Fixing the FBI
This man is pushing some of the biggest changes in the Bureau's History. Think he's a popular guy?
Mueller, often referred to as "Himself" by subordinates, because of his widely acknowledged lack of self-doubt, is an avid student of management theory. One of his earliest initiatives was to require all FBI executives to take management courses at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management in Evanston, Ill. The program, participants say, has been a nearly universal success. But Mueller isn't kidding himself. As a former federal prosecutor and former acting deputy attorney general, Mueller has watched and worked with the FBI for many years. The 9/11 attacks, Mueller says, administered a unique shock to the bureau's insular, change-resistant culture, making it easier for him to sell veteran agents and managers on the need to reorient their focus from that of a reactive law-enforcement agency to one of a proactive intelligence bureaucracy. Still, Mueller says, fidgeting with a pen at the head of his polished oak conference table that seats probably 40, "if you read any of the management books, they'll tell you that when you're trying to bring an institution through a transformation, 30 percent will be with you, 30 percent will be in the middle, and 30 percent you won't bring along." Given the bureau's unique responsibilities, those percentages, if they apply, give even some bureau boosters reason for pause. "All you can do every day is come in and put one foot in front of another," says Maureen Baginski, who heads the FBI's new Directorate of Intelligence, " 'cause if you start to think about it, you might just run, you know. It's a lot of work, but I have nothing but confidence."
Good news, bad news. The failure of the VCF system offers a glimpse into the difficulties facing anyone intent on casting the FBI into a radically different model. "As you know, senator," Mueller told Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is the ranking minority member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which oversees the work of the FBI, "in a bureaucracy this size, one of the problems is that people want to bring you the good news. They don't want to bring you the bad news."
When it came down to the VCF matter, FBI and Justice Department officials say, Mueller wasn't especially keen to hear the bad news. "I'll be honest with you. I think he was so hopeful the software was going to work," says Mueller's chief information officer, Zal Azmi. " Nobody could believe that after three years and all of this money that we didn't have it." Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine warned congressional committees last May to view Mueller's promises on the VCF with great skepticism. "He was overoptimistic," says Fine, "about when the VCF project would be completed."
Some FBI officials say the VCF mess shows just how much the senior leadership tends to withhold bad news from Mueller. "He is so isolated and shielded," says one FBI official. Bureau insiders point to the culture in which the director is "like God," and where the higher one climbs the management ladder, the riskier it is for the "palace guard" to alienate the boss. "The top guys around him," says this official, "there's no way they were going to tell him the bad news because VCF, it was his baby, and no one was going to say, 'Your baby's ugly.' "
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