen M Kohn, suggested that the FBI had displayed a disdain for Middle East expertise in its appointment of counterterrorism chiefs since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, none of whom had experience in the region.

Arthur M. Cummings II, whom the FBI on Friday named its executive assistant director for national security, speaks Chinese, not Arabic, Kohn noted.

The FBI, which considers Chinese espionage a major threat to U.S. national security, said Cummings has broad counterterrorism and counterintelligence experience overseas, including the Middle East.

Youssef filed suit against the bureau in 2003, alleging that he was passed over for several promotions after the Sept. 11 attacks despite his award-winning performance in counterterrorism and fluency in Arabic.

The suit said the FBI had a “glass ceiling” preventing the promotion of U.S. citizens born in Arab countries.

“No other non-Arab FBI employee with similar background and experience in counterterrorism was willfully blocked from working 9/11 related matters,” the suit alleged. “In fact, numerous non-Arab FBI employees with far less experience and expertise in counterterrorism were assigned to 9/11 related work.”

The FBI denies discriminating against him and points to a dramatic increase in the number of Arabic-language qualified personnel in its ranks since Sept. 11.

“Over six years have gone by since 9/11 without a successful attack by international terrorists on U.S. soil . . . It would be difficult to make a case that the FBI is not working effectively against terrorism,” FBI spokesman Richard Kolko said Saturday in a statement.

Victim of Retaliation

The son of immigrant Christian Egyptians, Youssef grew up in Los Angeles and joined the FBI in 1982.

At one point he coordinated the bureau’s investigation into the Islamic terrorists who carried out the first, 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Later he was put in charge of the FBI’s liaison with seven Middle East countries from the U.S. Embassy in Saudi Arabia, where his work also won lavish praise from his bosses,

But on the eve of the Sept. 11 attacks, in what appears to be a bizarre case of mistaken identity, his superiors evidently confused him with one or more other Arab-American FBI agents who had received poor job performance evaluations and put him on the shelf.

Youssef complained to his congressman, Rep. Frank R. Wolf , R-Va., who abruptly summoned FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III to his office to meet with Youssef.

Mueller’s aides were incensed at Youssef’s temerity, they later admitted in depositions. Eventually the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which is responsible for reviewing misconduct allegations, found “sufficient circumstantial evidence” that they had retaliated against him.

But in the meantime, Youssef was relegated to jobs where his counterterrorism expertise, Arabic fluency and undercover experience went unused, At the same time, the FBI was struggling to find such skills to defend against new al Qaeda attacks.

In 2005, Kohn got several high FBI officials to admit in his now infamous videotaped depositions that they didn’t know the most basic facts about Islamic terrorism, including the difference between Sunnis and Shiites.

Youssef’s discrimination case is pending in U.S. District Court.

Youssef was eventually assigned to the FBI Headquarters’ Communications Analysis Unit, which also boomeranged.

He quickly discovered that supervisors were routinely, and falsely, claiming “emergencies” to obtain the telephone, financial, Internet and even library records of thousands of U.S. citizens via National Security Letters, or office warrants that supervisors could write for themselves without court approval.

The Justice Department’s Inspector General would later find that the letters “contained factual misstatements,” such as claims that the FBI had submitted subpoena requests to a U.S. attorney’s office when, in fact, it hadn’t. The IG also found the letters were often issued when there was no emergency.

Youssef promptly complained to the FBI General Counsel’s office, according to a letter his lawyer, Kohn, sent to Sen. Charles E. Grassley , R-Iowa, a longtime critic of the FBI on the Judiciary Committee.

“At all times, the [National Security Law Branch] and the FBI [Office of the General Counsel] knew that the field offices and operational units were non-compliant in obtaining the legal documentation,” Kohn wrote.

ALA vs. FBI

National security letters, or NSLs, had long nettled the American Library Association, which in 2003 passed a resolution condemning their use. Librarians were forbidden to tell patrons that their records had been reviewed by the FBI.

Kohn suggested that Youssef would draw a direct line on Saturday between the NSL excesses and a lack of terrorism expertise in the ranks of the FBI, for his audience of librarians.

