Mission: Impossible?

Azmi

But intelligence and counterterrorism require big-picture strategic planning, savvy resource management, coordination, and teamwork, as well as real-time, highly accessible flows of information. All of which have surfaced time and again, in numerous post-9/11 probes of FBI performance, as critical deficits.

And five years later, while Home Depot can tell you how many two-by-fours are sold by the hour and which stores are selling most, the FBI still largely relies on a paper-based system of records management and internal communication. And while its leadership has embraced some measure of strategic planning, it still lacks a comprehensive strategic document, a specific plan governing in measurable detail the massive reinvention it has embarked upon.

FBI director Robert Mueller is a figure as problematic as he is central to this change endeavor. Mueller, who took his job a week before the World Trade Center attack, is, by all accounts, a dedicated public servant and a bright, respected leader. His résumé combines partnerships at pedigree law firms--Hill & Barlow, Hale & Dorr--with notable public-service credentials: In the early 1990s, he ran the Justice Department's criminal division.

Yet his most visible management experience before now was as U.S. attorney in San Francisco, heading a staff of 181 and a $21 million budget. Now, he's leading a $6 billion organization with tens of thousands of employees all over the world. (The FBI declined requests for interviews with Mueller, among other key senior officials.) For everything he's accomplished at the bureau in five years, the question remains: Is it enough?

Mueller has, experts agree, created the foundation for a markedly more effective counterterrorism entity. In print, speeches, and videotaped messages, he has communicated widely and repeatedly the need for a change in mission and culture, and the reason for that change. In one address last fall to business executives in Chicago, Mueller acknowledged the need to "chart a new course" and "establish a new mission and new priorities."

"It's all over the bureau literature," says Paul R. Corts, a former assistant attorney general with the Justice Department who worked closely with the FBI for much of the past three years on management issues. "The word is out. Terrorism is the No. 1 priority, and intelligence is what the bureau is about. You've got to say it, say it, and say it again, and they're doing it."

Among other things, Mueller has dramatically shifted personnel and resources from the bureau's traditional focus, fighting crime, to the new--counterintelligence and counterterrorism. He has increased the number of intelligence analysts, who traditionally have played second fiddle to special agents, from 1,023 to more than 2,200. He has raised the ceiling on their pay grade and established a first-ever analyst career track.

The director has demanded better communications with other federal intelligence agencies, as well as state and local authorities--a clear break from the past for an organization whose unofficial founder, J. Edgar Hoover, obsessed over secrecy and "close holds" on information. The number of Joint Terrorism Task Forces, in which FBI agents work with federal, state, and local agencies, has tripled since 2001, from 35 to 101. Likewise, the number of linguists has nearly doubled to more than 1,400.

Mueller has signaled an open-mindedness to new perspectives that are decidedly at odds with bureau tradition. In the past year, he has met regularly with an advisory panel of 12 people mostly from outside the bureau, among them technology executive and investor Craig Fields and former CIO of Scott Paper Co. Darwin A. John. "These are some very smart people," says Floyd Clarke, a onetime acting director of the bureau who sits on the team. "This is the first time in the bureau's history that the director of the FBI has gotten this kind of counsel and feedback and guidance."

Mueller also has recognized the need for a renaissance in managerial style and capability within the FBI, which is not known for either. He has sent hundreds of bureau executives to the weeklong courses Leading Strategic Change and Navigating Strategic Change at Northwestern University's Kellogg School. Likewise, training has been bulked up across the agency: New agents now train for 21 weeks, up from 16, and counterterrorism/counterintelligence training has nearly doubled to 106 hours.

Within the FBI, that counts as a lot. It would in any entrenched bureaucracy. Not all the changes have been completely voluntary; Mueller is acting under significant political pressure for the bureau to get better, fast. But it's a start, nonetheless.