Seven months later, Rowley is still campaigning, albeit more warily. She talked to Time, her first interview, with great trepidation. She is afraid of being fired and afraid of appearing self-serving. "I don't want to be famous," she says. "I will not stand up in front of people unless I have something important to say." Visiting FBI headquarters after the hearing, she was popular with clerks and secretaries. "I'd get elbows in my ribs and winks," she says. In the Capitol building, janitors and police darted across the hall to thank her.

But the tough Rowley—the Rowley who packs a gun and takes it everywhere, who moves coatless through Minnesota winters and runs triathlons, who made a habit of correcting her science teacher—has been stung by a nasty backlash within the FBI. In early June, an associate called to say high-level FBI agents in Washington had been overheard discussing possible criminal charges against her. Some fellow agents, retired ones in particular, crucified her. Charles George, then president of the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI, compared her to convicted spy Robert Hanssen, calling her behavior "unthinkable" in the society newsletter; instead of going to the Russians, she went to Congress.

And then there was the riff on loyalty from an old Elbert Hubbard essay, which Rowley received from a number of retired agents. A paraphrased version of Hubbard's words used to hang on the walls of FBI headquarters while J. Edgar Hoover was director. It read, in part: "If you work for a man, in heaven's name work for him; speak well of him and stand by the institution he represents. Remember—an ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness ... If you must growl, condemn, and eternally find fault, why—resign your position and when you are on the outside, damn to your heart's content." The copies she received had "resign your position" heavily underlined. "It wasn't even anonymous!" she says. "They signed their names! Even though that is not on the walls anymore, that is still in the hearts and minds."

The backlash bit. "I'm not the most sensitive female in the world," Rowley says. "And the people who are closest to you matter most. But you can't help having your feelings hurt when the retired agents are lumping [you] with Hanssen, who betrayed everything we stand for." She knows the culture of loyalty is a defense mechanism, but she does not excuse it. "Loyalty to whoever you work for is extremely important. The only problem is, it's not the most important thing. And when it comes to not admitting mistakes, or covering up or not rectifying things only to save face, that's a problem."

So how did Rowley get so tough? There's a certain kind of Midwesterner who looks across the long, flat plains and doesn't see any obstacles or vertical structures because, in fairness, there aren't any. In this part of America—the tiny town of New Hampton, Iowa, where Rowley grew up the daughter of a mailman who never graduated from high school and walked 14 miles a day to make his rounds—the socioeconomic topography mirrors the geographical one. Everybody is on the level because there is only one. In the Iowa where she was raised and in the Apple Valley community outside Minne-apolis where she moved with her family, hierarchy never had much of a chance. Most people drive the same kind of car, have the same kind of yard behind the same kind of weatherboard house. The houses are spread equally across the expanse, not clustered in some pecking order around a town center. The status symbol is not to have one, to invest in public life, to treat everyone like the fellow next door.

So the girl who was informed at age 11 that she could not join the FBI went ahead and started the "World Organization of Secret Spies" with friends. She became known as someone who quietly righted small wrongs from the sidelines of the school. Her close friend Jane David was her lab partner all the way through high school, when Rowley would have occasional dustups with the science teacher over his inaccuracies, but always after class. "I'd see her shaking her head, and I knew he was going to get a talking-to," David remembers. Rowley would point out errors not to embarrass him but to make sure he corrected himself the following day, David says. "She wanted to make sure the rest of us understood it correctly for our college entrance exams. She wasn't trying to show off. She wanted to help us."

Most of Rowley's friends have a story about her bullying them into doing something they didn't want to do. In eighth grade, she became convinced that David should run for student-council president against the most popular boy in the class. David recoiled at the thought, but "you don't get into many arguments you can win with Coleen." Rowley wrote her speech and made her practice it again and again. David won.

In New Hampton, the community pool was the gathering place for students in summer, and when Rowley was in junior high, she wanted to learn the jackknife dive. "But of course there was no one to teach her," recalls her friend Vicki Kennedy. "The rest of us, we didn't want to try because ... there were boys and everything." But Rowley "worked and worked and worked all summer, and she belly-flopped a lot," Kennedy says. "By the end of the summer, she could do a real pretty dive where the rest of us had been too embarrassed to try."

Her bluntness tripped her up when she applied for a generous scholarship to Wartburg College in nearby Waverly, Iowa, a liberal-arts four-year institution founded by a Lutheran pastor, where German Lutherans like Rowley's parents sent their working-class kids. One of several finalists for the Regents Scholarship, a four-year ride, she answered honestly when the panel asked her about her major. "I haven't thought much about it. I'm keeping it open," she said. The students who eventually won declared they planned to be missionaries, doctors and lawyers. "I tracked them," she says. "And within a few months, not one of them was doing what they said." Then she laughs. "Yes, I've always been a little bitter." Denied the scholarship, Rowley relied on an Iowa tuition grant designed for future teachers. Rowley quickly became a French major because those students got a free year in France. "She said what she thought and always had a firmness of opinion," remembers Moira McCluney, her French professor at Wartburg College. "And compared to the usual Iowa girls ... well, I suspect she was born like that."

After she put herself through college, Rowley—the first in her family to get a degree—went to law school at the University of Iowa, where she met her future husband Ross. And that's another tale of Rowley willfulness. He was balking at getting married, so Rowley told him she was joining the FBI and it was now or never. Two weeks later, they were wed, and soon after she was at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va. Ross abandoned his studies in art history to follow her to Washington, and he has followed her around the world ever since, from New York City to Paris to Mississippi.

Friends say Rowley was the top marksman in her class. And she wanted to set the two-mile running record for women. During her first days at Quantico, Rowley heard that a woman can run it faster when she isn't on the pill. So she stopped taking birth control—and quickly became pregnant. She kept the news to herself for three months, even when she had to throw herself on the ground, belly first, from a dead run during weapons training. She didn't set the record then. "I was worried about pushing too hard because I was pregnant," she said. But she and a friend did set it in 1984 and held it for several years.

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