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Freeh's Reign by Daniel Franklin Washington had rarely seen such urgency and bipartisan resolve. On a warm September day, the president and his handpicked Federal Bureau of Investigation director laid out a new vision for what Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy has called the "crown jewel" of law enforcement agencies. "Today's FBI," the president said, "operates in a new and challenging world. Terrorism once seemed far from our shores, an atrocity visited on people in other lands. Now, after the attack on the World Trade Center, we know that we, too, are vulnerable." Even in the face of uncertain times and untested missions, the new director expressed stout confidence. "We must do now and here what the people of America have always done in terms of crisis--take control of our own destiny and use our enormous resources, ingenuity and will to establish the domestic tranquility and justice envisioned in the Constitution of the United States." The year was 1993. The president, of course, was Bill Clinton. And the iron-spined G-man selected to lead the bureau through troubled and transitional times was Louis Freeh. At the time, Freeh seemed like an inspired choice. Following William Sessions, whom Clinton had fired in large part because of his personal use of FBI resources, Freeh seemed straighter than a shotgun barrel. A former FBI agent, federal prosecutor, and judge celebrated for his investigations into organized crime and drug trafficking, Freeh knew the bureau inside and out. Even the GOP, mindful of Freeh's appointment to the federal bench by President George H.W. Bush, couldn't muster a word of dissent. He was, Clinton said at the time, "the best possible person to head the FBI as it faces new challenges and a new century." Eight years later, the new challenges of the new century are as unambiguous as the billion tons of rubble still smoking in lower Manhattan. Under Freeh's successor, Robert S. Mueller III, the FBI is leading the investigation into the September 11 attacks and whatever may remain of the terrorist network on American soil. Mueller and Attorney General John Ashcroft have plans to turn the FBI into a mean, if not so lean, terror-fighting machine. But 27,000-person bureaucracies cannot transform themselves overnight. For the time being, it is still Louis Freeh's FBI. There's reason to believe that the FBI may not yet be up to the job now being asked of it. Whether or not the bureau could have prevented the attacks from taking place is unanswerable. What is certain, though, is that Freeh's management of the FBI failed to move it to where he--and many others in 1993--acknowledged it needed to go. How he fell short, and why no one held him accountable, is an object lesson in the importance of focused management, the complexities of counterterrorism, and the need for balanced FBI oversight. Micro-mismanagement Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the FBI was not asleep to the possibility of another terrorist attack. During the eight years that he was director, Freeh would tell anyone who would listen of the imminent terrorist threat, especially if that person sat on a congressional appropriations committee. "In the aftermath of the World Trade Center bombing," Freeh testified in 1994, "the U.S. must maintain credible defenses and constant vigilance against those groups who would terrorize the citizenry of this country." The call to vigilance would become part of the FBI congressional liturgy, repeated year after year. Because Freeh was a master at maneuvering amid the politics of Capitol Hill, Congress always answered, "Amen." From 1994 to 2001, legislators increased the FBI's counterterrorism budget from $79 million to $372 million--a whopping 471 percent. Freeh's expansion of the bureau's role in counterterrorism extended beyond its budget. A series of presidential declarations and antiterrorism bills broadened the FBI's role as the lead agency in the prevention, crisis management, and investigation of any domestic terrorist attack. Freeh took the FBI overseas, creating legal-attach� offices in 44 countries around the world. The offices channel intelligence back to FBI analysts and maintain relationships with foreign law-enforcement agencies. Even Freeh's critics agree that the overseas expansion helps the bureau keep step with the globalized realities of crime and terrorism. But back in Washington, Freeh appeared more interested in building the FBI's empire than in making sure that it ran effectively. Freeh's previous jobs--agent, prosecutor, and judge--rewarded individual brilliance rather than managerial competence, and, as director, he continued in the same vein. Instead of providing steady leadership across the bureau, Freeh often got intensely involved in individual cases or projects. Chafing at the micromanagement, many FBI agents dubbed Freeh "the bureau's only presidentially appointed street agent." Still more damaging, Freeh never surrounded himself with people who could compensate for his shortcomings. Instead, he chose agents