James Bernazzani

he day after the September 11 attacks, FBI Special Agent James Bernazzani was transferred out of the agency where he'd spent 17 years working terrorist investigations.

He hadn't done anything wrong. Quite the contrary. During the previous decade, Bernazzani had become an authority on terrorist attacks, investigating strikes on U.S. citizens in Western Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. He'd held a number of jobs, including leading a terrorism task force in Houston, and serving as chief of Iran/ Hezbollah Operations at FBI headquarters.

Bernazzani was a natural to be detailed to the CIA, which had been walking point in the terror wars for more than a decade. He reported for duty on September 12, and by May 2002, he was promoted to deputy director for law enforcement at the agency's famed Counterterrorist Center, called the CTC.

The CTC had been the government's de facto terrorism intelligence hub since it was established in 1986. It coordinated the intelligence agencies' counter-terrorism work, and comprised both analysts and clandestine operatives.

Today, though, the CTC has been augmented-or supplanted, some say-by the new Terrorist Threat Integration Center, and Bernazzani, still on detail, is its principal deputy director. TTIC is an FBI-CIA cooperative, but its day-to-day management is clearly under the thumb of CIA Director George Tenet.

For that reason, intelligence experts and former officials have questioned whether the new center will do much to tear down the legal and cultural barriers that have kept the FBI and CIA from cooperating on counter-terrorism. Bernazzani is unequivocal on that: The old days are over, he says. "The FBI and CIA are working together," he told Time in July 2002. "Anybody who promotes the notion that we are not is wrong. Period."

Bernazzani received a master's degree from Harvard University in 1984 and entered the FBI Academy that year.