FBI

WASHINGTON -- Even as the FBI hails as a major success story its breakup of an alleged plot by "radical Islamists" to kill soldiers at Fort Dix, N.J., federal authorities acknowledge that the case has underscored a troubling vulnerability in the domestic war on terror. They say the FBI, despite an unprecedented expansion over the past five years, cannot possibly counter the growing threat posed by homegrown extremists without the help of two often unreliable allies. One is an American public that they lament is prone to averting its attention from suspicious behavior and often reluctant to get involved.

WASHINGTON -- Two rounds of potentially flammable tear gas were fired into a bunker at the Branch Davidian compound on the morning of the FBI's final assault in 1993, but both canisters bounced harmlessly off the shelter, a newly released FBI videotape indicates.The video seems to support the assertions of federal investigators that the tear-gas canisters had nothing to do with the fire that later took the lives of around 80 people at the compound outside Waco, Texas.But to congressional investigators who are increasingly wary of the FBI, the videotape raised other questions.

WASHINGTON -- Attorney General Janet Reno ordered U.S. marshals to the FBI's headquarters yesterday to seize a previously undisclosed tape recording of voice communications between FBI commanders and field agents during the ill-fated tear-gas assault at the Branch Davidian compound, Justice Department officials said.The recording contains the voices of agents asking for and receiving authorization from their operational commanders at Waco, Texas, to fire flammable military tear-gas rounds at a covered bunker not far from the main Branch Davidian compound several hours before a deadly fire ignited, leaving about 80 people dead.

He started out as a patrol officer in West Baltimore. Now, 25 years later, he's coming back as Maryland's top FBI man."I have roots in Baltimore," says Richard M. Mosquera, who was named yesterday as head of the Maryland-Delaware office of the FBI. "When I was a bodyguard for William Donald Schaefer, I saw the transition of the city from the rat-infested pier to the Inner Harbor."Mosquera, 47, is a 21-year FBI veteran who has traveled the world, from his days in an undercover heroin investigation in Hong Kong to his experiences in Moscow helping to combat Russian organized crime.

WASHINGTON -- House investigators issued broad subpoenas to the Justice Department, the FBI, the White House and the Pentagon yesterday, demanding to know who exactly was outside the Branch Davidian compound the day it erupted into flames, how long they had been there and what they had done in the hours preceding the conflagration.The subpoenas effectively launched the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee into a new investigation into Waco. An exhaustive inquiry in 1995 concluded that the Davidians had ignited the fire themselves on April 19, 1993, leading to the deaths of their leader, David Koresh, and about 80 members.

Three Northern Virginia men face federal robbery charges after FBI agents arrested them outside the home of a prosperous Lutherville restaurant owner.The agency alleges in charging documents that the three were preparing to break into the large brick house off Seminary Avenue.The target, according to the FBI, was the home of James Han, owner of Ming's Chinese restaurant in the 2100 block of York Road, in the Timonium Shopping Center. The suspects were arrested Thursday night.Han declined to be interviewed about the incident last night.

A man who is charged with abducting his children from Europe in violation of a Dutch custody order was spotted this week leaving a rental cabin outside Mobile, Ala., after he tried to enroll his two daughters in a local school, the FBI and the Baltimore County police confirmed yesterday.Christopher Yavelow has been the target of an FBI and police manhunt in five states since he was seen visiting his parents in Towson and Timonium four weeks ago. He eluded the FBI once again Wednesday after checking out of a cabin in Fairhope, Ala., a community of 12,000 on Mobile Bay.Mobile FBI spokesman Ray Zicarelli said Yavelow was spotted about noon on Wednesday after an article appeared in a local newspaper about the search.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- The FBI used an international conference of police chiefs yesterday to warn that domestic terrorists could use the onset of the new millennium to wage a violent war of hate.While stressing that U.S. intelligence agencies know of no specific threats against cities or people, the head of the FBI's national security division told members of the International Association of Chiefs of Police that they should not lightly dismiss the potential for trouble.Though the meeting in a conference room packed with police executives from the nation's smallest and largest departments was closed to the public, the FBI released a version of the secret report, which surfaced last week.

In 1986, Chicago's El Rukn street gang struck a deal with Libya to commit terrorist attacks against American planes and buildings.Informed of the plot, FBI agents tapped the gang's phones, gathered information and arrested the bad guys before they could do any damage. The FBI claimed that hundreds of lives were saved.Today, the El Rukn gang members are the prime examples of the FBI's long-running campaign for enhanced authority to tap cellular phone calls and wired communications. Agents say that changes in technology since then have made it difficult, if not impossible, to carry out the kind of surveillance that put El Rukn's leaders behind bars.

For years, an ancient ornamental headdress smuggled out of Peru has been stored in an evidence vault at the FBI's office in Woodlawn -- alongside guns seized from local drug dealers and jewelry recovered from heists.After a decade-long odyssey that began with the crown's theft by South American grave robbers, federal authorities plan to return it to Peruvian government officials next week."It's their property," said Special Agent Peter A. Gulotta Jr., a spokesman for Baltimore's FBI office, adding that the stamped metal headdress will be returned at a ceremony at the Peruvian Embassy in Washington on Monday.

