-Caveat Lector-
From
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28474-2001Dec26.html
}}>Begin
Who Failed At the FBI?
By Richard Cohen
Thursday, December 27, 2001; Page A23
Back when I was in the insurance business -- yes, the storied Cohen
of Claims -- my company's in-house magazine profiled the personnel
manager of one of our branches. He was shown on his boat, in his
dandy apartment, behind the wheel of his sports car, on the town with
beautiful women and in other ways living beyond his means. Other
personnel managers took note, and after an investigation, the guy was
fired. Turned out he was taking bribes from employment agencies.
It also turns out that what was done by a mere insurance company was
beyond the reach of the vaunted FBI. Back in 1990, the brother-in-law
of the convicted spy, Robert Hanssen, noticed that Hanssen was
spending too much money for an FBI agent. He reported his suspicions
to the bureau and speculated that Hanssen was spying for the Soviet
Union. The brother-in-law, Mark Wauck, was no amateur in these
matters. He was an FBI agent himself.
Nonetheless, it was an incredible 11 years later, on Feb. 18, 2001, that Hanssen was
arrested. In that period, Hanssen disclosed the identity of at least nine Soviet
officials who were spying for the United States. Three
of them were executed.
He told the Russians about an eavesdropping tunnel under their Washington embassy. He
gave them the government's plan for how it would operate in the event of a nuclear
war. He provided them with the U.S. intelligence bud
get. In short, he about cleared the shelves for the KGB and its successor, the SVR.
Some of this was revealed at the time of Hanssen's arrest, but additional details have
been turned up by David A. Vise, a Washington Post reporter and the author of the
newly published "The Bureau and the Mole."
He reveals, for instance, that Hanssen allowed a neighbor to watch as he had sex with
his wife. (Hanssen set up a closed-circuit video system in his house.) He posted
pornographic fantasies on the Internet, not even bothe
ring to use a false name. He had a relationship with a Washington stripper, giving her
a Mercedes-Benz and the use of an American Express card. He said he was trying to save
her soul. Her soul, if nothing else, cost him a
bundle.
Back in February, FBI director Louis Freeh credited Hanssen's arrest to
"counterintelligence at its very best." He said he was "immensely proud of the men and
women of the FBI who conducted this investigation," but did no
t say that Hanssen virtually fell into the bureau's lap when it received a Russian
intelligence file. He also did not say that aside from wearing a Stalin mask at FBI
picnics, Hanssen could not have done much more to call
attention to himself.
This blunder -- this example of the FBI flopping on a floor of banana peels -- cost
America plenty. Taken together with the massive intelligence failure that led to Sept.
11, it is sufficient reason to conclude that somet
hing is awfully wrong with the FBI. Just recently, for instance, it was revealed that
the FBI was warned back in August that a student pilot might be planning to use a
fully fueled commercial airliner as a missile. That s
tudent, Zacarias Moussaoui, was recently indicted in connection with the Sept. 11
terrorist attacks -- clearly a bit late.
Since Sept. 11, Congress has held off investigating the intelligence failures that led
to the worst attack on U.S. soil in history. That's about to change. Sens. John McCain
(R-Ariz.) and Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) want t
o establish a 14-member bipartisan commission, Sen. Robert Torricelli (D-N.J.) wants a
12-member board. But in the GOP-controlled House, and especially in the Bush
administration itself, inaction seems to be the order of
the day. "The president is focused on the war on terrorism," a White House spokeswoman
said.
Fine. But as long as this is a long, continuing war, then it makes sense to have
intelligence agencies that are up to the job. Manifestly, that is not the case now.
But the Bush administration, which came to Washington li
ke the Romans to Carthage, has become the captive of the very
agencies it once was determined to smash. To criticize the
intelligence agencies has become the functional equivalent of
stepping on the flag.
As the catastrophe of Sept. 11 and the Hanssen case make clear, the
FBI and the CIA simply did not do their job. That job is hard, but
failure is simply not acceptable. Robert Hanssen, for one, was
allowed to spy for a full decade before he was caught. Terrorism
crisis or not, it's time to catch the people who didn't catch
Hanssen.
� 2001 The Washington Post Company
End<{{
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