FBI Agents Rebel Over Mandatory Transfers

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 country who are suddenly facing forced transfers to FBI headquarters.

Many, including Michael Clark, are leaving.

For 23 years, Clark was a loyal FBI man, rising to supervise a squad of agents in Connecticut working corporate fraud and public corruption cases. He helped send a former governor to prison.

But then the FBI told him he had to move to Washington, and he found out his loyalty ran only so deep. Now a casualty of an agency that has become a construction zone, Clark is working for Otis Elevator Co.

The agents argue that the upheaval is counterproductive. They say they have spent years cultivating contacts and relationships with state and local officials, which 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 recently left the bureau for 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 longer. High corporate demand for their skills since the Sept. 11 attacks has further swelled the ranks of retirees.

Recently, they have included agents overseeing some of the bureau’s highest-profile investigations, such as the CIA leak case and bribery investigations 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 supervisors are losing stature among state and local law enforcement officials they often rely on. A study led by former Atty. Gen. Richard L. Thornburgh found that an agent in charge of an FBI field office has been in that position an average of about 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 anti-terrorism, 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 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 anti-terrorism and other investigations, has been controversial within the agency, prompting criticism that Mueller is grooming bureaucrats rather than investigators.

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

Agents in the field who have five years of supervisory experience are being required to apply for supervisory positions in Washington. People who refuse the transfer are dropped out of the ranks of management and forced to accept a pay cut.

About 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 started getting 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 Assn., which represents most of the bureau’s 12,000 active agents. The group conducted a survey of its 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 believe their lifestyle is destined to deteriorate and the jobs are less attractive.

Although 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. And the bureau placed a high value on agents becoming established in their communities.

Clark, with four children, was president of the local Little League and is chairman of the Town Council in Farmington, Conn.

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.

Several agents facing transfers spoke about their dilemma, but only on the condition that they not be identified. They said they were torn between devotion to the bureau and a feeling that the policy put the FBI on the wrong track.

“You are going to lose hundreds of years of managerial experience and contacts that cannot be built overnight,” predicted one supervisor based on the West Coast who is weighing a decision. “The director wants to take people back there to [develop] leaders. That is fine. But we need leaders in the field too.”

Flush with post-Sept. 11 money, the FBI can readily afford to move people around the country. And critics argue that it can’t afford not to shake things up.

Mueller, who has often compared his task at the FBI to overhauling a major corporation, has said the idea is to develop a cadre of managers who stay in their jobs longer and to reduce turnover.

But as those seasoned managers quit rather than transfer to headquarters, the agents who agree to fill the supervisory vacancies are going to have less street experience.

Veterans “don’t want to see some guy coming in with a minimal amount of experience as a street agent doing the real work of the FBI and telling them what to do,” said Joseph Dooley, an agent who retired in July after 21 years with the FBI. “It is a very difficult hurdle for a young supervisor to overcome.”

The FBI’s Mason acknowledges as much, but says agents want it both ways: They don’t want to be transferred, yet don’t want to be supervised by those who do.

“I will forgive the bureau for picking supervisors from the available universe of people who have raised their hand,” he said.

To Clark, a transfer to Washington would have meant making personal and professional adjustments that he felt were not worth the price of remaining at the FBI.

In addition to uprooting his family, he probably would have earned less in Washington because he would have lost a cost-of-living adjustment given to agents in the New York area.

“I like the director and think he is trying to do good things for the FBI. I understand it is a national organization, and that he has bigger things on his mind than Connecticut,” Clark said.

“But cases are made in the field, and there is no one there who can tell me that a supervisor at headquarters is having the impact that a good field supervisor has,” he said.

“You go from being an investigator to more of an office-type job.... It’s just not an attractive assignment.”