with whom he had grown comfortable over the years, even if he had to bend the rules to do it. For instance, Freeh loosened the bureau's rules on previous drug abuse in order to hire three former colleagues from his prosecutor days. Linguini v. Quiche Mismanagement fell heaviest on the bureau's counterterrorism operations. Freeh made his name, as most FBI legends do, fighting drugs and the Mob, and in those arenas he was as good as they come. But fighting the Mob and fighting foreign terrorists are very different things. The techniques of a criminal investigation are familiar to just about anyone who has gone to the movies in the past 30 years: surveillance, wiretapping, interrogating, and, if lucky, door kicking. An effective counterintelligence and counterterrorism office, by contrast, can look a lot like the reading room at the New York Public Library. It's about research, record keeping, and analysis. A surveillance can go on for years and never lead to an arrest--and that's not necessarily a bad thing, so long as an agent continues to get good information that can prevent larger crimes. But because criminal investigators have the power of statistics on their side--number of arrests, amount of property seized--they tended to be promoted through the ranks faster than the counterintelligence agents. "When you have an opening and a counterintelligence agent comes before a promotion board with 400 surveillances and no arrests, these old crime guys with their cigars, the guys who used to be cops, would say, 'What?'" recalls John Lewis, former assistant director in charge of national security for the FBI. "The crime guys used to refer to foreign-counterintelligence and counterterrorism guys as 'fern-loving, quiche-eating, chardonnay drinkers. The criminal-division guys were the 'red-orchid-loving, linguini-eating, Chianti drinkers.'" Freeh was a linguini man through and through, and it showed in his approach to counterterrorism. In 1996 the Brown-Aspin Commission held a summit to discuss the roles and capabilities of America's intelligence community. Former FBI agent I.C. Smith, who had worked on both criminal and intelligence over his 30-year career, was on the team to help prepare Freeh for the meeting. "We had done a great deal of work preparing talking points about the FBI's role as the lead counterintelligence agency," he relates. "And Freeh basically ignored everything. He launched into a discussion of cop-to-cop relations overseas. I was watching people on the panel," Smith goes on. "They didn't want to hear about cop-to-cop relationships. They wanted to hear about what the FBI was going to do as the lead intelligence agency.... It was clear the FBI had no interest in being a player in the [intelligence] community." The people Freeh chose to lead the counterterrorism division shared the same biases. Of the three assistant directors in charge of national security to serve under Freeh, only one, John Lewis, who served for only a year and a half, had firsthand experience working intelligence cases. The same dearth of experience predominated among the top executives in the counterterrorism division. As a result, they seemed to lack an understanding of the delicacy of international investigations. One counterterrorism official, John O'Neill, who died in the September 11 tragedy just as he was beginning his job as director of security at the World Trade Center, was so aggressive in his investigation of the USS Cole bombing in Yemen that the U.S. ambassador there barred him from the country. Without experience in intelligence, many of Freeh's executives never seemed to understand its value. "The attitude was, 'They aren't making arrests, so why are they here?'" says Smith. So intelligence resources were regularly "reprogrammed" over to the criminal-investigative side. In 1995, for instance, half of the $5 million for intelligence analysts was shifted to a computer crime center. A laboratory built with counterterrorism funds was used, in part, to bolster the bureau's standard forensics operation. And many of the 1,000 agents that the FBI was able to hire thanks to $83 million in new counterterrorism funds were instead used as regular street agents. To be fair, it can be difficult for an FBI supervisor to justify keeping his agents on the business of preventing a threat that may never materialize while the in-boxes of criminal investigators accumulate more and more case files. But the ability to focus on the big threat down the road, as opposed to the little nuisances nipping at one's knees, is precisely what separates good leaders from bad ones. In seeking the funds in the first place, Freeh's expressed reasoning was, in fact, that it would "double the 'shoe-leather' for counterterrorism investigations so that we can address emerging domestic and international terrorist groups." It never quite worked out that way. The bureau's counterterrorism and intelligence operations suffered from subtler shifts as well. Intelligence analysts were often removed from their counterterrorism responsibilities and used instead for criminal investigation or, even