Coleen Rowley: The Special Agent

Coleen Rowley became enamored with the FBI's fictionalized ideal long before she heard of the real thing. Her favorite show was The Man from U.N.C.L.E., a spy spoof about two debonair agents who work to save the world from evil. In the fifth grade, Rowley wrote to the show's producers, asking to join the cadre of supersecret spies. She got a rejection letter. "They said it didn't exist," Rowley remembers. "But they told me that in the United States, we had something called the FBI. And they gave me the address." So Rowley wrote to the bureau and received a pamphlet titled "99 Facts About the FBI." One question was, "Does the FBI employ women as special agents?" The answer was no. Even then, she did not scare easily. "I thought to myself, That's stupid. I figured that would change eventually."

Last May, when Rowley upbraided her beloved FBI in a secret 13-page memo, she thought she was on a private rescue mission. In her view, it was not a reprimand but an act of redemption. It was not about speaking truth to power, because people like Rowley don't see much difference between the two. Truth is power--that's how you catch the bad guys.

So the memo--the one that leaked and landed her on the front pages of newspapers, that brought her to Washington to face cameras and Congressmen and that helped set off the debate over how to reinvent the FBI--was not meant to be a memo at all. It came tumbling out, almost by accident, because she couldn't hold the words inside anymore.

Since Sept. 11, the 48-year-old had muzzled her grief about the bureaus failures--specifically, about how it ignored cries from her office to take seriously the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, a French-Moroccan who spoke poor English and had signed up at a local flight school, keen to fly a 747. Eight months after the attacks, Rowley and others got a chance to tell what they knew. Staff members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees joint inquiry into the attacks invited her and others to come to Washington for a private interview.

"Initially, I just started writing down points that I didn't want to miss when I was going to do my interview," she says. "I went to bed Wednesday night and was up all night, saying, 'Oh! I've got to remember to say this, got to remember that.' Thursday night I went to bed thinking, man, am I tired. Well, I couldn't sleep all night long. The same type of thing. I've got to remember this and remember that." About 2:30 a.m. Friday, Rowley had had enough. I said, "This is ridiculous. I'm on 36 hours without sleep. If I jot it down, first of all I won't forget it. And I won't have to keep reminding myself of things to say. I'll get it out of my system, and I'll be able to sleep."