Frustrated by changes, many veteran agents leaving FBI

WASHINGTON -- The FBI's storied workforce is being dismantled and reassembled as Director Robert S. Mueller III tries to overhaul the hidebound agency.

The result is a culture war between old and new, and older agents are rebelling. Among the disaffected are hundreds of agents in field offices around the United States who are suddenly facing forced transfers to FBI headquarters.

Many, like Michael Clark, are leaving.

Clark was with the FBI for 23 years, rising to supervise a squad of agents in Connecticut working corporate fraud and public corruption cases. He helped send a former governor to prison. Then the FBI told him he had to move to Washington . He now works for Otis Elevator Co.

The agents say that the upheaval is counterproductive. They say they have spent years cultivating contacts and relationships with state and local officials that are not easily replaced. Middle managers, such as squad leaders and desk supervisors, often form the institutional memory of the bureau's 56 field offices.

``Nobody is happy about it," said Clark, who now has the top security and investigative job at Otis. ``You are going to lose a ton of experience."

FBI agents long have fled for greener pastures, propelled by a pension system that allows them to retire with full benefits at 50 and offers little incentive to stay. High corporate demand for their skills since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has further swelled the ranks of retirees. Recently, departures have included agents overseeing some of the bureau's highest-profile investigations, like the CIA leak case and bribery probes in Congress. Fat retention bonuses ordered up by Congress have failed to stem the flight.

Turnover among the agents in charge of FBI field offices is such that some fear those executives are losing stature among state and local law enforcement officials they often rely on. A study led by former US attorney general Richard Thornburgh found that an agent in charge of an FBI field office now has been in that position an average of 15 months.

The high-profile departures mask an even broader problem that extends deep into supervisory ranks at FBI headquarters.

Currently, as many as one-fifth of the 1,500 top FBI jobs in Washington are vacant, according to one agency official -- including positions in antiterrorism, intelligence-gathering, and Internet crimes, which are among the FBI's top priorities. The bureau has an authorized workforce of 31,000.

The large number of vacancies reflects both ongoing turnover and the fact that the bureau has yet to fill many new headquarters positions that Mueller has created over the last five years to avoid the sort of intelligence failures that led to Sept. 11. That consolidation of authority, aimed at centralizing investigations of terrorism and other crimes, has been controversial in the agency, prompting criticism that Mueller is grooming bureaucrats, not investigators.

Now, to fill the vacant positions, Mueller is resorting to another controversial policy, essentially a draft.

Agents in the field who have five years' supervisory experience are being required to apply for supervisor positions in Washington. People who refuse the transfer are dropped out of the ranks of management and take a pay cut. Roughly 900 supervisors in field offices are subject to the policy. Most are in their 40s, in the prime of their careers.

Mueller first announced the plan two years ago, but it is just now starting to affect scores of agents as they reach their five-year mark. In recent weeks, many received letters that give them a few months to make a decision.

The FBI says it is sympathetic, but not apologetic.

``To be what the American public expects us to be, the FBI is still a career that requires sacrifice," said Michael Mason, an acting executive assistant director to Mueller.

The opposition includes the FBI Agents Association, which represents most of the bureau's 12,000 active agents. The group conducted a survey of members affected by the new policy and found that more than half planned to retire or step down from management.

Frederick Bragg, the association's president and an agent in Syracuse, N.Y., said he thought the policy was especially unfair to agents who became supervisors before the bureau instituted the rules. He is calling on Mueller to give them a pass. ``These guys signed up for a different program, and have made personal and professional choices based on that," he said.

Recent chatter on an Internet site for former agents has focused on a possible class-action lawsuit against the bureau, alleging that the policy illegally discriminates against older agents. One writer said that as many as 30 employees have filed formal complaints with the bureau.

Like many employees in private industry and other government jobs, the agents are concerned about uprooting their families and moving, in some cases across the country, to high-cost Washington, where they say their lifestyle will deteriorate and the jobs are less attractive.

While such transfer pressure is common in industry, FBI agents have long been insulated from it, in part because it is expensive to move employees around.

The agents also question whether the policy really puts them where they are most needed. Much of their work in the field has involved supervising ongoing investigations, they said, but the jobs in Washington are considered to be far from the action, managing paperwork rather than people.

Critics argue, however, that the agency can't afford not to shake things up.