FBI chief Louis Freeh is opening the agency's first Moscow office with a pledge that it will help keep Russia's crime wave from spilling over into the United States.
"We need to be here not so much to assist our counterparts, but to prevent and prepare for the threats of crime coming out of this region of the world and impacting directly in the United States," Freeh said Sunday.The two-agent office is the culmination of a 10-nation tour of East Europe, the first by an FBI director.
The FBI office in Moscow will operate under the supervision of the American ambassador and will not directly conduct investigations except when authorized to do so by Russian authorities.
The main task of the FBI's 22nd field office overseas will be to exchange information with the Russians on criminal activities, including possible attempts to smuggle nuclear materials out of the country.
"We don't want to wait, and neither do the Russian police, for the first large-scale diversion of these materials which could be used for great destruction in Russia, in the United States, anywhere else," Freeh said.
"The world has gotten too small and too dangerous and the nature of crime has become so transnational that we need to go where the crime is before it gets here," he said.
He said U.S. law enforcement waited 50 years before becoming involved in the fight against Italian organized crime. "And we're now, although being very successful, still suffering the consequences of that delay."