The Bureau had no choice but to investigate him. We had information suggesting that, in 1982, Dr. Lee had contacted a suspected spy. Given that Lee was a mechanical engineer helping to develop nuclear bombs at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, that information alone was alarming, but it was only the beginning of the trail. Later, we learned that Lee, who was Chinese born, had failed to report a possible relationship with a key figure in China’s nuclear program. In 1998, he told us that he also had been approached by nuclear scientists from China. Furthermore, he had gone to extraordinary lengths to download, copy, and remove materials from a secure national laboratory: forty hours of work stretching over seventy days. Even after Lee’s security clearances were stripped at Los Alamos, he made attempts to reenter the weapons design area, including one try at 3:30 A.M. on Christmas Eve of 1998, not exactly a normal work hour.
Investigating people with profiles such as Dr. Lee’s—people with access to vital, extremely sensitive information—is a basic law-enforcement responsibility of the FBI. We would have been guilty of gross negligence had we ignored his actions. But we didn’t try and convict him in the court of public opinion before any criminal charges could be brought. To the extent that happened to Wen Ho Lee, it was the work of The New York Times, which took a leak from a congressional committee and blew it up into a four-thousand-word front-page story that ran March 6, 1999. That’s what launched things, not the FBI. The Times all but acknowledged as much in a grudging 1,680-word “Note from the Editors” that ran on page two of its September 26, 2000, edition.
Frankly, I was surprised at the Times: The reporting was unconscionable. But I was also fed up yet again with the way leaks drive the process in Washington, and this time I decided to act. I proposed to Janet Reno that we convene a grand jury and drag before it everyone who had been in a position to leak the Wen Ho Lee story to The New York Times. I would go first. The rest of the investigators and other officials could come behind me. I’d seen grand juries shake loose this kind of information before. Even if that didn’t happen, I thought we would be sending an important message: you leak at your peril.
Note that I wasn’t out to get the reporters involved. Journalists are supposed to go for the story, but we didn’t have to make it so damn easy for them to get it. Not surprisingly, of course, Janet and the administration behind her had no real stomach for any of what I proposed.
The simple fact, though, is that once the Wen Ho Lee genie was out of the bottle, nothing could get it back in. The fifty-nine-count indictment that was eventually returned against Lee—with my great support, I hasten to add—was viewed by some as further evidence that the FBI was piling it on. The fact that, after the indictment and at our urging, he was held nine months in solitary confinement added inhumanity to the charges against us, and never mind that the odds of Dr. Lee trying to flee to China at that point had he been free were, to my mind, astronomical.
Inevitably—and with the urging of Lee’s lawyers, who knew an opportunity when they saw it—several Asian-American groups got involved. The FBI was persecuting Lee based on his ethnicity. One of the judges we had appeared before got swept up in the hysteria and declared, entirely inappropriately, that the FBI was embarrassing the nation by pursuing Wen Ho Lee. As sometimes happens in high-profile circumstances like this, the suspect became the victim.
Finally, as political pressure built to free Lee, Janet Reno called a meeting over at the Department of Justice to say that she was prepared to abandon the indictment and let Dr. Lee plead guilty to a relatively minor charge of mishandling classified documents. The case, she felt, was just too weak to pursue. I disagreed, and I let my feelings be known. We ought to take this guy to trial, I argued. The case was much stronger than anyone at the meeting other than my fellow FBI agents realized. No, we didn’t have a confession. No, we didn’t have fingerprints. And, yes, we had made some mistakes of our own along the way, but our people had done an incredibly painstaking job of building a powerful computer forensics case against Lee.
They had shown that he had access to vital information kept on the computers at Los Alamos. They’d detailed his late-night downloads at the lab even after his clearance had been suspended. Lee contended through his lawyers that, yes, he had moved the information onto tapes, but had subsequently destroyed the tapes, so our agents spent days pawing through the sites where his home garbage would have been dumped and found no evidence whatsoever of what he alleged had happened.
“There’s no jury in the world that would believe his explanation of why he had downloaded that information and then destroyed it,” I told Janet and her assistants. “And even if they did, he was still technically admitting to all the elements he had been charged with.”
