Posted on 04/25/2004 7:41:21 AM PDT by Libloather
FBI chief fights for anti-terror role
Posted on Sun, Apr. 25, 2004
BY SHANNON MCCAFFREY
Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON — If the FBI survives a bruising examination by the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, it will largely be because of one man: Robert Mueller.
The FBI director has launched an aggressive one-man PR offensive, lunching with commissioners, preaching institutional reform and opening up many of the bureau's classified files to panel investigators. Mueller is fighting critics who doubt that the FBI is up to the task of domestic counterterrorism and think a new intelligence-gathering agency — in the mold of Britain's MI-5 — is needed.
"Bob Mueller has helped his agency tremendously," Commissioner Jamie Gorelick, a former deputy attorney general, said in an interview.
"I don't know where the commission will end up and I'm not even sure how I personally feel, but I think he has moved the meter considerably among the commissioners."
Commissioner John Lehman said he arrived on the panel "believing it was a no-brainer that we should go to an MI-5."
"And you have given us all a lot to think about in that regard," Lehman, a former secretary of the Navy, told Mueller at a hearing week before last.
The commission hearings have forced the FBI to relive a litany of embarrassing missteps prior to the Sept. 11 attacks. Chairman Thomas Kean called the commission's report on the FBI "an indictment" of the bureau.
"It failed and it failed and it failed and it failed," Kean railed.
Yet Mueller has emerged from the fray largely untarnished. He took over the FBI a week before the attacks, so he hasn't had to answer for the bureau's mistakes before Sept. 11.
Instead, it's fallen to the veteran prosecutor and decorated U.S. Marine to reform the bureau from top to bottom. What the commission's recommendations for the FBI will turn on is whether its members believe Mueller's reforms will succeed.
Under Mueller, the bureau is attempting to transform itself from a crime-solving agency focused on chasing down gangsters, drug dealers and bank robbers to one committed to preventing another terrorist attack by collecting intelligence that might never see the inside of a courtroom. It's a sweeping structural and philosophical shift for the 95-year-old FBI.
The road so far has been far from smooth.
The FBI's massive computer overhaul, considered critical to the FBI's success, is almost two years behind schedule and about $120 million over budget. Plans to hire more Arabic translators and intelligence analysts have moved more slowly than expected, in part because of laborious bureau background checks.
A report earlier this month from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service raised new questions about whether the FBI can change its culture to meet the its new intelligence mandate.
Mueller had enjoyed the support of the White House in keeping the responsibility for domestic counterterrorism at the FBI. But President Bush recently seemed to open the door to changing that, saying it could be time for an overhaul of the intelligence community.
FBI officials say Mueller knows the stakes are high and has made the appeal a deeply personal one. He's become a familiar face for the commission, sitting down for several private sessions before his recent public testimony. He's invited commissioners to FBI headquarters. And he's taken the time to make his case with individual commissioners.
"I had lunch with him," Gorelick said. "I don't think I'm the only one. I believe he has sought out every member of the commission for some kind of private conversation."
Kean said Mueller has willingly spent more time with commissioners than perhaps any other official.
His accessibility prompted Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste to joke with Mueller that "sometimes you've come back and showed up when you weren't invited."
While the White House has sometimes stonewalled on providing sensitive documents, the FBI has — after some initial bumps in the road — been generally cooperative, FBI and commission officials said.
According to the FBI, the commission's staff has conducted 350 interviews with FBI agents and personnel, perused 1.7 million electronically searchable computer records and another 100,000 paper documents.
In a July 2003 e-mail to all 56 FBI field offices, Mueller pledged cooperation with the commission and instructed agents to be "fully responsive" to its requests for information.
As long as you don't have to testify, you do...
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