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."
A host of friends and colleagues say Mueller is the right man for the job. A Princeton grad, decorated marine, private-sector attorney, and former homicide prosecutor, Mueller, 58, has spent 30 years in law enforcement, much of it as a federal prosecutor (story, Page 24). "He has a hard-driving management style that doesn't tolerate people who don't give 100 percent," says David Schertler, who supervised Mueller in the homicide section of the U.S. attorney's office in Washington, D.C. In San Francisco, when he was brought in to overhaul the U.S. attorney's office there, Mueller ruffled plenty of feathers, but in the end, he boosted morale and increased prosecutions. Even at Princeton, friends say, Mueller was a man in a hurry, but he's a man in a deadly serious hurry now. "We're in a race," Mueller says, "against the next terrorist attack."
The race is far from over, but Mueller can point to some evidence that the FBI is closing the gap with the terrorist groups that seemed to operate with impunity before 9/11. There hasn't been a major attack on U.S. soil in 20 months. And the FBI has been successful in identifying "sleeper cells" in the United States and disrupting al Qaeda operations in places like Detroit and Lackawanna, N.Y. But these have been smaller-scale investigations, mainly of secondary players. Most of the planning for the attacks on New York and Washington, by contrast, occurred overseas. "So by definition," the FBI's Mefford explains, "our intelligence agencies are going to be in key roles for us, and it's going to be very difficult without that information to be as effective as we need to be. It's a partnership."
Critics have a different take. The FBI, they say, has simply been unable to penetrate the world of violent Islamic fundamentalists on its own. "As 9/11 was being planned," says a former intelligence official, "there was not one [successful FBI] penetration in al Qaeda." The FBI's inability to find the most dangerous terrorists, adds John Martin, the Justice Department's former top counterintelligence official, "indicates a lack of penetration of cells in this country."
Mother ship. The FBI's miscues in the months before the 9/11 attacks have been well documented. The first was headquarters' refusal to approve a request by FBI agents in Minneapolis for an intelligence wiretap on Zacarias Moussaoui, now charged with being a 9/11 conspirator. The second was the failure of FBI headquarters to heed the now infamous memo from a Phoenix-based agent urging a study of the large numbers of Middle Eastern men training at U.S. flight schools.
In order to ensure that such leads get stitched together in the future, Mueller is making big changes. The first has to do with the role of FBI headquarters. Since the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the FBI's sprawling New York field office served as the "office of origin" for all terrorism cases. That, Mueller says, was both wrong and unfair. "I can't turn to New York," he explains, "and say, `You in the New York field office [are] responsible for protecting the United States.' " Instead, Mueller has made the FBI headquarters, just seven blocks from the White House, the "office of origin" for all terrorism inquiries. Ultimately, FBI brass will have 1,200 special agents and analysts assigned to counterterrorism work; 570 are on board so far. The new team is responsible for coordinating all terrorism investigations, ensuring, theoretically, that disparate strands of information are sifted, analyzed, and understood, and then shared as needed. Field offices can no longer open and close a terror investigation without notifying headquarters. "It's very important that there be responsibility in one place . . ." Mueller says, "because only from the headquarters view can you see whether or not there are leads in Portland or Seattle that would tie in to a lead in Miami or elsewhere." President Bush has also ordered the FBI to join forces with the CIA and others in a new center for analyzing terrorist threats.
More than a few agents question the wisdom of "headquarters knows best." After all, they say, both the Moussaoui and Phoenix screw-ups originated aboard the mother ship. Mueller and his deputies counter that the new system will ensure that agents get the best guidance. "There's still a tremendous amount of respect for the field agent," says Pat D'Amuro, executive assistant director for counterterrorism and counterintelligence. "What the field needs to understand is there will be oversight. . . . That does cause tension because people don't want headquarters running their cases."
Following Tiger. Mueller's second big change is to upgrade the bureau's Stone Age computers. A technology buff, Mueller is a big believer in former GE chairman Jack Welch's philosophy that transforming an organization's technology can transform the organization. Last June, Mueller hired former IBM executive Wilson Lowery to direct a multimillion-dollar upgrade. The challenge, says Lowery, an avid golfer, is "like teeing off 200 yards behind Tiger Woods." But the challenge, Mueller says, must be met: "We have to transform ourselves, from a organization that is paper driven, that can be somewhat slow to move . . . to a flexible organization that can move quickly."
He's got a long way to go. Before the September 11 attacks, FBI agents were still using old "386" and "486" computers and had no Internet access or FBI E-mail addresses. After the attacks, FBI headquarters staff had to send photographs of the 19 hijackers to the 56 field offices by FedEx because they lacked scanners. "Top managers, including [former director] Louis Freeh, didn't use computers and weren't chagrined about it," says the Justice Department's inspector general, Glenn Fine. For decades, agents struggled with a balky software package called Automated Case Support that was anything but automated, requiring 11 keystrokes for every search. In the past year, Lowery has distributed 22,000 new computers to field offices. Agents now have shared Internet capabilities and individual FBI E-mail addresses.