It was all to no avail. Janet had clearly made up her mind prior to the meeting. In addition to the felony guilty plea, Lee agreed to submit to interviews as to where the classified information he had improperly accessed had disappeared to, and that’s where the case ended. The gods of political correctness were satisfied. The firestorm died down, but in the end I didn’t feel that justice was served.
Occasionally, also, justice—at least as we conceived it—was forced to take a backseat to larger geopolitical interests. I was in my office at the Hoover Building one day in mid-August 1998 when Sandy Berger and George Tenet came to see me. It was the only time that the two of them had shown up together at my door. They didn’t have to tell me something big was up.
The CIA director and national security adviser had come to apprise me of an operation then in its final planning stages. Targets were to be struck simultaneously in Afghanistan and Sudan in retaliation for the bombing a week earlier, on August 7, of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Afghanistan, I understood. The embassy bombings were the work of al Qaeda forces loyal to Osama bin Laden, who had taken refuge with the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and the bombings had been lethal in the extreme, leaving 260 dead and thousands injured. I was becoming increasingly frustrated by the Clinton administration’s unwillingness to confront Iran on the Khobar Towers bombing. Here, finally, we seemed ready to take a stand consistent with what had become obvious to me. We were already involved in a global terrorist war.
Better still, the CIA had come into possession of intelligence that seemed to indicate bin Laden would be meeting with his senior staff on August 20 to assess the damage from the embassy attacks and begin planning new assaults. We were set to use U.S. Navy destroyers stationed in the northern Arabian Sea to rain seventy-five Tomahawk missiles down on the al Qaeda camp where the meeting was supposed to take place and hope for the best. I couldn’t have agreed more.
A simultaneous attack planned on a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory suspected of turning out lethal gas troubled me far more. For starters, I wasn’t much convinced by the evidence that Sandy and George laid out. The U.S. had basically been blind in Sudan for several years, ever since our embassy and the CIA station in Khartoum had been closed down for fear of terrorist attacks. George’s people had managed to entice an agent to collect some soil samples some distance away from the main entrance to the factory, and the soil had shown traces of a chemical substance used by the Iraqis in the production of nerve gas. But apart from that and some vague intimations of a financial connection between bin Laden and the factory, there wasn’t much else to go on.
I thought it was a slim dossier to launch an attack over, but I had more immediate concerns. The Bureau had a huge contingent of agents, laboratory experts, forensic experts, and other specialists on the ground in Africa at the two embassy sites, 471 people in all at the height of the investigation. Only about one in ten Kenyans is Muslim, but about a third of all Tanzanians are, and in Zanzibar—part of the United Republic of Tanzania—virtually everyone is a Muslim. I was worried about retaliation against our people if we went ahead with an attack on an African Muslim state, and I insisted that if we did go after the pharmaceutical plant, I be given notice far enough in adva
nce of the exact timing of the missile launches so that we could put protective measures in place.
There was a third element, too. Sudan had detained two people we suspected of being part of the embassy bombings. Even as the U.S. was planning to level the factory, John O’Neill was negotiating on the Bureau’s behalf in New York City with the Sudanese ambassador to the United Nations, and the ambassador had opened talks with his own people back in Khartoum about turning the two individuals in question over to the Kenyans, so that they could ultimately be turned over to us for trial back in the United States. Was it really necessary to do this strike, I asked, given that it would in all likelihood spell the end of that effort?
The answer, of course, was yes. Tomahawks got launched in both directions—at the al Qaeda camp and, from the Red Sea, at Sudan. Whether the intelligence was wrong or the missiles less accurate than expected, Osama bin Laden lived to attack another day. In Sudan, the factory was obliterated, but little evidence has ever been found to suggest it was manufacturing the lethal gas in question or any other weapons-grade chemical compounds. As feared, the attack drove a stake into John O’Neill’s effort to broker a deal with the ambassador.
