FBI has new duties, new high-tech center as it enters 91st year

Entering its 91st year with new duties that extend around the world, the FBI Friday opened a high-tech, $20 million operations center nearly the size of a football field to allow headquarters to manage up to five crises at once.

The new Strategic Information and Operations Center - called "sigh-ock" after its initials - has 35 separate rooms that can seat up to 450 people total and covers 40,000 square feet on the fifth floor of FBI headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue. It is 10 times bigger than its two-decade-old predecessor that could, with difficulty, handle two crises simultaneously.Bureau officials became convinced the old SIOC was outmoded in the summer of 1996 when they tried to manage investigations of the Olympic bombing in Atlanta, the explosion of TWA 800 and the Khobar Towers truck-bombing in Saudi Arabia at the same time.

"There weren't enough rooms or enough telephones," FBI Director Louis J. Freeh said. "We had people working at desks in the hallway outside and reading top secret material in the vending area across the hall."

The supersecret facility with no windows to the street, or even any outside walls, has a private ribbon-cutting today with former President George Bush as the FBI celebrates its 90th birthday.

Introducing the new SIOC to reporters for a one-time-only tour, Freeh said it was emblematic of the bureau's expanded responsibilities and technology.

He noted that the bureau's fastest growing component, its Counterterrorism Center, is arrayed in the offices around the SIOC - as is its violent crime unit, which handles domestic attacks such as the Oklahoma City bombing or hi-jack-ings.

Much of the counterterrorism work now extends overseas, to Saudi Arabia where U.S. soldiers have been killed in two bombings and East Africa where two U.S. embassies were bombed, for example. In the last five years, Freeh said, the FBI has nearly doubled its legal attaches working abroad - to 32 cities now. Eight more are to open soon - in Almaty, Kazakhstan; Ankara, Turkey; Brasilia, Brazil; Copenhagen, Denmark; Prague, Czech Republic; Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; Singapore and Seoul, Korea.

The computers at desks throughout the center and the 5-by-15-foot video screens on the walls of almost every room can display not only U.S. television broadcasts but also local TV channels from foreign countries. The bank of red-lettered digital clocks in each room can display the local time in five or six locations.

The FBI's new National Infrastructure Protection Center, tasked to prevent and respond to attacks on government or private computer systems that keep America running, will have three representatives on each of the 10-member watch teams that staff the center at all times. Also present around the clock: a representative of the National Security Agency's Cryptologic Security Group to provide information from the government's worldwide electronic eaves-drop-ping.

Behind a series of blond wood doors, the complex warren of workrooms, many of which can be combined or divided as need requires, have light gray carpets, paler gray walls and dark gray metal desks with white plastic tops. The desks are fixed in place only in two control rooms that manage the flow of information to each room; elsewhere they are modular and can be rearranged at will over floor-mounted electric and telephone plugs. Interior windows allow views into conference rooms or the SIOC's hallways.

Ron Wilcox, deputy chief of the SIOC, said the compartmented areas would allow bureau agents "to work in one room with District of Columbia police on a local kidnapping while another room works on a terrorist bombing with top secret data."