My FBI

by Louis J. Freeh

  Here it was, almost half a century later, and the son of that woman they wouldn’t hire had been handed a case with allegations that substituted sex for country of origin. Only in America. I had to recuse myself from the matter, obviously, but it served as a useful reminder that while discrimination can change stripes, it doesn’t go away.

  There were moments, too, during my two years as a federal judge when history just came rushing at me, in ways that would have foretold my future if I could have read them at the time.

  I was sitting in my courtroom on Foley Square in lower Manhattan on February 26, 1993, when the World Trade Center was first struck. Six people died in that attack, but it’s worth remembering that if the bomb that exploded in the parking garage beneath the towers had been better configured, one or both buildings might have collapsed then, with a terrible loss of life, eight years before Osama bin Laden’s suicide aerial bombers finally succeeded in bringing them down. (Eerily enough, one of the people in the towers at the time of the first attack told a reporter, “It was like an airplane hit the building.”)

  I’ll never forget hurrying down from the courthouse to the site of the bombing. People were mostly fleeing in the other direction. Panic was in the air. I suppose I should have stayed away and let the emergency rescue teams do their job, but that’s just not me. Without knowing it, I was looking at the bookends of my tenure as director. Within half a year, I would be leading the FBI. Eight years later, a little over two months after I’d left the job, these towers would be reduced to rubble.

  For a lot of lawyers, joining the federal bench is an economic sacrifice. Private-practice attorneys are among the best-paid professionals in the country, especially at the top law firms. Judges do better than most civil servants, but it’s still government pay. When I became a federal judge at age forty-three, my colleague, Kevin Duffy, a great and brave jurist, had warned that it was going to be hard for me to stick with the job, particularly with Marilyn’s and my growing family. (Kevin knew whereof he spoke. He had joined the bench at age thirty-eight, the youngest federal judge in the Court’s history.) But my flirtation with private practice had been broken off by Walter Leroy Moody and his lethal bombs. I’d been surviving for eighteen years on a government salary, and Marilyn and I figured we could survive for eighteen more.

  Besides, being a U.S. district court judge is a dream job, the goal of many attorneys, even those pulling down a lot more money annually than I had been. The caseload was staggering, but I closed the court at five every night and headed straight for the subway, Grand Central Station, and Metro North. Soon I would be moving to the new courthouse, far closer to my home. I felt I was being useful, and the cases were a wonderful cross-section of America—its ills, its aspirations, its endless conflicts.

  I honestly thought it was a job I could do for the rest of my useful years. It was a job I expected to do for all that time. Then the phone rang again, and this time the White House was calling.

  CHAPTER 7

  “If Anything Happens, You Drive. I’ll Shoot”

  My first great challenge as FBI director was to get inside the headquarters building for my own swearing-in. Marilyn, I, and the four kids showed up early at the Ninth Street entrance to the underground parking garage, all packed into our Volvo station wagon. Frank Johnson was waiting, the president was coming, and I was anxious to get the formalities over with and start settling into the job. But the uniformed FBI officer on duty at the parking garage entrance had other ideas.

  “Do you have identification?” he asked me.

  I tried my driver’s license on him.

  “No,” he said, “do you have an FBI badge?”

  “Not yet,” I told him, “but I expect to soon. Has anyone mentioned that they’re swearing in a new director today?”

  He knew about that, but he had no guest list to check visitors off against.

  “Well, listen,” I said, “I’m the guy getting sworn in!”

  That, at least, got his attention.

  Later that day, as if to make up for the affront to its new boss, the FBI security detail had three cars waiting to tail us when I pulled the Volvo back out onto the street for the thirty-block ride across the Potomac to the Key Bridge Marriott where we were staying. The cars were waiting a few hours later when we drove off to dinner, and waiting when we left the restaurant, and waiting the next morning when we were ready to leave the hotel again.

  “You guys are going to be with me a while?” I asked one of the drivers.

  “All the time,” he said, and he meant it.

  We moved immediately into a rental house in Great Falls, Virginia, out toward the suburban edge of the Washington metropolitan area. By sheer luck, we inherited wonderful neighbors in Dick and Patricia Carlson. A former ambassador and media genius, Dick became a mentor to me. Beautiful and brilliant Patricia became Marilyn’s dearest friend. Together they taught us how to survive in D.C.

  We thought Great Falls would be a nice place to raise the kids, and we wanted to get them started in the schools there while we shopped for a house to buy. A few days later, the head of my security detail came to see me.

  “Director, we’re thinking of putting a construction trailer outside your house. That way, we could have people there all the time.”

  “You can’t do that,” I told him. “We can’t have a trailer sitting out there.”

  “Okay, then,” he said, “we’ll do it in the backyard.”

  “No!”

  The kids, naturally, loved the attention. We went to weekend soccer games, to the grocery store, to everywhere in convoy. But apart from traveling like a celebrity, the kids had gained a second benefit from my new status.

  “This is really cool!” one of my sons said as we were convoying our way to Blockbuster one Saturday early in my tenure.

