When American airlines flight 11 crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, the Federal Bureau of Investigation director, Robert S. Mueller III, had been at his post for just one week. Suddenly he found himself responsible for both investigating the gravest crime in American history and for preventing further attacks.

Mueller had faced a daunting job even before the terrorists struck. He had been assigned to revamp a tradition-bound bureaucracy of 27,000 employees, an organization that for years had given the impression of lurching from one blunder to the next. His goals were to bring effective management to the Bureau, beef up its intelligence capabilities, reorder its priorities, and force the insular institution to cooperate with other agencies. He recognized that he faced a pivotal moment in the history of what his predecessor Louis Freeh had called “potentially... the most dangerous institution in the United States.” The FBI had long exemplified disciplined and effective professionalism, handling threats from kidnapping to espionage, but it had also assumed powers irreconcilable with democratic government and shamed the nation with its extralegal exploits.

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