For years, she was the voice of the FBI on cases ranging from the sensational to the sublime across the northern tier of America’s heartland.
From the hunt for Gianni Versace’s murderer to an Animal Liberation Front attack to protect lab rats, Coleen Rowley always played it straight, according to colleagues and the public record.
Part lawyer, part ethicist, part cop and part triathlete, Rowley cultivated an image of earnest determination, of headstrong candor and yet, always, of loyalty to her agency.
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Now this 47-year-old mother of four and career FBI agent suddenly has emerged as a singular, critical voice from within: a whistle-blower who set off what one former Minnesota prosecutor called “a steam whistle” last week in challenging FBI headquarters’ decisions preceding the Sept. 11 attacks.
And Rowley is getting high marks for it, both from within Minnesota’s federal law-enforcement circles and from neighbors in this flag-filled suburb where she and her husband organized the neighborhood watch program and often jog side by side.
“She is saying what a lot of people have been thinking and talking about [privately] for months,” said David Lillehaug, a former U.S. attorney in Minneapolis who was appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1994.
Describing Rowley as “a perfectionist,” retired FBI agent Larry Brubaker added: “She would stand up for what she thought and tell the bosses, `This is the way I see it.”‘
In the days since Rowley did just that–delivering a scathing 13-page letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller and key lawmakers that criticized the agency’s investigation of the only suspect indicted in the Sept. 11 attacks–Brubaker said the personal e-mails he has received are piling up in her favor. One said, “Hats off to Coleen for taking the bull by the horns.”
A closer look at Rowley’s career, which for the past 12 years has been spent in the Minnesota field office, makes her outspoken critique all the more dramatic–although perhaps not surprising.
Moussaoui request rejected
Specifically, what Rowley questioned was the response by FBI headquarters in Washington to the arrest of Morocco-born Zacarias Moussaoui at a suburban Minneapolis motel on Aug. 16, 2001–more than three weeks before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Moussaoui triggered the suspicions of a flight instructor in suburban Minneapolis after paying $8,000 in cash to take a flight-simulator course for a Boeing 747, despite having failed to solo even a single-engine Cessna after more than 50 hours of instruction.
The flight instructor called the FBI, which confronted a belligerent and uncooperative Moussaoui. Local FBI agents turned him over to immigration authorities for a visa violation and impounded his possessions, which included a laptop computer, and focused all their efforts on getting a warrant to search that computer.
In short, Rowley asserts in her letter that officials at FBI headquarters ignored key evidence and intelligence that could have justified a special national-security warrant to search the laptop, which contained files on crop-dusting and commercial-flight simulations.
Government officials acknowledge that FBI lawyers in Washington reviewed the Minnesota field office’s search warrant request for Moussaoui’s computer and determined that there was insufficient probable cause even to request it. At that point, no crime had been committed, they said.
Screening and handling agents’ search warrant requests is a major part of Rowley’s duties as the Minnesota field office’s general counsel. Not only did Rowley, a 1980 University of Iowa law school graduate, know and follow the law, her job has been to interpret it.
“Earnest is the adjective that comes to my mind,” said ex-prosecutor Lillehaug. “Straightforward. From what I could see, she was completely non-political.”
Sen. Mark Dayton (D-Minn.), for example, said he never had heard of Rowley until her story broke last week. That is likely to change in the weeks ahead; some lawmakers see her as a potential star witness at congressional hearings on lapses in the terror investigations.
Cultivated low profile
That track record of relative anonymity was one Rowley laid down through the many years she served as the FBI’s Minneapolis spokeswoman, a job she held until recently. With few exceptions, she offered reporters only the facts, and most often only the barest of them.
On the frenetic, nationwide search in 1997 for Versace’s killer, Andrew Cunanan, who was on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list for 42 days, Rowley was measured, always resisting the flashy quote or headline comment. She received the spokeswoman role in that case because another of Cunanan’s victims was from Minnesota.
It was at the peak of that search when Rowley perhaps foreshadowed the critique that would unleash a storm of controversy five years later.
She acknowledged before Cunanan committed suicide in Miami Beach in 1997 that authorities had the serial killer within reach several times.
“In retrospect,” she said of the FBI’s investigation of Cunanan that year, “there are some missed opportunities.”
She added: “There are always … opportunities in investigations.”
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