When Mueller arrived at the Hoover building, the FBI had already embarked on a technology upgrade package known as Trilogy, but Lowery says it didn't offer agents sophisticated new search capabilities. Mueller revised the hardware requirements and nixed the Trilogy package. He brought in a team of agents, supervisors, analysts, and secretaries to come up with an alternative and took personal interest in the project, even attending technical meetings. Says Deputy FBI Director Bruce Gebhardt: "You [could] see his eyes light up."
The new $596 million software package will be unveiled in December, six months behind schedule and $138 million over budget, but Lowery says it will be worth it. For the first time, agents will be able to do complex searches, E-mail color photos of suspects, and search for trends. All 56 FBI field offices will have access to the same information. The upgrade includes a 40 million-page terrorism database of evidence dating back to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, documents seized from Afghanistan, and 2 million pages of cable traffic. Agents searching for vulnerabilities to terrorists can now access even the Phoenix memo--instantly.
It all sounds good--on paper. But despite the change in the role of FBI headquarters, and after all the new computers are plugged in, Mueller's biggest challenge will be to sell the "prevention first" philosophy to a workforce that may simply be unwilling to buy into it. Busting criminals is still the FBI's bread and butter, and busting criminals is still what the FBI is doing most. Mueller has shifted 500 agents from drug squads to counterterrorism work, and he has tripled the number of agents devoted to terrorism. But that still means only a fifth of the 11,500-agent workforce is devoted to counterterrorism. Terrorism prosecutions are up, but they constitute just a fraction of the bureau's total workload, according to a U.S. News analysis of statistics compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a Syracuse University research group (chart, Page 22). And the FBI's conviction rate for terrorism cases is lagging behind that of other crimes. One reason could be that while Mueller has made terrorism a priority, Congress has not reduced the number of laws the FBI must enforce; terror cases are also complex. Changing any institution takes time, and the FBI has been resistant to change. Many agents signed up because they love the thrill of chasing bank robbers and drug dealers. "You're saying, `Eighty percent of all the stuff you were doing for the last 15 years is not important anymore'?" asks one agent. "Huh?"
Risk city. Change may come slowly for other reasons. Some FBI supervisors believe it would be a mistake for special agents to stop investigating bank robberies, white-collar crimes, and drug syndicates because they develop sources working those kinds of cases. U.S. attorneys also control powerful fiefdoms around the country and can exert a strong influence on what kinds of cases FBI agents in their jurisdictions pursue. In January, Thomas DiBiagio, the U.S. attorney in Baltimore, excoriated the FBI field office there for having become "a marginal presence at best." In a letter, DiBiagio complained to the special agent in charge of the Baltimore field office, Gary Bald, that the bureau's focus on terrorism had distracted agents from DiBiagio's top priorities--violent crime, white-collar fraud, and public corruption. "The FBI has become distracted," DiBiagio wrote, "and almost useless." Bald says terrorism "is the FBI's No. 1 priority, and if it causes us to be providing fewer criminal cases for prosecution, it's an undesirable byproduct, but it's got to be tolerated." Sources say Mueller and DiBiagio exchanged sharp words. DiBiagio got the message. "There was a failure on my part to adjust to the change quickly enough," he now says. ". . . I wish I would have figured it out sooner."
It's not just philosophical, cultural, or bureaucratic obstacles that could stymie Mueller's changes. There's also the reality that proactive operations to penetrate terror cells are riskier than straight criminal investigations. "When you are proactive, it's a double-edged sword," says Tom Corrigan, a retired New York detective who spent 16 years on the FBI-NYPD joint terrorism task force. "If you get your feet dirty, it can come back to kick you in the ass." In the early 1990s, FBI officials shut down surveillance operations on radical Islamic fundamentalists in Brooklyn and Jersey City, N.J., who would turn out to be players in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and other planned attacks. Why? Supervisors feared costs and liabilities. Recently, the FBI has taken flak for interviews of Iraqi exiles here and research on mosques. These efforts "don't keep us safer, but destroy fundamental freedoms," says the American Civil Liberties Union's Dalia Hashad. Some FBI officials are nonplussed. "The bureau was beaten following 9/11 for not knowing," says an FBI official. "And now [we're] beaten for trying to find out." Still, some agents find the prevention concept legally suspect. "How do you grab someone who hasn't done anything," asks former agent Ed Stroz, "but you knew he was about to do something?"
And how, in an intensely careerist place like the FBI, will performance of agents be measured in Mueller's brave new world? In the old days, supervisors counted the number of arrests an agent made; even today, promotion rests on making cases. But what is the right way to measure prevention? Mefford is trying to develop a new performance-measurement system. No longer will agents be rated simply on things like how many bank robberies they solved. It's going to be how many criminal and intelligence wiretap applications they write, how many informants they develop, and the quality of the intelligence that they come up with. In the meantime, Mueller's prevention mantra may be catching on, albeit slowly. The number of nonterrorism criminal cases the FBI referred to U.S. attorneys has plunged since 9/11 (chart, Page 22), though it's unclear how much of this reflects a shift toward more proactive, preventive operations.
