Robert Mueller became director of the FBI one week before 9/11 and spent the next 12 years adding global terrorists to the agency’s most-wanted list of gangsters, kidnappers and bank robbers – and aggressively hunting them down.

Now, two months after leaving the job that allowed him to transform the FBI and focus its agents more on counterterrorism and emerging threats like cyber crimes, Mueller will work closely with Stanford scholars to better understand the challenges and issues surrounding international security and online networks.

At the invitation of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Stanford Law School, Mueller will spend the current academic year as a consulting professor and the Arthur and Frank Payne Distinguished Lecturer.

He will also visit the Haas Center for Public Service and meet with students to discuss leadership and service around cybersecurity, and work through FSI to train and mentor undergraduate students.

"I look forward to working with the students and faculty of Stanford to address critical issues of the day, including counterterrorism, cybersecurity and shepherding institutions through transition,” Mueller said. “Having worked on these issues as FBI director over the last several years, I hope to pass on the lessons I have learned to those who will be our leaders of tomorrow.  For my part, I hope to gain fresh insight and new thoughts and ideas for the challenges our country continues to face."  

Mueller will make several visits to Stanford, spending about 30 days on campus during the academic year. His first visit comes next week, and will be marked by his delivery of the Payne lecture on Nov. 15. The public talk will focus on the FBI’s role in safeguarding national security. It will be held at 4:30 p.m. at the Koret-Taube Conference Center in the John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Building.

“Bob Mueller is an extraordinary public servant who will bring an enormously important perspective to some of the most complex security issues in the world,” said FSI Director Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar. “We’re excited that he can help shape our research agenda on cybersecurity and other security issues.”

Mueller will spend the year working with FSI and Stanford Law School scholars to develop research agendas on emerging issues in international security. He will hold graduate seminars and deliver a major lecture at the law school and work with students and fellows at the Haas Center, the law school and the Graduate School of Business. He will also mentor honors students at FSI’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.

"Robert Mueller has been a federal prosecutor and the nation’s leading law enforcement official during very difficult times.  We are thrilled he will be interacting with our students and faculty because he has much to teach us,” said M. Elizabeth Magill, dean of the law school. "His unique perspective on the intersection of law and international security will be tremendously beneficial to our community.  We are delighted to welcome Director Mueller back to Stanford Law School."

As the FBI’s chief, Mueller created a dedicated cybersecurity squad in each of its field offices and dedicated about 1,000 agents and analysts to fight Web-based crimes. At Stanford, he will bring together academics and practitioners with an eye toward creating an unofficial diplomacy dialogue.

“Should a terrorist utilize cyber capabilities to undertake an attack, it could be devastating,” he said just before leaving the FBI in September. “We have to be prepared.”

Mueller received a bachelor’s from Princeton in 1966 and a master’s in international relations from New York University a year later. He fought in Vietnam as a Marine, leading a rifle platoon and earning the Bronze Star and Purple Heart. After leaving the military, Mueller enrolled at the University of Virginia Law School and received his law degree in 1973.

He began his law career as a litigator in San Francisco, and in 1976 began a 12-year career serving in United States Attorney’s offices in San Francisco and Boston focusing on financial fraud, terrorist and public corruption cases. He worked for two law firms before returning to the U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington, D.C., where he was a senior homicide investigator.

He was named U.S. Attorney in San Francisco in 1998, and held that job until President George W. Bush tapped him to lead the FBI. His first day on the job was Sept. 4, 2001.

“When I first came on board, I thought I had a fair idea of what to expect,” Mueller said during his farewell ceremony at the FBI ‘s headquarters in Washington “But the September 11 attacks altered every expectation.”

A visit to CIA headquarters is nothing like Jack Bauer's CTU: the entrance has no retina or fingerprint scans. Agents do not look like Hollywood stars. 

"In fact, the place has something of a shabby post office feel," CISAC co-director Amy Zegart told nearly 200 Stanford alumni attending her "Class Without Quizzes" during alumni weekend. 

But shows such as "Homeland," "Blacklist" and "24," with the fictitious operative Jack Bauer, have dramatically changed Americans' perception of our intelligence agencies, Zegart told the class. 

Zegart, who is also associate director of academic affairs at the Hoover Institution, says the proliferation of  “spytainment” has skyrocketed in the last 15 years. Spy genre novelists Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy have sold 300 million books in the last 15 years, nearly one for every American. 

Spy-themed video games have gone from a $2 billion industry in 1996 to one of $16 billion in 2011. Spy movies have made the top-10 grossing U.S. film list every year since 2000. 

"Don't get me wrong," said Zegart, one of the country's leading intelligence experts. "I'm married to a Hollywood screenwriter and love being transported to an imaginary world where congressional oversight works and spies always look like Daniel Craig." 

Amy Zegart

Amy Zegart  Photo Credit: Caleb Rau

But, she added, the blurring of fact and fiction makes for great entertainment at a hidden cost: “Americans are steeped in misperceptions about what intelligence agencies actually do – and misplaced expectations about how well they can do it.” 

Zegart and Hoover research fellow Marshall Erwin commissioned a YouGov National Poll in early October about public attitudes toward national intelligence. They found that many Americans don't really understand what our intelligence agencies do. 

When asked specifically about the National Security Agency, they found: 

• About one-third believes NSA officials are responsible for interrogating terrorist detainees. They aren't.
• About one-third thinks the NSA conducts operations to kill terrorists They don't.
• Nearly 39% of those polled believe metadata – the information collected as part of its bulk phone records program – includes content of phone calls. It doesn’t.
• Nearly half of those polled did not know that the NSA breaks foreign codes, even though that’s been one of its core missions since its founding in 1952 and why the NSA employs more mathematicians than any other U.S. organization.
• Frequent wathers of spy TV (43%) are more likely to approve of government collection of telephone and Internet data than infrequent watchers (29%).

The finding that got the biggest laugh and loudest groan: While 43 percent of Americans could correctly name James Clapper as the director of national intelligence, 74 percent could identify Miley Cyrus as the young woman who created a global stir when she twerked on nationwide TV.

You can learn more about the poll in this video and their recent VIDEO: Is Spy-Themed Entertainment Affecting Public Opinion on Torture?, as well as in this Lawfare Blog posting and Walter Pincus column in the Washington Post.

The YouGov poll of 1,000 randomly selected people was conducted Oct. 5-7 with a margin of error of +/- 4.3.