Mueller's Mandate
The FBI chief has a little job to do--overhaul the agency from top to bottom
Bob Mueller had been on the job just a week, and he was doing what all new bosses do--getting up to speed. Mueller was in the small conference room at the FBI's command center, but the television was turned off so he could concentrate on details of the bureau's investigation into the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole. Two men with links to al Qaeda had rammed an explosives-laden skiff into the warship in the port of Aden, Yemen, killing 17 sailors. "We were within 15 minutes of ending the briefing," says Michael Rolince, a top counterterrorism specialist who had just returned from Yemen, "when all the pagers went off." The time: 8:45 a.m. The date: Sept. 11, 2001. "It was a beautiful day out," Muel-ler recalls thinking. "How could a plane be so lost that it wouldn't see a tower?" The briefing resumed. A few minutes later, the second plane hit. In that instant, the world of Robert Mueller III changed forever, and so did that of the FBI. "One can't even call it baptism by fire," says Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff. "It was baptism by conflagration."
For nearly every one of the 95 years it has been in existence, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been all about investigating crimes, catching bad guys, and putting them behind bars. Crime prevention had never been at the core of the FBI's mandate. But when Mueller walked into the Oval Office three days after New York's twin towers fell, all that changed. "The briefing started with, `This is what happened on September 11, we'll be building a case, and so on,' " Card recalls. "And the president said, `What are you doing to prevent the next attack?' That was a change in mind-set that the president introduced."
And it is one Mueller has worked every day since to implement. Mueller's mandate, if he can fulfill it, will represent the most sweeping structural and philosophical shift in the FBI's history. In a series of exclusive interviews with U.S. News, Mueller and his top aides detailed the steps they have begun to take. The changes, they say, mean transforming an investigative agency into an intelligence-gathering service and reorienting virtually everything about the FBI's institutional culture and its traditional operating procedures.
Both sides now. Resistance, unsurprisingly, has already been encountered. Members of Congress, civil libertarians, police, and agencies like the CIA have questioned the FBI's competence for its new role even as they criticize the sweeping new powers the bureau has been given to carry it out. Mueller, in many respects, is a man caught impossibly in the middle, able to please some constituencies, but only at the risk of incurring the wrath of others. The stakes riding on the FBI's success, nevertheless, could not be higher. Last week's bombings in Saudi Arabia provided just the latest bloody evidence that the al Qaeda terrorist organization, while weakened, is apparently still able to attack and kill Americans overseas. And Mueller and his top deputies are not unmindful of what another terrorist catastrophe inside the United States would mean. "Just one more terror attack," says Larry Mefford, the FBI's assistant director for counterterrorism, "and we will be called a failure."
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