  “C’mon,” I told him, “don’t you find it annoying to be followed everywhere?”

  “No, and you don’t yell at us anymore when we’re outside the house!”

  I realized in that instant that he was absolutely right. The kids had six agents as witnesses everywhere they went. I was on model behavior! That was it, I decided. I needed to be unprotected.

  The large security detail favored by my predecessor, William Sessions, had naturally transferred to me. I couldn’t just fire them en masse, but over the next several months, I managed to get all of them assigned to someplace they wanted to go or some duty they were hoping to draw. (One member of the security detail, an excellent agent with the captivating name of Icey Jenkins, would eventually head up the FBI investigation in Saudi Arabia, following the Khobar Towers bombing. Despite massive initial skepticism on the Saudis’ part about sending a female to take charge in a male-dominated culture, Icey handled her role spectacularly.) Finally, I was left with two drivers as my security detail: one who retired shortly and John Griglione, a onetime varsity football player at the University of Iowa who had been deputized as a U.S. marshal so he could carry a gun.

  Out of a sense of duty, John took me down to the bowels of the FBI parking garage once we had worked out our new arrangement to show me the three-ton armored limousine that directors were occasionally expected to ride around in.

  “We can’t do that,” I told him. “It’s out of some comic opera.”

  “Great,” he said, “It’s a pain in the ass to drive, and you have to change the brakes every couple hundred miles.”

  Instead, we got a Chevy Suburban to come and go in from Great Falls. John carried his gun. I carried mine, in the car and pretty much everywhere else. For backup, we had a machine gun stowed in the center console. That was our new security. (Carrying a gun is not traditional with FBI directors although a specific statute permits it. In my case, it was a good substitute for a security detail and I liked qualifying once a quarter with the agents.)

  “If anything happens,” I told John Griglione, “you drive. I’ll shoot.”

  Almost as hard as adjusting to the security demands was adjustin
g to the power of my own voice, at least within the walls of the J. Edgar Hoover Building. In my other positions in government, the wheels of the bureaucracy moved very, very slowly. Now, the least request would filter down from the director’s office, gaining strength at every new floor it passed through until it came out as a roar at the other end.

  I was still in the process of transferring myself and my family to Washington when I called Noreen Gawley, my incredibly organized secretary who had moved down ahead of me to get things in order, and asked her about the few items I wanted to hang on the walls. What were the weight limitations? Did the office have any bearing walls or were they all for show? Noreen transferred my query down to the facilities people, and the next thing she knew, a crew from facilities had come up to office to do a little measuring.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “We’re here to move the wall for the director.”

  “Why?”

  “Someone called down and said he wanted a bigger office.”

  I already had plenty of room. Noreen had plenty of room. In between us was a conference room so huge I had to shout whenever I wanted to get Noreen’s attention. (Although he didn’t live long enough to occupy them, the suite of offices had been designed by J. Edgar Hoover himself. He obviously didn’t want his secretary listening in on his calls.) I didn’t need room. I just wanted to know if I could hang my kids’ framed art without pulling down the sheetrock.

  Being FBI director meant never being off duty. That’s true of a lot of high-pressure jobs, of course, but with this one, the stakes could be so terribly stark. I wrote earlier that my mother was making dinner for us in New Jersey when Khobar Towers was hit. A year and a half earlier, two days before Thanksgiving on November 22, 1994, Marilyn and I and the kids were on the New Jersey Turnpike, again headed to my parents’ house, when I got a call informing me that FBI agents Martha Dixon Martinez and Mike Miller and D.C. police officer Hank Daly had been gunned down inside Metropolitan Police Headquarters in Washington. I turned around at the next exit, went straight to my own office, and had one of the agents drive everyone else back to Great Falls.

  The facts of the case were almost unbelievable. Martha and Mike were on detail to the D.C. police, helping with “cold cases,” homicides in which the leads or witnesses had dried up or momentum was at a standstill. They were in the cold-case room on the third floor, minding their own business, when a D.C. drug gang member, Bennie Lee Lawson, burst in wielding a Cobray M-11 assault pistol. Lawson was looking to take revenge on the narcotics squad but got the wrong room. Never mind. He began firing anyway. When he was through, the three officers were dead and a fourth badly wounded. Before other police in the building could apprehend him, Lawson put the pistol to his own head and ended his life as well.

  Martha was newly married to an FBI agent. Mike was the father of two small children. I didn’t know either agent before the shootings, but I went to the morgue with Martha’s husband when he had to identify her, and I attended both funerals because, to me, being there at the bad moments is even more important for a leader than being there for the good ones.

  I’ll never forget either the first time I got called in the middle of the night to inform me that an agent had been killed. That was March of 1996. The agent, Charles L. Reed, had been shot in Philadelphia during an undercover drug operation. For the five-plus years I had remaining to me as FBI director, every call after midnight set my heart racing in fear of an agent being hurt.

