A Chat with the Bureau's Top Cop.

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FBI Director Robert Mueller met with U.S. News editors and reporters last week to talk about his efforts to refocus the bureau on preventing terrorism. Excerpts:

Anything relating to terrorism should not sit in a particular office but has to be pushed to headquarters. And once it is in headquarters, it has to be analyzed and pursued. There should be no counterterrorism needs to go unaddressed. That's our No. 1 priority.

With the CIA, they have more people working over with us day in and day out than they had shortly before September 11. And on the analytical side, we, the Department of Homeland Security, and the CIA have persons at TTIC [the new CIA-FBI terrorist threat integration center] analyzing the information that flows in. It's been a dramatic change and a huge increase in the integration and exchange of the information.

We're far better integrated than we were before September 11 in terms of the exchange of information, the identification and proposal of persons for the watch list, and [understanding] the importance of identifying persons overseas or in the United States who might be associated, affiliated.

We're hiring 900 analysts. Our initial thrust was to bring the best people in the bureau who knew al Qaeda to headquarters and beef up the capacity in counterterrorism. But now, we're pushing it across the bureau. The same type of analysis that we used for counterterrorism we ought to be utilizing to analyze the gangs in Northern Virginia. So our analysts will be doing counterterrorism, doing counterintelligence, but they'll also be doing the same type of analysis in our other programs. And to build that up takes a period of time. We've got to continue to integrate state and local law enforcement. We have to do a better job communicating. But we've made substantial strides.

We have a number of cases of persons that we are concerned about because they are potential operatives. The majority of cases we have around the country are individuals who are providing some form of material support. It can be recruiting, it can be financial, it can be training. Our greatest concern is that which we do not know.

It's very difficult to replace somebody like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed [the 9/11 mastermind], who was educated in the United States, was essentially smart, was a leader, was computer literate, a very good organizer, was close to [Osama bin Laden] and understood, most particularly, our vulnerabilities. So that type of person is, I think, very difficult to replace. A person who wants to commit some sort of suicide attack is not very hard to replace.

PHOTO (COLOR): TOUGH JOB. Director Mueller is trying to change the way the fabled bureau does business.