worse, as secretaries. "They were paid as intelligence analysts," Smith says, "but many times their actual function was more clerical in nature." At the same time, the quality of analysis was hurt by a lowering of the standards governing who could become an analyst. The analyst positions became "a reward system for people's secretaries," says Robert Heibel, former FBI intelligence analyst and director of the Research/Intelligence Analyst Program at Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pennsylvania. "If you did a good job and you had typing ability and could communicate, you could get promoted to an intelligence analyst," he asserts. "The system became bastardized." Meanwhile, the bureau brought over from the criminal side its bias against working closely with local law enforcement. Freeh, to his credit, did address FBI coordination with local officials by creating "joint terrorism task forces" that bring together the FBI, state and local police, and federal and local prosecutors. Institutionally, however, there were clues to suggest that the FBI hadn't completely changed its spots. In 1994 the FBI participated in a joint terrorism exercise with the Departments of Defense and Energy that was designed to assess how well the agencies were prepared to coordinate a response to a possible nuclear incident. Nearly 1,000 federal personnel and private contractors showed up, but not one of them was from local government. Responding to a disbelieving Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, John Sopko, the deputy chief counsel to the minority at the time, testified that "there was an apparent belief by the FBI that tactical and technical operations to deal with the incident could be performed in relative isolation from local officials." The Department of Energy's report on the exercise claimed that the FBI worked "in imperial fashion." Four years later, the FBI worked together with the Department of Justice to prepare a five-year counterterrorism plan intended to be the all encompassing national counterterrorism strategy. The report was comprehensive with one notable exception: It identified no role whatsoever for state and local governments. Mismanagement was not limited to the counterterrorism division. Freeh's penchant for crony over quality led to his hiring of Larry Potts as deputy director, despite Potts's censure for his leadership role in the disastrous Ruby Ridge shootout. Potts later was suspended after it was determined that he had participated in a cover-up of his wrongdoing. And Freeh's cutbacks in headquarters staff and lack of managerial oversight resulted in the introduction of an expensive but failed computer system (which led to the mishandling of the Timothy McVeigh files) as well as a debilitating one-year backup at the FBI's once-vaunted crime lab (a delay that led to the mishandling of up to 50 cases). A Political Operative But what Freeh lacked in managerial genius, he more than made up for in political and public-relations acumen. In a breathtaking display of political agility, Freeh skated over the cracking ice beneath him, away from the Clinton administration and into the warm and welcoming arms of congressional Republicans. Freeh's relations with congressional Republicans were hard won because, for much of the first few years of his tenure, his standing was diminished by various bureau mistakes. In the summer of 1996, it was discovered that the FBI had provided the White House Director of Personnel Security Craig Livingstone with the files of 400 Republicans. The Clinton administration at the time said it was nothing more than a bureaucratic snafu. Four years later, a three-judge investigative panel agreed with that assessment. Freeh, however, didn't take any chances. "The prior system of providing files to the White House relied on good faith and honor," he said. "Unfortunately, the FBI and I were victimized." At first, congressional Republicans didn't buy the image of the FBI as political na�f. The scandal hit at a time when Freeh was seeking expanded wiretap powers (many of which were finally granted by the USA Patriot Act of 2001). With "Filegate" in the air, Newt Gingrich said that "it's very hard to justify giving that agency more power." In October and again in December, Freeh was called to the Hill to undergo a public grilling at the hands of Senate Republicans on both the Ruby Ridge cover-up and the Richard Jewell Olympics-bombing case. Criticism had grown so intense by the fall that Freeh wrote a memo to FBI personnel insisting that he had no intention of resigning. Since President Clinton was seen as politically incapable of replacing his holier-than-he FBI director, Freeh's fate seemed to fall into the hands of congressional Republicans who weren't sure what use they had for an FBI director whose prosecutorial vigilance scared the hardest-core of the GOP's constituency. They soon found out. In January 1997, the FBI discovered evidence suggesting that China had sought political influence through illegal campaign contributions. A new Clinton scandal was born, and Freeh used it to