What the FBI Needs--and Doesn't Need

By Coleen Rowley

As the FBI has essentially been on trial at the hearings of the 9/11 commission, you might expect to find bureau employees crowded around the television sets. In the Minneapolis, Minn., field office where I work, a few TVs were on last week, but I saw no one glued to the screen. We were simply too busy. Too busy trying to prevent the next terrorist attack, and the next and the next.

Those of us in the business know this is a genuine Mission: Impossible. There can be no such thing as 100% success when the terrorist adversary has to get through our defenses only once and there is no referee to ever signal that the match is over. Of course, that doesn't mean we can't work harder at preventing attacks. We can and must. The question is how.

FBI director Robert Mueller repeatedly pledges to leave no stone unturned in investigating terrorism--to the widespread applause of those who apparently think that it is only others whose privacy or civil rights can be violated by this aggressive posture. The supposition here is that the FBI is not spying enough in this country, that the failure to prevent 9/11 was due less to an inability "to connect the dots" than to "too few useful dots." I strongly disagree. We knew a great deal before 9/11. The problem was, "We didn't know what we knew," as a former FBI official has said.

Everyone acknowledges that it is only useful intelligence that counts. Gathering troves of information on people just clutters the picture and (besides upsetting innocent folks) makes connecting the dots harder. Quality trumps quantity. Homing in on known terrorists, for example, through well-placed confidential sources or possibly by electronic surveillance is what's called for, not simply more indiscriminate use of these intrusive techniques across the board. It's not easy to quickly penetrate highly secretive, cohesive terrorist groups. But I believe there will be a tipping point, like the one the FBI reached when it penetrated the Mafia. Although making inroads was initially difficult, it became much easier as time went on.

Some FBI critics propose taking domestic intelligence gathering away from the bureau and giving it to a new agency modeled after Britain's MI5. But I don't see why a new force would be better than the FBI at gathering intelligence. The field agents I have worked with for more than 23 years are as eminently adept at tackling sophisticated criminal and terrorist enterprises as they are at investigating straightforward whodunits. What's more, creating a new agency would undermine one of the most important post-9/11 reforms--removal of the wall between the FBI's criminal and intelligence functions so that communication between agents and with the CIA is much improved.

Another FBI strength is that its more than 11,000 agents are scattered throughout the country, not only assigned to big cities but distributed geographically. Over the years, these agents have developed working relationships with other federal, state, county, city and tribal law-enforcement officers that multiply the FBI's eyes and ears, hands and feet, and also can be said to form a tight grid that spans every part of the country. The importance of this unique coverage cannot be overstated when it comes to detecting terrorists, who may be anywhere. A new domestic-intelligence bureaucracy would not only need time to get up to speed but would probably never be able to duplicate the FBI's geographical spread.

So where, beyond the reforms already undertaken, should we focus our efforts to make improvements? Rather than despair at the size of the challenge before us, it's important for us to remember that the impact of the 9/11 plot was, to a huge extent, lessened (and thereby, in a sense, prevented) by the actions of the brave passengers on board United Flight 93 who, by confronting their hijackers, quite likely averted an attack on the Capitol or the White House. They did not let themselves be deterred by the difficulty--the near impossibility--of the task. In the same way, the courage of rescue workers and other heroes that day at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon saved countless lives. Like those men and women, we don't need to remake our world so much as to steel our resolve, use our common sense and try our hardest.

FBI agent Rowley, a TIME Person of the Year in 2002, wrote a memo to FBI headquarters that year accusing the bureau of obstructing measures that might have disrupted the 9/11 attacks. Here she is expressing her personal views, not those of the FBI.