Someone Had to Say It, So Coleen Rowley Did

For years, she was the voice of the FBI on cases ranging from the sensational to the sublime across the northern tier of the American 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 neighbors, colleagues and the public record.

Part lawyer, part ethicist, part cop, part triathlete, Rowley cultivated an image of earnest determination, of headstrong candor and yet, always, of loyalty to her agency.

Now, the 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 in the Sept. 11 terrorism investigation.

And Rowley is getting high marks for it, from within Minnesota’s federal law enforcement circles and in this flag-strewn suburb where she and her husband organized the Neighborhood Watch program and often jog together.

“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 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.’”

Rowley did just that, delivering a scathing, 13-page letter to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and key lawmakers that criticized the agency’s investigation of the only suspect directly charged in the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In the days since that letter became public, 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.”

Across the street from the Rowleys’ modest, two-story home, where her husband, Ross, declined all comment Saturday by either himself or his wife, neighbor Audrey Pacholski summed up her feelings about the situation.

“She had in her mind what was right, and she did it,” Pacholski said.

“She got scolded for it. But that’s her. You don’t tell her what to do.”

A closer look at Rowley’s career, which for the last 12 years has been spent in the Minnesota field office, makes her outspoken critique all the more dramatic--though perhaps unsurprising.

Specifically, what Rowley questioned was the response by FBI headquarters in Washington to the arrest of Moroccan-born Zacarias Moussaoui at a suburban Minneapolis motel Aug. 16, three full weeks before the attacks.

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 excerpts of her letter that have been leaked in recent days, that officials in 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 there was insufficient probable cause to even 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 job as the Minnesota field office’s general counsel. Until recently, she also served as media spokeswoman for the office.

Not only did Rowley, a 1980 University of Iowa law school graduate, know and follow the law, but her job also has been to interpret the law.

“She’s very highly ethical,” former agent Brubaker said. “She’s our ethics person. She gave classes in ethics to our agents every year.”

Accounts of Rowley’s spartan work ethic abound. She brought her lunch from home and ate at her desk. When she was deputized to train the police force at an Indian reservation near Bemidji, she got up at 4 a.m., drove 200 miles to the reservation, taught all day and drove home at night.

“‘Earnest’ is the adjective that comes to my mind,” said ex-prosecutor Lillehaug. “Straightforward. From what I could see, she was completely nonpolitical.”

Sen. Mark Dayton (D-Minn.), for example, said Saturday that he had never heard of Rowley until her story broke last week.

That’s likely to change in the weeks ahead; some lawmakers now see her as a potential star witness at congressional hearings concerning lapses in the terrorism investigations.

That track record of relative anonymity was one Rowley laid down through the many years she served as the FBI’s Minneapolis spokeswoman. With few exceptions, she offered reporters only the facts, and most often only the barest of them.

When a white man was beaten and left for dead with a rope around his neck on a Minnesota Indian reservation in 1999, Rowley confirmed that the FBI was investigating but declined to weigh in on local speculation that it was a hate crime.

Rowley’s humor emerged subtly when she parsed the law to explain why the FBI went after the Animal Liberation Front for its lab-rat attack but couldn’t prosecute the Earth Liberation Front for a fatal assault on genetically altered oat plants. She noted that there is a federal Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, but “there is no Vegetable Enterprise Terrorism Act.”

On the 1997 frenetic, nationwide search for Versace’s killer, Andrew Cunanan, who was on the FBI’s most-wanted list for 42 days, Rowley was measured, always resisting the flashy quote or headline comment. Rowley inherited the spokeswoman role in that case because one of Cunanan’s victims was from Minnesota.

It was at the peak of that manhunt when Rowley perhaps foreshadowed the critique that would unleash a storm of controversy five years later.

She acknowledged to reporters before Cunanan committed suicide in Miami Beach in 1997 that authorities had the serial killer within their reach several times, but never did capture him.

“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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Anderson reported from Minnesota and Fineman from Washington. Times staff writer Megan Garvey also contributed to this report.