Coleen Rowley had served as a Special Agent with the FBI and was assigned to the Omaha, Nebraska and Jackson, Mississippi divisions. Beginning in 1984, she spent six years working in the New York City field office on investigations involving Italian organized crime and Sicilian heroin. During this time she served three temporary assignments in the U.S. embassy in Paris and the consulate in Montreal. In 1990, she was transferred to the FBI's Minneapolis field office, where she became Chief Division Counsel. Her career with the FBI spanned 24 years. In 2002, Rowley wrote a memo to FBI Director Robert Mueller, detailing the mishandling of the intelligence her office had gathered, and later that year testified before the Senate.
In 2006 she ran as a Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party candidate for Congress in Minnesota's 2nd congressional district. In this interview, Rowley speaks about the Italian Mafia "Pizza Connection" case, Bojinka Plot, Khobar Towers Bombing and how Minneapolis FBI supervisors at the Radical Fundamentalist Unit curtailed the Zacarias Moussaoui case by not authorizing a FISA warrant to search Moussaoui's personal belongings such as his laptop.
An Interview With Coleen Rowley (Minneapolis FBI & Whistleblower)