Coleen Rowley

Coleen Rowley, who served as chief counsel of the FBI's Minneapolis field office, "in a 13-page memo, outlined how FBI headquarters thwarted agents' attempts to investigate Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged 20th hijacker. The 'bombshell memo' led bureau chief Robert Mueller to reorganize the agency. Rowley testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in June about the FBI bureaucracy that frustrates agents' attempts at innovative investigation and mires them in paperwork."

Rowley was selected as Time magazine's 2002 "Person of the Year". According to Time's December 22, 2002, article "The Special Agent," on May 21, 2002, "when Rowley upbraided her beloved FBI in a secret 13-page memo, she thought she was on a private rescue mission. In her view, it was not a reprimand but an act of redemption. It was not about speaking truth to power, because people like Rowley don't see much difference between the two. Truth is power--that's how you catch the bad guys.

"So the memo -- the one that leaked and landed her on the front pages of newspapers, that brought her to Washington to face cameras and Congressmen and that helped set off the debate over how to reinvent the FBI--was not meant to be a memo at all. It came tumbling out, almost by accident, because she couldn't hold the words inside anymore."

"In June 2002, Rowley testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee based on her 23-year history with the FBI and on her role in the Zacarias Moussaoui investigation. Rowley joined the FBI as a Special Agent in 1980 after earning a law degree from the University of Iowa."

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