Fixing the FBI
This man is pushing some of the biggest changes in the Bureau's History. Think he's a popular guy?
Such opinions are anything but rare among intelligence officials. "Mueller has checked out on counterintelligence," says a senior counterintelligence official. "The FBI is over here , the rest of the counterintelligence community is over there ." Mueller says he has greatly beefed up the counterintelligence and counter-terrorism programs. "There's, quite obviously, still a lot of work to be done," he says, "but I think we've made substantial progress . . . and by that I mean, the prioritization--the understanding that it's a national priority that has to be managed and directed from headquarters."
Mueller's big challenge outside FBI headquarters has been to win over his own agents. Many have not warmed to him because of his unflinching demand for instructional change. Others complain about his apparent willingness to move them wherever it's necessary to meet the bureau's investigative needs. "He's more heartless than Hoover," grumbles one supervisory special agent. "He's not overly concerned about our personal lives."
The failure of the Virtual Case File system, once again, offers a window on Mueller's relationship with the rank and file. "When will the honeymoon be over?" asks one FBI official, regarding Mueller's perceived lack of accountability in Washington. "This is something you promised us on your watch." Many agents are angry that the director required them to get VCF training before the technology was ready, an edict some supervisors quietly ignored. "Maybe Mueller believed it was coming," says an FBI official. "But most of us had no faith in it. Many of us thought, 'There's no way he can't know this.' "
In the battle for hearts and minds, such issues, in the end, probably count for less than Mueller's insistence that FBI agents move from traditional crime-fighting work to counterterrorism investigations. Some veteran agents complain that the FBI is losing valuable sources, expertise, and relationships with police by walking away from its traditional missions. "I think if we become a terrific intelligence agency, we're one of 14 others," says one bureau official. "If we're the FBI, we're like none other." The FBI's counterterrorism chief, Gary Bald, says that there has been "tremendous rallying" around the new intelligence-driven priorities. "We're not dealing with our father's FBI; it's our FBI," he says, adding that if headquarters has erred in any way, it has been in failing to trumpet what he characterizes as the many untold counterterrorism successes with all of the troops in the field.
Mueller understands that, in a fundamental way, this is a battle for the soul of the FBI. "There are always going to be agents out there who think we ought to have stayed in the war on drugs," Mueller says, "we shouldn't have shifted those resources, that we ought to be doing what we traditionally have done in a number of arenas. It could be bank robberies, it could be government fraud . . . and they've done them for a period of their career, and it will be very difficult for some of them to change."
Tip fatigue. Some FBI officials' objections to the new counterterrorism work are more than just philosophical. Mueller has insisted that every terrorism tip and lead be investigated thoroughly and aggressively. But almost none of the many thousands of tips and leads the bureau has pursued since 9/11 has resulted in criminal prosecutions, although FBI officials say they have been invaluable from an intelligence perspective. "Agents want to fish in a pond where there are indications of fish," says a retired agent. "That's the problem. How do you keep action-oriented people energized and focused and challenged looking for a needle in a haystack?"
advertisement