On the positive side, the FBI was given the heads-up we asked for. I was on the ground in Dar es Salaam on August 20, 1998, taking a meal break with some of the agents who had been working there, when my old friend and able deputy, Bill Esposito, called from Washington. He’d just heard from the White House and the CIA that missiles would be striking their targets in Aghanistan and Sudan within the hour. I had my senior people pull the rest of our contingent together.
“Look,” I said, “I’ve got some news for you.” Then I told them about the missile strikes. Except for me, the room was absolutely silent. By then, the attacks were imminent. We took extra precautions of our own in the hours and days ahead to keep our people safe, but the crime scenes in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi were already being protected by heavily armed, company-strength U.S. Marine FAST teams. To my great relief, there were no attempts at retaliation against either site.
The Centennial Park bombing that marred the 1996 Summer Olympics was another case where I directly intervened to prevent what would have been a legal catastrophe.
Richard Jewell had originally been one of the heroes of the Centennial Park bombing. A security guard hired to protect a light and sound tower at the popular late-night meeting site, Jewell had been the first person to alert police to a suspicious knapsack shortly before the bomb inside it exploded. After the blast, Jewell had helped police clear the park. So far, so good, but Jewell also had gone out of his way to tell television reporters about his efforts. More than one “hero” has been known to create the circumstances of his own heroism, and Jewell was beginning to fit that profile. Statements by some of his co-workers raised further suspicions. I wasn’t in Atlanta, but when a draft application for a search warrant to be served on Richard Jewell crossed my desk back in Washington, I responded that the evidence seemed sufficient for probable cause.
It wasn’t that I was convinced Jewell was the man. If anything, I was unconvinced, then and later. To me, he never quite seemed to fit the facts. But a search warrant isn’t an accusation. It’s a judicial order to acquire evidence and other information that will help decide whether to move forward toward an indictment or to move on to other suspects and other lines of inquiry. That’s where we were with Richard Jewell when the Atlanta Journal-Constitution got wind of the search warrant, added two and two and came up with five, and named Jewell as our prime suspect. Thus, just as with Wen Ho Lee, a choreographed media circus ensued that would take two long months to die out.
Unfortunately, at just about the same time, we compounded the difficulty by getting too cute by half. Agents had originally asked Jewell if they could interview him at a local restaurant. Since Jewell agreed to come along voluntarily and since a restaurant hardly constitutes “custody”—he could walk out whenever he wanted to—there would have been no need to apprise him of his Miranda rights to have a lawyer present.
Then the plan changed. Rather than use a restaurant, agents asked Jewell to come down to the Atlanta FBI office and take part in a bogus training film about how to interview a “first responder.” Jewell once again said yes, came of his own free will, and of his own free will began to answer the questions that interviewers had been planning to ask over sandwiches and coffee.
Technically, I suppose, that still let us off the hook in terms of his Miranda rights, but when I found out what was going on, halfway through the ruse, I didn’t like the misleading way it had been orchestrated. The arrangements for the interview, the setting it was taking place in, the fact we were tricking the guy—the whole production began to suggest a nonvoluntary situation. This was an FBI office. Guys sit around with guns strapped to them. On top of that, if Jewell was the guy, we were risking tainting the case right at the outset. What’s more, we had an incipient media blowout on our hands, and I wanted to make sure things were done more than right. Not only had people been killed and injured—one dead from the bomb, another by heart attack seemingly as a result of the explosion, and 120 wounded—they had been killed and maimed in the public eye, on a hallowed stage. The world press corps was camped out within walking distance of Centennial Park, desperate to fill column inches and broadcast minutes. (The heart attack victim was a Turkish cameraman racing to film the event.)
For me, the situation had reached critical mass. Read him his rights, I said, not to any great hosannas of praise either in my office or down in Atlanta. Why, people asked? But I was through explaining. Because that’s my directive, I answered. It was only when they asked him to acknowledge in writing that he had been read them, as required by the statute, that he glommed onto what was happening and shut up tight.
I’ve read in the years since that if we had continued the ruse, Richard Jewell would have told FBI investigators enough that they could have cleared him then and there. Maybe so. I don’t have a crystal ball. But given the choice between deceit and transparency, I’ll take transparency every time.
