-Caveat Lector-
New Yorker
May 14, 2001
Pg. 68
Annals Of Politics
Louis Freeh's Last Case
(continued)
III
The Freehs live in a heavily mortgaged house in Great
Falls, a Virginia suburb, and, although the F.B.I.
director has access to a government plane, he often
flies coach on a commercial airline. Freeh met Marilyn
Coyle in 1980, at F.B.I. headquarters, where she was a
paralegal in the Bureau's civil-rights division. (She
was twenty-two; Freeh was thirty.) After a three-year
courtship, they married, and a year later they had the
first of six children, all boys, now ages three to
sixteen. Freeh is actively involved in the daily
routine of raising them, and nearly everyone I spoke
to had a story about catching Freeh in the middle of
diapering a baby or bathing a child. "I have always
said to myself, 'I never want to say I'm leaving a job
because I want to spend more time with my family,' "
he said. "I feel sorry for people when they say that.
But my advice to them is that you shouldn't have taken
the job in the first place." More than once, when we
spoke, he was on his way to or from the emergency
room. Tenet, the C.I.A. director, said that five of
Freeh's children were in Freeh's office on the day
that Freeh swore Tenet in. "What I remembered most
about the event was that one of the older kids was
trying to stuff one of the younger ones into the
safe," Tenet said. When it was reported that Freeh
might retire at the end of last year, the reason most
often cited was financial-the difficulty of supporting
a large family on his salary, which is a hundred and
forty-five thousand dollars. "What I've been telling
people, including very close friends," he said to me
last week, after he said he was quitting, "is that
this was a good time for many different reasons,
personal and professional." He conceded that he had
not wanted to leave while Clinton was in office: "I
wanted to make sure there was a smooth transition for
the Bureau."
One day, Freeh told me about his first meeting with
Clinton, in the summer of 1993. Freeh was a federal
judge in New York. (He had been appointed by George H.
W. Bush in 1991.) Bernard Nussbaum, Clinton's White
House counsel, approached him about taking the post of
F.B.I. director. Even though it was a job Freeh had
dreamed about, he initially resisted, because Marilyn
was reluctant to relocate. Clinton invited him to the
White House and gave him a private tour. The President
had seemed totally absorbed in what they were doing,
and Freeh was impressed with the level and the detail
of his historical knowledge. He seemed engaging and
straightforward. At the end of the tour, Clinton asked
Freeh if there was anything they needed to discuss. In
two hours, they hardly touched on the F.B.I.
"He asked me what, if anything, I expected or wanted,"
Freeh said. "What I emphasized to him was that I
wanted to make sure that the F.B.I. would be
politically independent and have no political
interference, and he agreed to that completely." The
other issue that Freeh raised was his family. "I said,
'I'll be a full-time F.B.I. director for you, but I
have four children and there will be times when that
might take precedence over appearances and things like
that.' He was fine about that. He was very
supportive." Clinton had launched into a short speech
about the importance of family, about attending to
your wife and children. "He seemed very sincere,"
Freeh said.
But relations between Freeh and the Clinton White
House soon deteriorated, beginning with Freeh's
criticism of White House efforts to involve the F.B.I.
in the Administration's decision, in 1993, to fire
members of the travel staff, and his public objection
to the Administration's proposed cuts in the F.B.I.'s
1995 budget. In 1996, Republicans in Congress were
critical of the F.B.I.'s willingness to hand over
hundreds of dossiers, including those of prominent
Republicans, that the Administration, apparently
through crossed signals, had requested in an effort to
update its security files. The Filegate scandal struck
at Freeh's most treasured principle: the independence
of the Bureau. Freeh had joined the Bureau shortly
after L. Patrick Gray, the acting director,
acknowledged sharing information about the Watergate
investigation with the White House counsel John Dean,
and also destroying files. Freeh told me that the
Watergate disgrace had informed every decision he
made. One of the first steps he took after becoming
director was to return his White House pass, with a
note explaining that he would come to the White House
strictly as a visitor, making him the only senior
Clinton appointee without one. In his retirement
statement, he quoted Harlan F. Stone, who was the
Attorney General when the F.B.I. was founded, in 1924,
on keeping the Bureau "completely divorced from the
vagaries of political influence."
