With America under a terrorist threat, you’d think the FBI would be busy keeping us safe from the terrorists. Instead, the bureau seems to have gone off on a side mission – trying to prevent the New York Police Department from gathering information to keep New Yorkers safe. That would be odd enough, but it seems to be doing this at a time when the FBI can’t seem to find someone willing to hang around New York to run its office here – or, for that matter, to run the bureau’s counterterrorism operation in Washington.

What is one to make of the report back in the New York Times in May where the FBI spokesman, Ed Cogswell, described the NYPD’s presence in Israel as “a problem”? That quote was in an article Judith Miller wrote before being packed off to prison for refusing to give up a confidential source. The same article quoted an Israeli police official, Anat Granit, as saying the FBI had promised to “kill” the idea of posting a New York police detective in Israel. The New Yorker magazine, meanwhile, quotes the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for intelligence, David Cohen, as saying that in the immediate aftermath of the Madrid train bombings of March 2004, he “got a call” – from Washington, the magazine says – “saying, ‘Don’t send anybody.’ I said, ‘They’re already on the plane.'”

One reads this sort of thing while also reading that the FBI has been pursuing an aggressive investigation against the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. It’s no wonder that a former Bush speechwriter, David Frum, and a former chairman of the Defense Policy Board in the Bush administration, Richard Perle, called the FBI “the single worst performer” among government agencies fighting terrorism.

Instead of interfering with the NYPD or harassing pro-Israel lobbyists, maybe the FBI – or Secretary Chertoff of homeland security or the attorney general or even the president – might have a look at the agency’s personnel policies and try to figure out how to slow the revolving door that has led to four different heads of the bureau’s New York field office in the last four years and six different heads of its counterterrorism directorate in Washington.

Naming them is like some kind of obscure trivia game: There was Barry Mawn, who left the New York field office in March 2002 and is now a consultant in Massachusetts; Kevin Donovan, who left the bureau in 2003 to work for Johnson & Johnson; Pasquale J. D’Amuro, who left on March 31, 2005, and went to work for Giuliani Partners; and now Mark Marshon. Even the FBI, it seems, can’t keep track of who is in charge; yesterday, the Web site of the FBI’s New York field office still listed Mr. D’Amuro as the assistant director in charge.

The six different assistant directors for counterterrorism at the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington were: Dale Watson, Mr. D’Amuro, Larry Mefford, John Pistole, Gary Bald, Willie Hulon. An FBI spokesman in New York, James Margolin, says that turnover isn’t as high among the agents in the New York office as it is at the top, and he says the turnover at the top is not unusual at large FBI field offices. Only someone with a lot of experience is likely to qualify for such a job, he said, but having a lot of experience brings one up against the FBI’s mandatory retirement age of 57.

Whatever the excuse, maybe the Senate Judiciary Committee, on which New York’s own Senator Schumer sits and which has oversight over the Justice Department, could take up the turnover problem in New York with Director Mueller. It’d be a more productive use of their time than blocking President Bush’s judicial nominees. Or – if one wants to solve the problem promptly – the president could just instruct the head of the FBI’s New York field office and its 2,000 employees to report to Commissioner Raymond Kelly of the NYPD. He’s been here the whole time and doesn’t seem eager to go anywhere else.