Tanya DeGenova

Tanya S. DeGenova

E-mail:
tanya@tsdconsulting.com

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Tanya S. DeGenova, CPP
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In the News 2002

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 Tanya S. DeGenova, CPP
CEO and Managing Director
P.O. Box 568
Marblehead, MA 01945

E-mail:
tanya@tsdconsulting.com

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In the News 2001

On June 11, 2002 DeGenova was a guest of Laura Knoy's "The Exchange" on New Hampshire's National Public Radio.The topic was the FBI.

Here is a link to the radio broadcast.

"FBI The Exchange 06/11/2002 Laura Knoy

Congress and many Americans are pretty upset to learn the agency had clues that might have thwarted the September 11th attacks. We’ll look at a new FBI restructuring plan and whether it will make a difference. Laura’s guests are Malcom Sparrow, a professor at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government [http://www.ksg.harvard.edu]. Tanya DeGenova, CEO, TSD Security Consulting Group [http://www.tsdconsulting.com] and retired FBI agent, and former US Senator Warren Rudman."
Friday, May 31, 2002 By Meredith Warren Eagle-Tribune Writer

Ex-agent: Don't blame Methuen native

A former FBI agent said too much blame is being placed on Methuen native David P. Frasca for the agency's failure to react to crucial reports that may have prevented the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. "You can't place blame and you shouldn't place blame," said Tanya S. DeGenova, a retired special agent who worked at the bureau's Washington, D.C., headquarters, where Frasca is head of the agency's Radical Fundamentalist Unit.

Frasca, a 1976 Methuen High School graduate, was a popular student -- voted "king" by his classmates -- and a star athlete. He has stayed in contact with local friends, and his mother lives in Methuen. Over the past week, he has come under increasing fire after Minneapolis Special Agent Coleen Rowley sent a searing memo to FBI Director Robert Mueller.

The May 21 letter blasted Frasca's office and FBI headquarters for fumbling the investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui, dubbed the "20th hijacker" by authorities who say he was being trained to take part in the Sept. 11 hijackings. Moussaoui was arrested in August, and Rowley said if agents had been allowed to investigate him more completely, they might have uncovered the Sept. 11 plot. While she never mentions Frasca by name, Rowley's letter also accuses the office he supervises of failing to act on a July report from a Phoenix FBI agent that Middle Eastern men with ties to Muslim extremist groups were training to fly planes.

Three U.S. senators sent a letter to Mueller demanding to know what Frasca's role was in evaluating the field office's appeals to further investigate Moussaoui. In her 13-page letter to Mueller, Rowley points to "the counterterrorism unit chief" and the "FBI Supervisory Special Agent (SSA)" as the two most involved in the Moussaoui matter. Although the name of the agent has not been made public, it has been reported that, as unit chief, Frasca was his or her boss. DeGenova, a former SSA at both the FBI headquarter's National Security Division and the Boston field office who now runs a private investigative business based in Boston and Marblehead, called Rowley's letter a "cover your (behind) a little bit" memo. DeGenova said she was not a personal acquaintance of Frasca's when she worked at headquarters from 1992 to 1996, but "never heard anything bad about him."

When a report is filed by a field agent, DeGenova said, it must pass through a chain of command. The field agent first brings the information to a supervisor in his own office before it is sent to an SSA at FBI headquarters, she said. If the SSA determines that there is "probable cause" for further investigation, the report is passed on to the FBI director, the Department of Justice and finally to a special court staffed by federal circuit judges. All of this must occur before a court order is issued, she said. Because of this mechanism, the blame cannot be placed solely on Frasca, she said. The actions of the Minneapolis field office and Frasca's bosses must also be investigated, she said.

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In her 13-page letter to Mueller, Rowley alleges that agents in the Minnesota office arrested Moussaoui on immigration law violations after a Minnesota flight school became suspicious of him and informed the FBI. After learning from a French intelligence agency that Moussaoui had ties to "radical fundamentalist Islamic groups and activities connected to Osama bin Laden," wrote Rowley, the Minneapolis agents "became desperate to search the computer laptop that had been taken from Moussaoui." The agents sought a warrant to check Moussaoui's computer, she wrote, but were denied by Frasca's office. "It is obvious ... that the agents in Minneapolis who were closest to the action and in the best position to gauge the situation locally, did fully appreciate the terrorist risk/danger posed by Moussaoui," she wrote, adding that it was hard for her to accept the FBI's "20-20 hindsight" justification for its failure to act.

At this point, DeGenova said, if Rowley wasn't satisfied with the response from Frasca's office, it was her responsibility to pursue it further with her own supervisor, who could have then contacted Frasca's bosses. DeGenova said that "sometimes things fall through the cracks" at the bureau's headquarters. As an SSA, she said, she often worked seven days a week and had little administrative assistance to deal with field reports that inundated the office. Sometimes, she said, the field agents even handed in reports that were not properly written. "The SSAs in headquarters are not just slugs or inept. They're actually overworked," she said.

In her letter, Rowley blames the SSA for "almost deliberately thwarting" the Minneapolis agents' efforts to obtain warrants for Moussaoui and for chastising the agents for notifying the CIA about their concerns. She said that the SSA downplayed the information collected by the Minneapolis office about Moussaoui "in order to get out of the work" of seeing the report through. The supervisor took the time to read each word of the report and then substituted "his own choice of wording," she said. Rowley also complained that her office was never told about a July 2001 memo from a Phoenix FBI agent warning that operatives from al-Qaida might be training at U.S. flight schools. She wrote that this memo and the information on Moussaoui should have been enough to warrant further investigation by the FBI. Finally, Rowley criticized Mueller and the FBI bureaucracy as a whole. "I have deep concerns that a delicate and subtle shading/skewing of facts by you and others at the highest levels of FBI management has occurred and is occurring," she wrote. With the many layers of FBI bureaucracy and the number of careers at stake, DeGenova said, the slip-up could be the result of "people in the bureau putting their careers ahead of public interest." If that is the case, those individuals must be exposed, she wrote.

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