In the months after the Khobar barracks bombing, the
break between Freeh and the White House became
irreparable. By mid-February of 1997, as part of its
investigation into possible fund-raising abuses by the
Clinton-Gore campaign, the F.B.I. was reported to be
looking into allegations that the Chinese government
had tried to funnel money into the campaign. Clinton
complained publicly about a lack of notification; he
had no idea how deep skepticism about him had begun to
run inside the F.B.I. During one late-night telephone
conversation with Freeh and Esposito about a White
House request to brief Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright for an upcoming trip to China, Bear Bryant
adamantly opposed sharing information that could be
relayed to the President. "Why should we brief him?"
he asked. "He's a crook. He's no better than a bank
robber. Would we tell a bank robber about our
investigation?" That's going a little too far, Freeh
replied. At the end of the conversation, though, Freeh
decided against sharing information.
Berger and James Steinberg, his deputy, found Freeh's
position unacceptable. "Sandy and I both felt we could
not do our jobs," Steinberg told me. Berger and
Steinberg continued to complain, and eventually Freeh
let the Bureau provide the National Security Council
with a cleaned-up summary of the investigation. But
the bad feelings only intensified. "You can't separate
Khobar and Freeh from the context of his relationship
with the White House. It went sour for a hundred
different reasons," said one senior Pentagon official
who worked closely with Freeh and the Administration.
"Clinton's view was 'Freeh is trying to nail my ass
every day.' "
When Attorney General Janet Reno rejected Freeh's
advice to appoint an independent counsel, Freeh's
recommendation was leaked to the press. A few days
later, Mike McCurry, Clinton's press secretary, was
asked if the President still had confidence in Freeh.
"I think the President thinks that the F.B.I. is the
world's greatest law-enforcement agency, and I think
the President has great confidence that Louis Freeh is
leading that agency-as best he can," he replied. Asked
about Freeh, Clinton ignored the question. The
controversy set off a discussion as to whether Freeh
might quit, but Freeh told me that at that point he
had not seriously considered quitting.
In March of 1997, the F.B.I. thought it had its first
big break in the barracks bombing: Canadian
authorities arrested the suspected lookout-Hani
el-Sayegh, a Saudi Shiite implicated by others in
Saudi custody. Several months earlier, Sayegh, who was
then twenty-eight, had passed undetected through
United States Customs at Logan Airport, in Boston, on
his way to Canada. What happened to Sayegh over the
next few months was in many ways emblematic of the
case-delays and frustration, jurisdictional battles,
increased suspicion among the F.B.I., the White House,
and Cabinet agencies, and a tightening of the
relationship between Freeh and the Saudis.
Freeh and the F.B.I. were eager to bring Sayegh to the
United States for questioning-Sayegh, after all, might
be the first human link to the attack. But almost
immediately Justice Department lawyers raised
objections. What if the case fell apart? What if
Sayegh asked for asylum? The United States couldn't
keep a suspected terrorist and certainly wouldn't want
to let him walk free, but human-rights concerns might
bar sending him back to Saudi Arabia, where they
thought he might face torture and execution. Bandar
and Massoud complained to Freeh that a Justice
Department official seemed to be trying to encourage
the Saudis to raise an objection to bringing Sayegh to
Washington. When Freeh protested, Berger responded
that he thought the Justice Department concerns seemed
legitimate: if Sayegh reneged once he entered the
United States, Berger pointed out, it would be an
embarrassment to the Administration. But Berger also
recalled telling Freeh, "If you think this strategy
will work, we'll support it."
In early May, Eric Dubelier, an assistant U.S.
attorney, and several F.B.I. agents travelled to
Ottawa and began questioning Sayegh in the chapel of
the Ottawa-Carleton Detention Center. A frail
asthmatic with a shadowy beard, Sayegh nervously
denied any role in the bombing, but acknowledged at
one time having been a member of the cell alleged to
be behind it and provided specific details about how
he believed the other cell members might have carried
it out. Sayegh also admitted that he had been
recruited by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and had
been under the tutelage of Brigadier General Ahmad
Sherifi, who was in charge of operations for the
guard. He said he had participated in two operations
directed by Sherifi, including videotaping another
American airbase as a possible target. In all this,
Sayegh confirmed the picture that the Saudis had
painted: a Saudi Hezbollah faction responsible for the
bombing appeared to be backed by Iran, and there were
plans to target other sites. Convinced that Sayegh, at
the very least, knew more than he was telling, the
F.B.I. hoped to get him to plead guilty to charges
related to the other Sherifi-directed operations:
conspiracy to commit murder and international
terrorism.