sever his cord to the White House. The FBI leaked word of the investigation to The Washington Post. They also briefed congressional Republicans. The White House had to learn about it by reading the newspaper. When it was leaked that Freeh had written a pointed memo to Attorney General Janet Reno objecting to her decision not to appoint yet another independent counsel to investigate the matter, the battle lines were quickly drawn--and few could help but notice on which side sat the "politically independent" director of the FBI. Freeh's fortunes changed almost overnight. On June 4, 1997, he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the issue of FBI oversight, ordinarily a contentious issue between Congress and the bureau. Not on this day. There have been serious problems within the FBI, Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch of Utah said, "but I would be remiss if I did not mention the positive leadership of Director Louis Freeh." Pennsylvania Republican Arlen Specter went out of his way to "compliment you on a job well done" and issued a rare invitation for a funding request, reminding Freeh: "The war against terrorism is obviously at the top of the agenda, and we have urged you in the past to let us know what additional resources you need." From that point on, Freeh and the FBI were virtually bulletproof. The bureau seemed to reward its new friends on the right with briefings and other information unavailable to the Democratic leadership. At times, this was done to deflect criticism away from the FBI and toward Reno's Justice Department. During the investigation of Wen Ho Lee, who was suspected of spying for the Chinese, the FBI fed one-sided information to Specter that squarely placed the blame for the botching of the Lee investigation on Justice. The report that Specter produced turned out to be so dubiously slanted that not a single other member of the Senate Judiciary Committee--not even South Carolina's Strom Thurmond--would sign it. Meanwhile, Freeh was not subtle about where his political sentiments lay. "It was useful," says one former Republican Senate Judiciary staffer, "to have someone more to your way of thinking from a policy perspective than Reno's Justice Department." Suddenly, any concerns that Congress had about the bureau's counterterrorism activities--or other aspects of the bureau's work--seemed to disappear. Concerns over where the bureau's counterterrorism money was being spent, though raised by the General Accounting Office, were met with complete silence on the Hill. Indeed, in 1999, Freeh was completely forthcoming in admitting that the bureau's intelligence analysis capabilities were "deficient." Congress didn't for a moment question whether Freeh's leadership contributed to the deficiency. Instead, it rewarded the FBI with still more funds to bolster its intelligence units. The faults in Freeh's management and Congress's failure to provide proper oversight are now playing out in the FBI's ever expanding investigation into the September 11 attacks. How much further along the FBI could be is impossible to know. But the scattershot nature of its investigation certainly suggests that the bureau has little targeted intelligence on al-Qaeda's reach in the United States. Moreover, the rush to lock up suspects before intelligence on terrorist cells can be developed seems to indicate the persistence of the cop mentality that prevailed under Freeh. Merely throwing more criminal investigators at the problem won't be enough. The bureau needs to address the lack of intelligence capability not merely by hiring new agents but by making sure that they are trained in the finer points of intelligence and ensuring that their supervisors understand it as well. Moreover, it needs to work harder to break down its own cultural bias against local law enforcement. Freeh himself identified that need at his swearing-in, saying that the FBI needed to "share our toys." Director Mueller, who has echoed the sentiment, should back it up with concrete action. Mueller, for his part, has seemed willing to accept that with an increased role will come increased oversight, both from the Justice Department and from Congress. And the Senate seems willing to step up to the task. After the Senate switched hands last summer, the new chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Patrick Leahy, almost immediately called hearings to look into the question of FBI oversight--in order, he said, to "restore the luster, the effectiveness, and the professionalism" of the FBI. If that is to happen, the Senate's vision of oversight will have to extend beyond holding sharp hearings that say much and do little. The past three months have only increased the desire of Congress--and, indeed, the nation--to make sure that the FBI lives up to its image as the crown jewel of law enforcement. In a sense, though, this may be the very image that is holding the bureau back. It is not a precious gem to be appreciated and admired from afar. Rather, it's an industrial diamond--a tool--and more than ever we need to know that it can do the job. |
