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WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Minneapolis agent Coleen Rowley, who last year exposed FBI intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, has warned bureau Director Robert Mueller that a war with Iraq could provoke new terrorism on a scale that the bureau is not prepared to handle.

In a bluntly worded seven-page letter, she called on Mueller to advise President Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft that bureau officials "should be deluding neither ourselves nor the American people that there is any way the FBI . . . will be able to stem the flood of terrorism that will likely head our way in the wake of an attack on Iraq."

Compared with the weeks before Sept. 11, she said, the current situation is "of even more consequence for the internal security of our country."

Rowley provided copies of the letter to the Star Tribune and the New York Times, saying she wants to publicize her concerns before the United States commits to a war.

A 22-year bureau veteran who is the Minneapolis field office's chief lawyer, Rowley is not a counterterrorism agent, but she said she is thoroughly familiar with the bureau's operations and the concerns of fellow agents. (Rowley will speak Friday at 3 p.m. at Hamline University's Sundin Music Hall.)

Rowley said that she and her husband, Ross, spent three weeks debating whether to send the letter and then whether to make it public, and that it came down to a matter of conscience.

She e-mailed it to Mueller Feb. 26. The FBI chief had urged her to share any criticism of the bureau with him after she triggered a national furor with her allegations that bureau headquarters blocked Minneapolis agents' attempts to gain a warrant to search suspected terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui's belongings before the Sept. 11 attacks. In his belongings were clues to the suicide hijackers.

In a phone interview Wednesday night, Rowley said she does not know whether Mueller has seen the letter. She said she informed Deborah Pierce, the special agent in charge of the Minneapolis office, earlier in the day that she had decided to make her letter public.

She said she told Pierce she is speaking out because before Sept. 11, she watched Minneapolis agents "pulling their hair out for 2 1/2 weeks but I didn't really do much" to help them.

"Now we're looking at probably doing the same stupid thing, and we're looking at more 9/11s," she said. "So I thought I should try harder. I didn't try hard enough the time before. I don't want to repeat that mistake again."

For her stinging, 13-page letter to Mueller last spring, Time Magazine named Rowley one of three persons of the year.

The FBI had no comment on Rowley's latest letter but pointed out that Mueller has warned of increased terror threats in the event of an Iraq war.

In the letter, she cited Mueller's recent Senate testimony in which he contended that Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaida network will remain the most serious threat facing the United States for the foreseeable future, while also noting that a U.S.-Iraq war could prompt Saddam Hussein to give Al-Qaida weapons of mass destruction.

"But you did not connect these very important dots," Rowley wrote.

She noted that Mueller has made it clear to agency employees that the FBI, facing criticism that it cannot transform itself into an effective counterterrorism agency, is "perilously close to being divided up and is depending almost solely upon the good graces" of Bush and Ashcroft.

"The FBI is apparently the source for the public statement that there are 5,000 Al-Qaida terrorists already in the U.S.," Rowley said, asserting that the figure is unsubstantiated and appears aimed at gaining favor with the administration.

If the FBI truly has solid evidence that Iraq is linked with Al-Qaida and is planning to provide the terrorists with weapons of mass destruction, she said, "it would seem such information should be shared, at least internally within the FBI."

And if preventing terrorism is indeed the FBI's top priority, she asked, why hasn't the FBI attempted to interview Moussaoui, who faces capital conspiracy charges in the Sept. 11 plot, and Richard Reid, who was recently convicted of trying to blow up an airliner over the Atlantic by igniting explosives hidden in his tennis shoes.

Rowley said that if the United States goes to war without the support of traditional allies such as Germany and France, it could also damage U.S. relationships with European intelligence agencies.

"I believe the FBI, by drawing on the perspective gained from its recent history, can make a unique contribution to the discussion on Iraq," she said.

She likened the current situation to the decision the bureau faced in its ill-fated confrontation with cult leader David Koresh, whom she said "exerted the same kind of oppressive control over his Branch Davidian followers as Saddam Hussein does over the Iraqis."

"Law enforcement authorities were certain Koresh had accumulated a formidable arsenal of weapons and ammunition at his compound and may have been planning on using them someday," she wrote. After a failed assault, she said, the compound was contained and pressure built, but then the FBI decided "it could wait no longer and mounted the second assault," leading to the deaths of "the children we sought to liberate."

Rowley, stressing that she was expressing her personal views, urged Mueller to set aside "the extraneous pressures currently being brought to bear by politicians of both parties."

A U.S. attack on Iraq, she said, "may have grave consequences for your ability to discharge your responsibility to protect Americans, and it is altogether likely you will find yourself a helpless bystander to a rash of 9/11s."

After her experience in the weeks before Sept. 11, she said, "I promised myself that in the future I always would try."

-- Greg Gordon is at ggordon@mcclatchydc.com .

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