FBI Terror Expert Sees Job Evolve

Perren is a bull of a man, bald and gravel-voiced. He hits the gym at 4:30 a.m. for 75 minutes of cardiovascular exercise and weightlifting before exploding into the office. ("I'm kind of triple A," he admits.) His colleagues call him a hardworking agent, "willing to break a little china to succeed," as retired FBI official Michael Mason puts it.

Perren's energy is legendary. "John could go out on surveillance for 15 hours, and then, where I'd go home and go to bed, he'd go work out," recalls New Jersey State Police Col. Rick Fuentes, one of his partners in Newark.

"John is a bulldog," adds Jim Rice, an FBI counterterrorism veteran. "If he gets his teeth into something, he's not going to let it go."

And yet colleagues say Perren's most important quality is one rarely associated with the chisel-jawed, door-kicking FBI agents of television lore.

He is good, Mason says, at "relationships."

D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier offers an example, recalling how Perren arrived at the scene of a suspected bomb in Northeast Washington a few years ago.

"He could have come in and said, 'I'm the FBI; I'm in charge.' But he really just jumped into a team mode and said, 'Just tell me how I can help,' " recalls Lanier, who was then head of police special operations.

Such cooperation, she adds, "is not typical for relations between the state and locals and the feds."

Perren said he believes strongly in building investigative teams with other agencies. In 1999, when he became supervisor of the joint terrorism task force at the Washington office, it had representatives of nine law enforcement agencies. By late summer 2001, it had grown to 17.

"We were working it hard," he recalls.

And then, as Perren was getting a physical examination on Sept. 11, 2001, the unthinkable happened.

He raced back to set up a command center at the Washington office. For several weeks, Perren spent 16-hour days at the Pentagon site, ensuring security.