The FBI has had a rough couple of months with the public, in the press, and on the Hill. Senators are even entertaining the notion of splitting the bureau in half. But if Director Robert Mueller is seriously concerned about the FBI's future, it's only because he's new to the job. Congress may be in a punishing mood, but its idea of punishment would make masochists of us all.
Over the past 10 years, with very few exceptions, Congress hasresponded to FBI slipups by spanking the bureau with more money, more manpower,and more investigative latitude -- and by resolutely refusing to address anyinternal reforms the FBI might need. When the bureau's crime lab bungled its wayinto a one-year backlog and dozens of mishandled cases in 1996, Congressresponded by building a shiny new $130 million facility. When the cost ofbuilding a nationwide automated fingerprint system ran $85 million over budget in1995, Senator Robert Byrd was ready with a "dire emergency" supplementalappropriations bill to keep the project on target.
Even amid the crisis of confidence brought on by the bureau's pre-September 11missteps, Congressman Frank Wolf, chairman of the appropriations subcommitteethat oversees the bureau's budget, sent an open letter to Mueller on May 24. Themissive expressed "concern" for the FBI's recent mistakes but then asked thedirector "if Congress was doing enough with regard to providing the FBI with thefinancial resources it needed."
Mueller should have few complaints. The bureau is set to receive its biggest,ahem, punishment in decades, including a $1.5 billion budget increase and theinvestigative latitude for agents to open preliminary investigations and maintainthem for up to a year without approval from headquarters.
Of course, some of the bureau's shortcomings do take money to fix. But it wasnot for lack of money that these problems developed in the first place. Congressin 1997 allocated $83 million to hire more than 1,000 new counterterrorism agentsand support personnel who, Congress was told, were going to focus solely on theproblem of preventing terrorism. Instead, they were more commonly assigned torun-of-the-mill criminal investigations. Kenneth Williams, the Phoenix agent whowarned of suspicious flight-school trainees, applied his knowledge of radicalIslamic organizations to investigating a series of arsons in the Phoenix suburbs.According to Williams's colleague, agent James Hauswirth, one of theirsupervisors in the Phoenix office referred to terror prevention as "hokeypokeywork."
Nor are the bureau's problems the result of overly restrictive investigativetechniques. The Minneapolis agents could have been granted a warrant to delvemore deeply into Zacarias Moussaoui's life if FBI headquarters had allowed themto do so.
The fact is that the FBI's mistakes have more to do with an overabundance ofresources than a lack of them. From 1997 through 2002, the bureau added 1,000people to its payroll, virtually all of them at headquarters, virtually none ofthem field agents. During the same years, its budget grew by roughly 30 percent.But the number of bureaucratic hurdles grew as well. By sending her memo directlyto Mueller, agent Coleen Rowley was circumventing eight different layers ofleadership. As in most bureaucracies, the bureau was more concerned withupholding the chain of command than with increasing its effectiveness. TheMinneapolis agents investigating Moussaoui were chastised for stepping outsidebureau protocol and making direct contact with the CIA's Counterterrorism Center(which happens to be staffed by FBI agents in order to facilitate just this kindof communication).
Mueller's reorganization plan has some very strong points, including arational division of responsibilities among his top deputies and a significantshift of manpower to the counterterrorism division. Unfortunately, it does littleto shorten the distance between street agents and the director's office. In fact,by creating new offices within the counterterrorism division, it may only createmore obstacles. Mueller has expressed frustration with the fact that eightdifferent people need to sign off on a memo before it sees his desk. But he'sdone little to address the essential bloat that's hamstrung the FBI. Perhaps hecan't. Perhaps Congress should.
What cannot be known from a reorganization chart, though, is how Mueller willaddress the cultural problems that afflict the bureau. Changing not just what theFBI does, but how it thinks, how it perceives itself and the people and agenciesit works with, is the most difficult challenge Mueller will face.
That's especially so when not everyone agrees on what the "cultural problems"of the bureau are. At the Senate Judiciary Committee's June 6 hearing, thebureau's cultural problems were brought up no fewer than 28 times by thecommittee members, Mueller, and Rowley. Each time the words were uttered,however, they seemed to be referring to a distinctly different challenge.Depending on whom you ask, the FBI's culture is either arrogant, fearful,slothful, obsessively image-conscious, or simply too reactive.
But if the goal of all this is to shape up the bureau, it doesn't matter whatMueller says to Congress, or what Congress says to Mueller. What matters is whatMueller says to the FBI. So far he has said little. Mueller "is beingappropriately sensitive to the need for transition here," according to anadministration consultant familiar with the FBI. "But the line betweenappropriately sensitive and not getting things accomplished -- not changing theculture -- can be very fine."
When asked precisely what kind of cultural change Mueller is referring to, FBIspokesman Bill Carter said, "I'll be honest with you. I don't know" -- and thenspoke about Mueller's plans to boost the bureau's preventive capabilities. FBIAgents Association President Nancy Savage said she has yet to hear Mueller sayanything along those lines to the bureau staff, which was just fine with her. "Ipersonally don't think there's anything wrong with the culture that needs to bechanged," she said. "Most of us don't."
If the bureau's recent history proves anything, it's that it can't fix aproblem that its own agents don't perceive. Mueller escaped the calls for hisresignation by convincing Capitol Hill that he was serious about changing theFBI. It's time he turned to the task of convincing the FBI.