Washington ? An FBI supervisor whose headquarters unit denied a pre-Sept. 11 search warrant against Zacarias Moussaoui has won a presidential citation and large cash bonus, incentives the agency’s congressional critics say reward incompetence.

The FBI’s deputy general counsel, Marion “Spike” Bowman, was among nine current and former FBI officials who last month received a Presidential Rank Award for career senior executives, which carries with it a large cash bonus of 20 to 30 percent of an annual salary.

Bowman, head of the FBI’s National Security Law Unit, was praised for efforts to attract within the FBI “a staff of attorneys to examine diverse and highly complex issues for which little or no formal legal education has been available.” FBI Director Robert Mueller recommended to the White House that Bowman receive the award.

The decision roiled FBI critics who believe Bowman’s lawyers improperly rejected a search warrant request by FBI agents in Minnesota investigating Moussaoui in August 2001. Bowman, who declined comment Thursday, maintains there never was enough evidence for such a warrant.

Sen. Charles “Chuck” Grassley, R-Iowa, complained in a letter to the FBI director, “You are sending the wrong signal to those agents who fought — sometimes against senior FBI bureaucrats at headquarters — to prevent the attacks.”

Grassley asked Mueller to explain in writing his decision to nominate Bowman. He told Mueller that Senate testimony by Bowman during a closed Judiciary Committee hearing in July raised serious question about the competence of lawyers in the unit.

Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, the senior Republican on the Intelligence Committee during its oversight investigation of the FBI, complained last month that Bowman’s unit provided “confused and inaccurate information” to FBI investigators in Minneapolis during the Moussaoui case.

Shelby said in an 84-page report that the FBI unit’s advice turned out to be “patently false” and led agents in Minnesota on a “wild goose chase for nearly three weeks.”

On Thursday, Shelby said the award showed “no accountability for poor performance at the bureau. … They continue to reward bad behavior.”

Although the U.S. indictment of Moussaoui does not directly tie him to the 19 hijackers, prosecutors disclosed months ago that Moussaoui had called a phone number written on a business card recovered from the wreckage of one of the hijacked flights.

Bowman also headed the law unit in early 2000, when the FBI acknowledged serious blunders in surveillance. Among the problems, outlined in an April 2000 memorandum, were agents who illegally videotaped suspects, intercepted e-mails without court permission and recorded the wrong phone conversations.

Those mistakes extended beyond those criticized in a rare public decision last summer by the secretive U.S. court that oversees the surveillance warrants. The court’s decision was later overturned, but it admonished the FBI for providing inaccurate information in warrant applications.