Coleen Rowley: The Special Agent

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If Rowley is willing to take on the big questions about the FBI, she remains a stickler about its smallest rules. Because FBI employees cannot accept gifts valued over $20, she refused to accept a ride in a rental car paid for by TIME, and she handed over $30 to cover her dinner. She forwarded a check to ABC correspondent John Miller when he sent her his book on terrorism, paying the full $24.95 retail price. Her frugality is legendary. She wanted to take the subway to testify on Capitol Hill but finally relented and accepted a ride from friends. When she inadvertently bought a Vanilla Coke recently, she took one sip, declared it awful, then drank it all because she could not bear to pour it out. She has two business suits--one that she bought for her FBI interview in 1980 and the one, given to her by her mother-in-law more than 15 years ago, that she wore to testify in June. "Stuff doesn't wear out," she explains. Her daughter Bette feigns outrage: "She used red yarn to patch my jeans! Red on the butt, red on the pockets!"

In the days after the hearing, Rowley received a flurry of concerned letters from fashion consultants, hairdressers and ophthalmologists who yearned to make her over. These she disregarded effortlessly. "It wasn't loud!" she says in response to a letter from a designer criticizing her plaid suit. "It was black and gray. How can that be loud?" Rowley's friends have recently succeeded in a longstanding crusade: they persuaded her to replace her oversize glasses, telling her that lightweight lenses would save her time and energy while running because she wouldn't need to keep pushing them up.

But in the months that have passed, so much has not happened. What if Rowley was wrong about the FBI's potential? What if no one at headquarters is capable of the kind of imagination the times demand--the kind of fearlessness that she has shown them? Rowley has so far refused to accept this possibility.

But she has been "a little disillusioned," says her friend Jane David. And she has had some reason to be. When Rowley walked into her office on the morning of Sept. 11 and saw the Twin Towers burning on TV, she immediately thought of Moussaoui. For three weeks her office had been trying--and failing--to get FBI headquarters to allow a request for a search warrant of his computer. Agents had had him arrested for overstaying his visa while they looked into his past. As Rowley wrote in her memo, French officials and other intelligence sources established that Moussaoui was affiliated with radical fundamentalist Islamic groups and activities connected to Osama bin Laden. Minneapolis agents pushed headquarters for approval to dig deeper, fearing--before Sept. 11--that he might be part of a larger scheme to hijack commercial jetliners. He has since been indicted as a co-conspirator.