How Far Do We Want The FBI To Go?

That was probably further than the White House wanted Mueller to go; such mea culpas invite talk of a never-ending blue-ribbon commission — something the Bush team dreads. But there are few signs that the White House is, in fact, dissatisfied with Mueller. Even before last week, he quietly replaced more than a third of the FBI's senior executives, hoping to break open the culture of caution that so stymied agents in the field. Sources tell TIME that Mueller is actually policing top agents' efficiency by insisting that each document be marked to indicate how long the author took to prepare it. And Mueller has discovered that when he can't retrieve a document from the FBI's impenetrable archives, he can usually call someone at the CIA, where many of the same papers are more carefully sorted and filed. "The FBI," notes an agency official, "is archivally challenged."

But Mueller, like his predecessors, is walking a narrow line. "The reason the folks at FBI headquarters are paralyzed is they have to undergo a Senate inquisition every time they act," says a former Clinton Justice Department official. "If they investigate Wen Ho Lee, it's profiling. If they don't investigate, they're attacked for letting the China stuff go by. They can't win. They are paralyzed because the Senators who are jumping up and down today about the FBI being paralyzed will be jumping up and down tomorrow when they go too far."

Both Mueller and whistle-blower Rowley will be pressed hard about the FBI's many problems and the wisdom of the new rules when they testify on Capitol Hill this week. Bureau veterans are the first to say that little in last fall's antiterrorism bill or last week's new rules would have helped stop the hijackers as they went about planning their strike. The problem was not just that clues pointing to the 19 terrorists weren't discovered; it was also that wispy evidence and agents' observations about the possibility of hijackings weren't being analyzed, evaluated and judged for their meaning. That's one reason insiders say the most important reform may be Mueller's creation of an Office of Intelligence, staffed with foreign-language speakers and regional experts who will report to FBI counterterrorism chief Dale Watson. "For years," says a former Justice official, "the analysts were not the heroes of this agency. Nobody wanted to be one. Nobody wanted to listen to them."

So can the FBI turn itself into a domestic CIA? "The question now is, How quickly can you change a complex political culture?" says Joseph Nye, dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Spy agencies such as the CIA are all about cracking codes, uncovering secrets. "During the cold war," Nye says, "they didn't believe it was important unless you had to steal it. But some of the biggest and hardest questions are mysteries — and most of the answers to a mystery are available in the public domain and just have to be assembled." At the FBI, "getting people to sit in the back office and connect dots has not been their strong suit. Now they know they have to do it. The question is, Will they?"

Any move to make it easier for federal agents to track what private citizens do privately, though, makes libertarians on the left and right edgy. On Friday, House Judiciary Committee chairman James Sensenbrenner, a conservative Republican, said he was "deeply troubled by the Department of Justice's failure to consult with Congress over changes to investigative policies that have been in place for more than 20 years." Civil libertarians warned that however sensible the reforms sounded, the potential for abuse by "cowboy" agents was great and that the letter and spirit of the Constitution do not endorse the sacrifice of privacy for security. "You could make the country safer from terror by attending every meeting at every mosque, but do you want to do that?" asks Robert Litt, a top Justice official under Janet Reno. "The question will be, What do they do and where do they go with this new power?" Polls have consistently shown a public willingness to trade some privacy for security. The harder questions are, Whose privacy, and how much, and will it actually do any good?