By the middle of June, Sayegh had reached a series of
still secret agreements with the Justice Department.
In exchange for pleading guilty and agreeing to
continue testifying, Sayegh would spend less than ten
years in prison and be placed in the
witness-protection program after his release. In
addition, the Saudis would send his wife and two
children to the United States and not seek his
deportation. On June 12, 1997, Sayegh and the United
States entered into a signed and sealed plea
agreement.
Five days later, Sayegh arrived at Dulles Airport-and
almost at once the agreement began to unravel, just as
Berger had feared. Sayegh now said, according to
Michael Wildes, his lawyer at the time, that he didn't
want his wife to come to the United States, because
she would go to casinos and night clubs. Sayegh was
given a new lawyer, Francis Carter (who later briefly
represented Monica Lewinsky), and five weeks later
Carter told the judge that Sayegh was backing out of
his plea agreement. Carter also said that if the
government went forward he planned to challenge the
admissibility of Sayegh's statements, claiming that
they were "illegally obtained" from someone who didn't
understand the American legal system. Freeh's strategy
at this point, according to Berger, was to frighten
Sayegh into coöperating. "As they were driving him to
the airport, they'd say, in effect, 'Have a nice time
in Saudi Arabia, where, by the way, they will cut off
your head,' " Berger said.
In May of 1997, during the Sayegh negotiations,
Mohammad Khatami, a relative moderate, was elected
President of Iran. A few days later, Clinton said, "I
have never been pleased about the estrangements
between the people of the United States and the people
of Iran." He said, "What we hope for is a
reconciliation with a country that does not believe
that terrorism is a legitimate extension of political
policies." The State Department, meanwhile, was
sending a message of its own-that Louis Freeh was
overstepping his bounds. Esposito and others at the
F.B.I. noticed that it began to get harder to get
approval from the State Department to travel for the
investigation. This interference, Esposito said, just
emboldened Freeh, who called upon one of his personal
relationships: he asked Secretary of Defense William
Cohen to support him with the Saudis, telling Cohen
that the Saudis were trying to decide if Freeh was the
only one who cared. "He needed to build some allies
for this effort, because, clearly, there was no big
effort being made by the White House or the State
Department," said a senior Pentagon official. Cohen
agreed to help.
Over the summer, Freeh continued to press for access
to the men in custody, though he was aware that Saudi
law, which is based on Sharia, or Islamic law,
prevents questioning of Saudi suspects by foreign
police. In mid-July, the Syrian government turned over
another key cell member, a Saudi known as Khassab, and
Freeh wanted to interview him, too, but the Saudis
refused. To complicate matters, the Saudis were now
talking separately with Iran.
That same year, Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah met in
Pakistan with the outgoing Iranian President, Hashemi
Rafsanjani, and brought up the terrorist attack. "We
know you did it," Abdullah told Rafsanjani, according
to two people with knowledge of the conversation.
Rafsanjani, in this account, insisted that he was not
involved personally, but that if any Iranian had a
role "it was he"-Ayatollah Khamenei, the country's
supreme leader-and he pointed upward. Berger said he
knew from intelligence sources that the Saudis were
trying to persuade the Iranians that the United States
wouldn't retaliate if the Iranians would hand over
more suspects. But Berger wouldn't make that bargain.
"You can't decide what the U.S. response will be,"
Berger said he told Bandar. "The Saudis can make a
separate peace, but you can't make one for us."
On September 10, 1997, the United States government
moved to dismiss the indictment against Sayegh, citing
his refusal to coöperate as well as their inability to
obtain corroborating witnesses. Freeh was frustrated,
Bandar told an associate, but in the White House
people acted like it was a "gift from Heaven." From
that moment on, Bandar believed, political pressure
from the White House ceased for good. In Bandar's
view, Clinton was a romantic who had become excited by
the possibility of converting his Iranian adversary.
Bandar told Freeh that he had once told White House
officials that the Saudis could close the
investigation, so that no one would have to retaliate
against Iran. "I bet they were smiling," Freeh
responded.
=================================================================
Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF:
*Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
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