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The rationale for this shift was provided by the FBI itself. In January 1992, the George H. W. Bush White House asked all security agencies to reassess their "post-Soviet" priorities. At that fateful moment, the chief of the National Security Threat List Unit, in the FBI's Intelligence Division, suggested a radical shift in focus: Instead of neutralizing organized secret warfare by states, the counterintelligence community should target criminal acts by loose networks of rogue actors. The collapse of the Soviet Union, it was foreseen, would provide a fertile operational field for the transnational criminal. The threat list was revised accordingly: Three hundred FBI agents were pulled from intelligence duties and pushed into international crime.
The FBI unit chief who revised the threat list, Robert Phillip Hanssen, would later confess to being a Soviet and Russian agent. But by then the new notions about national security were dogma. In May 1994, FBI director Louis J. Freeh told Congress that "criminal cartels are now richer and stronger than many nations." The New York Times echoed that judgment: "The threats [today] are less nations than gangs. The harm they can do the United States is . . . a law-enforcement problem."
This doctrine was refined by former Carter defense secretary Harold Brown, whom Clinton chose to head the Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of the United States Intelligence Community. Brown redefined international terrorism — traditionally considered a form of political warfare — as a form of "global crime."