“They’re a strong civil liberties group, so what they need to understand is that the incompetence and lack of subject matter expertise in counterterrorism not only hurts the terrorism investigations but also impacts civil liberties,” Kohn said.

“For example, if a case agent can’t understand the nature of a threat and classifies a benign incident as an emergency and gets a wiretap of some sort, or does an NSL search [of personal records] when there was no real reason to do it, you’re violating privacy.”

The FBI takes strenuous exception to charges that it lacks terrorism expertise and language capabilities.

“The FBI uses a combination of Special Agents, Language Analysts, and Contract Linguists to address its foreign language translation requirements, all with tested foreign language proficiency as determined by the Interagency Language Roundtable,” FBI spokesman Richard Kolko said.

The number of FBI Special Agents who could speak at least some Arabic had increased from 29 to 46 since Sept. 11, 2001, he said. The number of Contract Linguists and Language Analysts “who meet FBI Arabic language test standards” has ballooned from 70 to 285 in the same period.

“The FBI also has access to the National Virtual Translation Center, which serves as the clearinghouse to provide timely and accurate translation of foreign intelligence for Intelligence Community agencies,” Kolko added. “Although we always look to increase the numbers through our recruiting efforts, we have the tools available to do our job.”

BACKCHANNEL CHATTER

My Dec. 20 column warning that “Libya is close to getting off the hook” for millions of dollars due families who suffered the loss of loved ones in the PanAm 103 and LaBelle discotheque bombings drew plenty of heat.

Some suggested that I had somehow taken Libya’s side by merely reporting on the conclusion of a Scottish criminal commission that a “miscarriage of justice” might have occurred in the Pan Am trial. Critics who support that view point to the early suspicions of U.S. intelligence that an Iranian-back terrorist group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, had really downed the airliner (in response to the accidental downing of an Iranian passenger jet by a U.S. Navy ship six months earlier).

Critics also denounced my reporting that at least two informants had received million-dollar rewards for providing evidence against the Libyans.

One of those who wrote me was the FBI agent in charge of the U.S. side of the PanAm 103 case, retired Special Agent Richard Marquise. After several e-mail exchanges, I invited him to write a critique for publication here. It is reproduced in its entirety below:

“We initially speculated it was the PFLP-GC based on events which had occurred in Germany in late 1988. We went with that premise until the painstaking evidence collection in Scotland (done by police officers not having any political agenda) turned the investigation in a different direction.

“By this time, we had reached an agreement with the CIA and other intelligence agencies to completely share information. With their assistance and the meticulous police investigation, this led to the eventual indictments.

“You quote several sources but Vince Cannistraro [the CIA official in charge of the agency’s investigation of PanAm 103] retired before the evidence began to lead to Libya.

“Your quote ‘more sinister factors were at work in the investigation’ which was attributed to Professor Black and other ‘authoritative sources close to the case’ is taken from people who only know what they believe but have no inside information.

“I can promise you as a 31-year FBI veteran who was proud of my service to America; no sinister forces were ever involved. If you (or anyone) were to speak with Stuart Henderson (the Scottish Senior Investigating Officer) or myself, we would tell you we followed the evidence, the way we were trained and no political or sinister forces were involved. Libya was implicated because of the evidence, not because we wanted to blame someone other than Syrian-backed terrorists.

“Edwin Bollier, the Swiss businessman who made the timer which blew up Pan Am Flight 103, seems to forget he went to a US Embassy in January 1989 after reading in the news that the ‘evidence’ pointed to the PFLP-GC cell in Germany (and therefore to Syria). He left an unsigned note implicating Libya — long before we knew anything about the timer, MEBO or Bollier, as that evidence was not developed until nearly two years would pass.

“Since 1992, Bollier’s story has changed. I would prefer to believe what he told a Swiss magistrate, the FBI and Scottish investigators in 1990 and 1991, not what he is now saying. I was the FBI official who met with Mr. Bollier in Washington, and I can assure you no one offered him (or any other witness for that matter) anything to implicate the Libyan Government.”

First posted Jan. 12, 2008 1:50 a.m.