  Part of the pressure of the job was the simple lack of privacy. I could dump the security detail that wanted to surround me everywhere I went, but I couldn’t escape the daily and hourly obligations of the post. It must have been the summer of 1998 when Marilyn and I rose well before sunup one morning, packed the kids and mounds of gear into the car, and took off for Cape Cod. Thirteen or so hours later, we finally had unpacked the car and were settled on the beach, surrounded by sand and water with four glorious days ahead. I was just contemplating the sheer joy of doing nothing when a sweet elderly lady tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I was the FBI director. When I said I was, she pointed to the top of the dune behind us. Two agents were standing there in government blue suits and city shoes that wouldn’t do in the sand. They had an affidavit with them that needed my signature.

  But the largest part of the pressure by far was politics. That was the one thing I wasn’t ready for coming into office: navigating through all that. Maybe it was naïveté on my part, or the triumph of hope over experience, but I just wasn’t prepared to find the waters so teeming with reefs, dangerous shoals, submerged icebergs, killer sharks, and just about every other form of hazard imaginable.

  A ten-year term of office was supposed to help the director ride out political storms. You could never be beholden to just one president, one administration. But the reality of the job is that, as head of the FBI, you have such great power for good or ill. Directors of the FBI can launch an investigation or stop one, or they can influence the drift of an ongoing one if they so choose. Their position allows them to exert pressure to bring charges, or pressure not to. Careers can be made or undone in the process. If Bill Clinton’s memoir is an accurate reflection of his inner life, he came to believe that I was trying to undo his presidency. That’s bunk, but the possibility that I or any director would conceivably even attempt to do something like that inevitably makes the job a political appointment, whatever Congress intended, with all the craziness that entails.

  On one of my first days as director, I happened to ask my staff how the FBI hiring policy worked in terms of gay people. We have no special policy, I was told. Everyone is treated the same. Well, I went on, what if you’re doing a background check and find out that someone is gay? Oh, came the answer, we stop processing the application. Whoa, I said, that’s got to change. It was, first of all, a matter of compliance. We were subject to equal employment opportunity provisions just like any other agency. But beyond that, it was a matter of fairness and of image and, yes, of politics. Even as a neophyte I could see that we’d get pummeled in the press if word got out that we were tossing those applications in the dead-letter file. It was during that first week, too, that I got all my assistant directors in the office and noticed—as if anyone could have failed to—that they were white males every one. That had to change, too, to assure a better balance of advice but also because I wanted the FBI’s leadership to reflect the nation we served. I was later proud to appoint the first Hispanic and female assistant directors.

  That much I could understand, but I never really got used to the sheer politics that invested what seemed to me basic, everyday, practical decisions. I had been director for perhaps a year when I happened to mention in an internal report that because of some budget cuts, we were having to limit the number of rounds that agents were firing, not just at the training academy but also at the quarterly qualifying sessions on the range that every agent—the director included—has to go through if he wants to continue to carry a firearm. Simply put, we didn’t have enough bullets to go around or, under current budget restraints, the money to buy more. Naturally, Washington being Washington, the internal report got leaked to the press. Next thing I knew Leon Panetta, who had just moved over from heading the Office of Management and Budget to become White House chief of staff, was on the phone. I liked Leon a lot, we got along very well. But Leon hadn’t called to chat.

  “Why would you put in a report that the FBI doesn’t have enough bullets?” he demanded to know. “It makes the administration look bad!”

  I don’t know what Leon expected my reaction to be. Would I boil over? Start screaming? Be contrite? He had been around Washington a long time, and I respected him greatly. I imagine he had seen just about everything. For myself, though, all I could do was laugh at the absurdity.

  Once I’d settled down, I explained that I had requested more money for bullets for the same reasons the Pentagon asks for more ammunition in its budget requests—because we didn’t hav
e enough rounds, and because the agents were complaining about it, and because if you’re asking people to discharge firearms in the line of duty, you need to provide them with the best training possible for their own sake and for the safety of the populace generally. But that was being reasonable, at least by my lights, and when politics intervened, reason was often the first thing thrown overboard at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. In this case, though, my unreasonable-reasonable budget request was actually approved, and the Bureau thereafter always had more ammo than it knew what to do with.

  Another example of the budget process at work: by the middle of Bill Clinton’s second term, I was lobbying hard for a long-range aircraft to supplement the ancient Citation jet the Bureau had at its disposal. We were doing everything we could to round up terrorists around the world and witnesses to terrorist acts, and to convince the governments of the host nations to let us carry them back to the United States. Often we failed to find our quarry or to win approval. That’s the nature of the business. But when we succeeded, we were commonly given a narrow window to remove the suspects, sometimes as little as twelve hours. In those circumstances, we would have to scramble for a military aircraft to do the transport. If one wasn’t available, we would start calling friendly CEOs of American corporations to see if we could hitch a ride to Karachi or Doha or wherever we had to go on their corporate jet. (I can’t name the CEOs we approached for obvious reasons, but Ramzi Yousef, for one, was flown out of Pakistan on a private corporate jet under very tight time constraints.)