Mission: Impossible?

Azmi

The problem is, it's just a start. Numerous congressional panels and investigative entities have produced a stream of reports that question the FBI's actual progress. And this is the heart of the matter: When a capable, change-minded leader meets a calcified, reluctant organization, progress becomes a matter of daily battles of inches gained, conceded, and then regained.

"The FBI has no corner on the market of people being resistant to change," says John Miller, the FBI's assistant director of the office of public affairs. "We don't recruit people from Planet Perfect; we recruit human beings. But in five years, we've changed dramatically, and we've done it while we're doing our job of protecting the American public."

The evidence on that, though, has been mixed. In one recent report, the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General--the entity charged with keeping closest tabs on the FBI--noted a flaw in the protection strategy for the nation's 360-plus seaports, considered among the most vulnerable entry points for weapons of mass destruction. The OIG team found that one FBI field office, tasked with overseeing six significant seaports in its territory, had only one maritime-focused agent, while another with no strategic seaports was staffed with five. The FBI declined to comment.

Another report cited allegations by a contract linguist and translator named Sibel Edmonds. Edmonds expressed serious concerns to the OIG about mismanagement of the FBI's critical foreign-language translation program. Investigators dismissed some of Edmonds's charges as unsubstantiated, but concluded that many were legitimate and held potentially damaging consequences for both the FBI and national security. (The agency terminated Edmonds's contract and issued a press release saying it would investigate the matter.)

Such incidents in themselves represent tiny pockets of concern. But they also hint at what Mueller is up against. To get the bureau's thousands of people to think and act differently, he has to clear away old baggage and old ways of doing business, including a decades-old organizational practice of shoot-from-the-hip, small-picture strategic planning.

Harvard Business School professor John Kotter has been studying organizational change for two decades, examining more than 200 major initiatives. In that time, he has identified eight core factors that can unhinge a change mandate. One, he says, is a failure to remove the old barriers that prevent people from acting in new ways. To some critics of the bureau, that's exactly what the seaport-protection gap and the Edmonds case suggest.

"Even when you can get people all pumped up about the 'new' and they understand what's needed and why, all people need to do is hit the same old barriers about four times and their enthusiasm drops like a rock," Kotter says.

Randolph Hite has observed and studied the FBI for years as a senior staffer with the Government Accountability Office. He sees steps in the right direction but likens the effort to the organization's having to train for and run a marathon. "You need leaders who are focused, attentive, and committed--and I haven't seen anything over there that leads me to believe these fellows are anything but that," Hite says.

"But it's too early. You're asking them to operate in a whole different way. You're trying to accomplish this transformation in an environment that's moving constantly. It's as if you're changing tires on a moving car and you need to upgrade the vehicle you're traveling in and the terrain you're on is dicey and unstable."

In all the examinations by the many commissions and panels dispatched to suss out the 9/11 intelligence failures, no issue attracted as much concern and criticism as the state of the FBI's information technology.

On September 10, 2001, the FBI's 11,200 agents, if they had computer access at all, still used 1980s-era IBM 386 desktop computers. If an agent used the Web, it was via a dial-up connection. In the New York field office, the office most responsible for counterterrorism investigations prior to 9/11, 25 agents shared one secured phone line.

Even now, the main database available to agents--the Automated Case Support system--is governed by a paper-laden process that requires agents to write reports and official documents, print them out, and fax or mail them overnight to clerks who enter the documents' contents by hand into a system run by a mainframe computer. It was into this obsolete system that the now-famous "Phoenix memo," linking Arizona flight-school students to Osama bin Laden and a radical British Islamic group, fell in 2001. The type-written memo, dated July 10, did not get uploaded into the ACS system for 17 days. Then, a paper copy of the memo had to be mailed to headquarters. In the end, the "electronic" alert was not read by any of the senior officers it was meant for until after September 11.