Eschol Amelia Studnitz lost her $58,000 accounting job July 31 because a government background check deemed her "unsuitable" for a low-level security clearance. She was stunned. She had no criminal record. "I kept thinking, 'What could I have done?' " said the 59-year-old Carroll County resident, who goes by the name Amy. Her shock was warranted: Her firing was based on a mistake. And within days, her employer, Corporate Mailing Services of Arbutus, heard from the Social Security Administration that she could, in fact, work on a new contract handling mail for the agency.

Beware of a spam e-mail claiming to be from FBI Director John S. Pistole. The FBI warns that the fraudulent e-mail advises recipients that they are the beneficiary of a large sum of money, which they will be permitted to access once fees are paid and personal banking information is provided. The appearance of the e-mail, which incorporates photographs of FBI officials and the FBI seal, leads a recipient to believe that it is authentic. The typical schemes using the FBI name's are lottery endorsements and inheritance notifications, but they can cover a range of scams, including threats and malicious computer program attachments to bogus online auctions.

WASHINGTON - The Federal Bureau of Investigation is struggling to find enough agents and resources to investigate criminal wrongdoing tied to the country's economic crisis, according to current and former bureau officials. The bureau slashed its criminal investigative work force to expand its national security role after the Sept. 11 attacks, shifting more than 1,800 agents, or nearly one-third of all agents in criminal programs, to terrorism and intelligence duties. Current and former officials say the cutbacks have left the bureau seriously exposed in investigating areas like white-collar crime, which has taken on urgent importance because of the nation's economic woes.

In an extraordinary briefing yesterday, the FBI described in detail how a small army of scientists managed to trace samples of anthrax from the 2001 letter attacks to the bureau's chief suspect, microbiologist Bruce E. Ivins, at the Army's biodefense laboratory at Fort Detrick in Frederick. A panel of six microbiological experts joined top officials from the FBI's laboratory in the briefing - apparently an attempt to address concerns expressed by some scientists and others about the strength of the evidence linking Ivins to the high-profile case.

One of the nation's top biodefense researchers has died in Frederick, apparently in a suicide, just as the U.S. Justice Department was to file criminal charges against him in the anthrax mailing assaults of 2001 that killed five, the Los Angeles Times has learned. Bruce E. Ivins, 62, who for the past 18 years worked at the government's elite biodefense research laboratories at Fort Detrick, had been informed of the impending prosecution, people familiar with Ivins, his suspicious death and the FBI investigation said.

Steven J. Hatfill will forever be linked to his outing as a "person of interest" in the post-9/11 deadly anthrax scare. But he can rightly now claim he took on the U.S. government, its lawyers and the FBI for ruining his reputation - and won. The former Army researcher who was never arrested or charged in the case sued the federal government in 2003 in a dogged effort to clear his name. The government recently agreed to pay him $4.6 million to settle. But as these things go, notoriety as a once-suspected biological terrorist may be hard to shake.

The FBI is investigating Sen. Ulysses Currie, a leading Prince George's County Democrat, in connection with his consulting work for Shoppers Food & Pharmacy, a spokeswoman for parent company Supervalu in Minnesota said yesterday. Richard Wolf, an FBI spokesman in Baltimore, said that agents visited Currie's District Heights home yesterday afternoon after also serving a search warrant at Shoppers Food Warehouse's corporate headquarters in Lanham. "It's an ongoing investigation," said Wolf, who declined to provide additional information.

Amy Jo Lyons does not appear easily daunted. As the new chief of the FBI's Baltimore office - which oversees Maryland and Delaware - Lyons is only too aware of the devastating crime rate of the area's biggest city, one of the worst in the country. "It's a huge task," Lyons said yesterday as her third week at the helm of the regional office drew to a close. "I see there's a great need for strong law enforcement, and we're ready to fill it, along with our partners. It means there's a calling for us to be here."

CHICAGO -- It is considered one of the great unsolved mysteries of FBI history: how a seemingly quiet man in his mid-40s hijacked an airliner somewhere between Seattle and Reno, Nev., in November 1971, then parachuted out in his loafers and trench coat, making off with $200,000 in cash. Who was he? Did he survive? After all these years, federal authorities say they still do not know, and the case lingers and vexes and fascinates as the only unsolved airplane hijacking in U.S. history.

WASHINGTON -- The FBI is quietly reconstructing the cases against Khalid Sheik Mohammed and 14 others accused as al-Qaida leaders being held at Guantanamo Bay, spurred in part by U.S. concerns that years of CIA interrogation have yielded evidence that is inadmissible or too controversial to present at their coming war crimes tribunals, government officials familiar with the probes said. The process is an embarrassment for the Bush administration, which for years held the men incommunicado overseas and allowed the CIA to extract information from them in coercive ways that would not be admissible in a U.S. court of law - and might not be allowed even in military commissions, some former officials and legal experts said.