Approach Turning More Long-Term, New D.C. Chief Says
By Mary Beth Sheridan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 20, 2008
As an FBI supervisor, John Perren spent weeks in the wreckage of the Pentagon after Sept. 11, 2001. Yet what haunts him is the attack that didn't happen.
"The second airplane meant for D.C. did not get here," says Perren, the new counterterrorism chief of the FBI's Washington field office.
That hijacked jet, which authorities say was apparently bound for the White House or the U.S. Capitol, crashed in Pennsylvania. Perren says he believes that al-Qaeda will return to Washington, just as the group came back and attacked the World Trade Center eight years after a botched bombing there.
"They had a target," he says. "They will keep going after it."
To head the FBI's counterterrorism division for the nation's capital is to treat every day as an orange alert. The office has nearly 900 open investigations involving a variety of groups, from al-Qaeda to the Animal Liberation Front. Most of the cases are in the District and Northern Virginia, but the office also investigates crimes against Americans in the Middle East, South Asia and other parts of the world.
Perren, 54, comes to the job with two decades of experience pursuing some of the biggest terrorist plots in U.S. history. And yet he acknowledges that this is a new era for the FBI's second-biggest counterterrorism office, where he succeeds Mike Heimbach, now at headquarters. The bureau is trying to blend a crime-busting past with a more intelligence-driven, long-term approach. "The focus isn't response" to attacks, says Perren. "It's investigation, prevention and disruption."
In a crisp white shirt and dark suit, Perren looks very much the traditional G-man. He grew up in Detroit, the son of immigrants from war-ravaged Malta who adored the United States. In fifth grade, Perren wrote to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, declaring his ambition to join the bureau. "I always wanted to be in law enforcement," he says.
At 19, Perren became a clerk at FBI headquarters. But he needed education and experience to advance. He spent 14 years with D.C. police, studying at American University at night, before returning to the FBI. His first assignment, in 1987, was on the FBI's joint terrorism task force in Newark.
Over the next decade, Perren's team ricocheted from one high-threat case to another. It investigated the slaying of extremist rabbi Meir Kahane, the first World Trade Center attack and a plot to blow up New York's tunnels.
It was the start of a new era of terrorism, although few recognized it at the time. The Justice Department and FBI did "excellent work" investigating the 1993 World Trade Center attack, according to the 9/11 Commission. However, it noted, their approach was to solve individual terrorism cases. It "was not designed to ask if the events might be harbingers of worse to come."
Today, Perren's squads work with dozens of intelligence analysts, reflecting the FBI's effort to transform itself into an agency that prevents attacks.
"You're not just going after prosecutions," he says. "You're looking at this incident, this group, where it fits into the bigger picture."
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.
"You took it personally," he says of the terrorist attack. "That's why, maybe, I still have this passion. To me, it's like I'm in the military. That's what the bureau is to me. I'm fighting a war."
Over the next several years, as he was promoted to the No. 2 job in the Washington office's counterterrorism division, Perren built a crisis response branch. He oversaw the expansion of the joint terrorism task force to include 34 local and federal agencies throughout the region. He also established an intelligence squad to support day-to-day investigations and forecast threats.
Perren declines to say how many people work in the counterterrorism division today, and he will not provide a breakdown of their cases, citing security regulations. But he confirmed that the number has increased since the Sept. 11 attacks. "There is no lead left unaddressed. It's why we have so many cases," he said. "You have a lead, you run that thing into the ground."
Some tips go nowhere, and those cases are closed within days; other cases stretch into years.
Arab and Muslim organizations have criticized some of the FBI's efforts as overly aggressive. Perren acknowledges that when agents began questioning immigrants after Sept. 11, 2001, many feared that "we were going to take them away in the middle of the night."
"We had to show them to trust us," he says. The FBI has tried to build bridges to the Arab and Muslim community, but it has had mixed success.
In 2005, Perren spent six months running the FBI operation in Iraq. It was a powerful experience, he recalls, supervising agents and analysts investigating roadside bombings and seeking intelligence about threats to U.S. forces.
"To watch them in these extreme conditions, working their hearts off, up to 20 hours a day . . . it was a real privilege," he says.
Perren's father died while Perren was in Iraq. He kept the news to himself so the troops would not be aware of his grief. "You can't lose faith in your on-scene commander," he explains. "Game face on."
His office is a study in machismo, decorated with police badges and photos from Iraq and the Pentagon. But there is a hint of a softer side, a line of statues of police protecting children. They are gifts from his only child, John. Next month, the 23-year-old will graduate from the D.C. police academy. He will wear his father's old badge number.
"I'm very proud of him," says the elder Perren, and a smile spreads across his face.
But there is little time for sentimentality.
"I keep getting buzzed," Perren says, pulling out his BlackBerry. "Let me make sure we're still okay."
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