The change, skeptics say, is going to come grudgingly, if at all. "I believe Mueller is trying to make the FBI . . . more responsible," says Sen. Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican and FBI critic. "But there's an institutional disease there that is going to be very difficult for him to change." Sen. John Edwards, a North Carolina Democrat--and presidential contender--believes the FBI is juggling two inherently incompatible missions: intelligence gathering and law enforcement. "The nature of law enforcement is linear," he says. "Intelligence is never-ending."
Insular institution. Others say the FBI's demographics are ill-suited to combating terrorism. With 500 agents eligible to retire this year and with a young and inexperienced workforce--average age, 31--the FBI's institutional memory on terrorism is largely gone. Worse, Mueller must combat radical Islamic fundamentalism, global terrorism, and international crime syndicates with a workforce that's mostly white and male. Only 76 agents speak Arabic. Mueller has hired nearly 300 language translators and created an FBI language center. He wants to hire 700 intelligence analysts. But his efforts have been stymied by stiff security checks. "The bureaucracy is stifling," says one senior official, "and he's trying to break through it."
On every front, Mueller keeps pushing, trying to instill a sense of urgency. "We can't take any information or source for granted," says Van Harp, who just retired as the head of the FBI field office in Washington. "It all has to be vetted, run to the ground." Agents' workloads have dramatically increased, supervisors say. "You used to look at threats; you knew what had validity; you'd get to them after you got all these other things out of the way," says one official. "Now, no matter how bizarre or how routine, you go after them."
All terror threats get flashed on the pagers of senior executives, whether it's a suspicious package on a subway or an anthrax hoax. "You'll sit at a table with management," says Rolince, "and simultaneously every pager will go off." The agents say they are exhausted from chasing leads constantly. Mueller says he wants supervisors to use their judgment, but he insists that no lead can be ignored. "The possibility of that lead, if that lead were followed, identifying somebody who wanted to kill Americans," he says, "is such that we just cannot afford to have that happen."
Last November, Gebhardt, the deputy director, sent an E-mail to field supervisors saying he was "amazed and astounded" by the failure of field agents to develop sources. "You need to instill urgency," Gebhardt wrote. ". . . You are the leaders of the FBI. You cannot fail at this mission. Too many people are depending on us." Gebhardt says his memo was meant to energize agents, not to scold them.
Perhaps. Many agents appreciate Mueller's efforts to solve problems. "He seems to be very honest, very approachable," says Nancy Savage, president of the FBI Agents Association. "He wants to know directly if there's a problem." But others are resentful of his push for change. "A lot of agents are saying, `To hell with it--get someone else to do this,' " asserts former agent Stroz. They construe Mueller's urgency as impatience, his directness as a lack of regard. So far, Mueller and his laser focus on terror aren't creating a lot of warm and fuzzies among the troops. During one of Mueller's trips to a field office, an agent asked him about the status of "office of preference," a perk that allows agents to select a field office, once in their careers. It's especially important to New York agents, because that posting is considered the pits. The agents say Mueller was unsympathetic and replied that if an agent didn't like his posting, there were 70,000 applicants waiting to take his place. Mueller says he never indicated he would discontinue the program. "I do believe it's important," says Mueller. "I have told agents, though, that . . . if there are skills that are needed someplace in the organization that sacrifice is necessary. . . . The needs of the organization come first."
Still Your Father's FBI?
Director Robert Mueller's effort to focus on the fight against terror requires changes in the way the FBI has traditionally done business--changes involving the bureau's workload and prosecution strategy as well as the makeup of its workforce. The charts below document a "work in progress."
ON THE RISE
After 9/11 there was a spike in the FBI's referral of terror-related cases to prosecutors.
[Complete chart data are not available.]
[labels]
1998 149
1999
2000
2001
2002 1,297
STILL A SMALL SLICE
Those terror-related referrals still represent only a tiny percentage of the bureau's overall caseload.
3.7 pct. Terrorism referrals
96.3 pct. Referrals for other crimes
THE BIGGER PICTURE
The FBI's total number of referrals to prosecutors has been dropping.
[Complete chart data are not available.]
[labels]
1998 42,170
1999
2000
2001
2002 35,382
FBI DEMOGRAPHICS
18.1 pct. Women
81.9 pct. Men
3.5 pct. American Indian and Asian
5.6 pct. Black
7.4 pct. Hispanic
83.5 pct. White
Sources: FBI, Syracuse University's TRAC Reports Inc.
USN&WR
With Christopher H. Schmitt, Sheila Thalhimer and Monica Ekman
This story appears in the May 26, 2003 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.