I was galled by what had happened, and I agreed when three FBI supervisors were reprimanded by Justice Department investigators for their role in the questioning of Richard Jewell. As I wrote in an internal FBI memo on the reprimands, “No prosecutor could go into court, and no director of the FBI could go before Congress, and claim that necessary constitutional warnings are adequately conveyed by telling a suspect that he is an actor in a training video and that he is being presented Miranda warnings ‘just like it’s (a) real official interview.’” Inevitably, the memo was leaked to the press almost before the ink was dry.
But as happened with the flap over the McVeigh records and Wen Ho Lee, I was mostly galled by the fact that the controversy drew attention away from what the FBI does best: exhausting tens of thousands of work hours on solving crimes that no other agency has the training or resources or resolve or corporate culture to take on. Led by John Behnke, Tracey North, and Todd Letcher—all veterans of the Moody case—agents ultimately conducted more than twenty thousand interviews in the Centennial Park bombing. They studied and cross-referenced and matched up innumerable photos and video camera stills and individual frames from TV and newspaper coverage. (Everyone was recording the Olympics in one way or another.) And in the end, after two years of the most minute examination and cross-comparison, all those dedicated and unbending agents had made their case against their man, Eric Robert Rudolph.
By then, Rudolph was already on the FBI Most Wanted List for a 1998 bombing at a Birmingham, Alabama, abortion clinic that had killed an off-duty policeman helping to guard the facility and seriously wounded a nurse at the clinic. Soon, additional charges relating to other Atlanta area bombings, at a lesbian nightclub and a women’s clinic, would be added to the list.
Another half decade would be needed to hunt Eric Rudolph down and finally close the books on the Centennial Park bombing, almost two years after I had left the director’s po
st, and for that, too, the FBI has taken flak. But Rudolph was willing and able to live virtually like a wild animal in the rugged mountains of western North Carolina. The area had been a stronghold of a hate group that called itself the Army of God, to which Rudolph belonged. He grew up there. As Osama bin Laden has proven, even the most committed manhunts in the world can fail to flush a prey when it’s hunkered down in a harsh terrain, protected by its own kind. And Rudolph clearly had the genes of the maniacally committed. Back in 1998, his brother sawed off his own hand, on videotape, to protest the FBI’s pursuit of his sibling.
Had a local police officer in Murphy, North Carolina, not spotted Eric Rudolph one evening eating out of a Dumpster behind a supermarket, he might still be at large. But the point to be made is that, as with Khobar Towers and so many other cases, the FBI never gave up. We never stopped looking for Eric Robert Rudolph, and because we didn’t, we created the conditions that led to the lucky break that finally brought a crazed murderer to ground. That tale might begin with Richard Jewell and a foolish trick in the Bureau’s Atlanta office, but that’s the background static, not the story itself. Rudolph has now admitted to his crimes, but the FBI’s overwhelming evidence would have gotten him in the end even if he hadn’t.
The Unabomber was a case study for me in how the media can not only drive events but sometimes precipitate them, which is why I will forever associate the names Ted Kaczynski and Dan Rather.
I was working my first big case as an agent when Kaczynski mailed his initial bomb back in 1978, a package device supposedly being returned to Northwestern University professor Buckley Crist. Suspicious—he’d never mailed the package in the first place—Crist turned the package over to campus police, who opened it, causing minor injuries to one officer. Other bombs followed. Some went to airline officials; others were meant to explode in flight. Fortunately, Kaczynski wasn’t much of a bomb maker, at least in the early days. Then in 1985, he did his first serious harm. A graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley lost four fingers and the use of one eye. Later that year, a California computer store owner was killed by a bomb loaded with nails and other shrapnel. Two years later, in 1987, Kaczynski struck again. A similar bomb was sent to a computer store in Salt Lake City. Then he went to ground for seven years. His first victim when he surfaced again was Yale computer scientist David Gelernter. Gelernter survived but lost part of his right hand. Kaczynski followed that up by maiming geneticist Charles Epstein. In 1994, he killed an advertising executive; in 1995, the president of a forestry association.
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