Security Officials Considering Plan to Combine Terror Forces

Moving quickly on President Bush’s plan to create a national terrorism threat center, national security officials said today that they were considering moving all counterterrorism operations at the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. into the same building. The idea goes beyond the concept Mr. Bush announced on Tuesday night in his State of the Union address for creating a national terrorism threat center, and it would carry tremendous symbolic weight for two agencies often at odds in coordinating operations. “There are obviously advantages to having two of the main agencies in the fight against terrorism being located together,” a government official said. “There will be meetings and discussions to determine if that makes sense.” Officials emphasized that the idea was in the discussion stage, but they said that George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, and Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, had talked recently about whether it could work. Under one plan, the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. would move their counterterrorism operations — and their several thousand employees — to Northern Virginia to help create the terrorism center. Full Story