My FBI

by Louis J. Freeh

  Clearly, the attacks were increasing in frequency and in accuracy. Whoever the Unabomber was, he had learned how to make an effective bomb, and his list of enemies was growing. But that was about all we had to go on. Most bombers are driven by some obvious if demented cause. Kaczynski, it turned out, had one, too. He had declared war on modern society and particularly those who were by his malicious lights abusing technology. But until Kaczynski sent his first anonymous letter to the press in 1993, we had not the remotest clue who was behind the attacks, and the letter provided little help. The writer credited the attacks to an anarchist group he called FC. Indeed, “FC” had been inscribed on the bombs regularly since 1985, but we had no idea what that stood for. (The answer, once we got it, was simple in the extreme: “Freedom Club.”)

  We’d dubbed the case Unabomb—an amalgamation of “university” and “airlines,” his favorite targets—and we had a special task force dedicated to finding the Unabomber, but that, too, was going nowhere. Using every kind of matrix and analytic tool they could think of, the agents had assembled a massive computerized list of anyone and everyone who might have some kind of lethal grudge against the specific people attacked, against computers, against universities, against the airline industry, and on and on. Just assembling the list was the work of thousands of agent hours; checking it increased the workload exponentially. Every time I look back on the case, I’m amazed by the perseverance our people showed, the sheer dedication in the face of so little positive feedback. The FBI task force was led by agents like Terry Turchie who didn’t know the meaning of giving up, yet Ted Kaczynski’s name wasn’t even on the list. He was below everyone’s radar.

  When Kaczynski had a new bomb to send, he would bicycle down from his cabin to town, then hop a bus to someplace like San Francisco, where he would mail his lethal devices before scurrying back to his hidey-hole in Montana. Like Walter Leroy Moody, he left no forensic trail, and like Eric Rudolph he seemed able to live on air and bark and beetles. And then Theodore Kaczynski made his pivotal mistake, without which we never would have caught him. He mailed to The Washington Post and The New York Times a 35,000-word “manifesto” and claimed he would cease his bombings if the document was published verbatim by one of the newspapers or by a major national magazine such as Time or Newsweek.

  The manifesto was rambling, the reasoning tortured, but the minute I started reading it, I felt certain someone, somewhere would recognize its author. The syntax, the diction, the logic—they were all so singular, as full of idiosyncratic quirks as any fingerprint. The problem was how to get it published.

  Newspapers don’t like to be bossed around, and they don’t like setting onerous precedents. I can remember sitting in the office of Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher of The New York Times, with Donald Graham, who had succeeded his mother, Katharine, as publisher of The Washington Post, hashing matters over with the fourth estate. Publish this and we’ll be hostage to every nut with a cause, the two of them argued. Fail to publish it, I countered, and people might die, perhaps your own employees, or their families and loved ones. The Unabomber has shown an affinity for airplanes in the past. He might really bring one down this time. More practical issues intervened, as well. Publishing a 35,000-word document would require a special section. Paper, ink, typesetting time—none of it’s free, and no advertisers were going to be rushing to fill this insert with quarter pagers. Publishers have to answer to their stockholders, too, and Sulzberger and Graham were both conscious of that, as they had to be. Graham said that in the end it came down to a matter of “public safety.”

  It was obvious to me, too, that neither publisher wanted to be in the position of aiding and abetting the FBI, but I couldn’t help but note the irony involved. A quarter of a century earlier, the government had unsuccessfully moved heaven and earth to keep these same two newspapers from publishing the “Pentagon Papers.” Now I was trying to move heaven and earth to get them to publish a document they would have just as soon left alone.

  “This might be the only time in history the FBI has begged you to leak something for us,” I told them.

  I don’t know if it was true, but I suspect so, and ultimately my argument carried the day. Against the economic self-interest of both papers, against the widespread opposition of some of their top editors, and, to be honest, to my great surprise, Sulzberger and Graham struck a deal. The Post would publish the manifesto, and the Times would share the cost, maybe $40,000 in all.

  On September 19, 1995, right at the tail end of a three-month deadline imposed by the Unabomber, the manifesto finally saw the light of day, in an eight-page supplement to the Post amended three days later by an additional two paragraphs, seventy-two words in all, that had been inadvertently dropped by a typist. Media critics, by and large, were appalled. The Post and Times had caved. Their pages were going to be Crackpot City from now on. Armchair criminologists climbed on board, too. The Unabomber, whoever he was, was chortling over his success.

  Maybe my stomach should have been churning, too. I’d gone way out on a limb to talk America’s two most influential daily newspapers into this. If the manifesto didn’t flush out someone who could identify its author, the FBI was going to have plenty of crow to eat and could have made powerful enemies in the process. But from the moment I opened my Washington Post that morning, I knew we’d done the right thing. Some professor or student was sure to recognize the quirky style of a former mentor or mentee, and it wouldn’t take long. It didn’t, but what almost floored me was that it was Ted Kaczynski’s brother who dropped the dime.

  I’ve got two brothers I dearly love. I can only imagine how wrenching it must have been for David Kaczynski to see his brother’s tortured style and psyche spread all over those pages, and then to decide to turn him in. But I like to think that, under similar circumstances, I would have had the courage to do much as David did. First, he contacted a lawyer, and the lawyer contacted us. His anonymous client, he said, was prepared to identify the Unabomber, but he wanted concessions, the chief of which was that the government would not ask for the death penalty. We didn’t agree entirely, but we did say we would take the request into strong consideration, and ultimately we did. With that, we had the Unabomber’s name, corroborating evidence such as it was, and an address: a backwoods cabin outside Lincoln, Montana. But the weirdness was not done, not by a long shot.

  I was sitting in the FBI’s operations center on April 2, 1996, the day before agents armed with search and arrest warrants were to descend on Ted Kaczynski in Montana, when one of my chief lieutenants shouted over to say that Dan Rather was on the line.

  “Here we go,” I said.

  So I got on the phone, and Dan, whom I had met a couple of times, came right to the point.

  “Listen,” he said, “we know all about Kaczynski, where he is, all that, and were going to have some people go out there and film the search.”

  “You can’t film the search!”

  “Well,” he said, “that’s what we’d like to do.”

  “You’re going to get someone killed,” I told him. “First of all, and I know you’re not going to answer this, I’d like to know how you found out about this.”

  We’d been mobilizing people to move out to western Montana for days, but not on the scale that would attract media attention. Now I was enraged, not at Dan—I’d been in Washington long enough to know that the place leaks like a water mattress at a porcupine convention—but at his source. The operation had been relatively tightly held; whoever had talked was clearly intimately involved in the operation. Dan Rather, though, wasn’t about to hand over CBS’s stoolie.

  “Well,” he said, “you know, we have good sources.”

  Right.

  “Don’t worry,” he went on. “We’re just sending one truck. It’ll be low profile.”

  “Dan, this is western Montana. You can’t do that! There’s no way for a news truck to be unobtrusive.”

  And so we went on, the CBS news anchor and global
media figure assuring us that his reporters and soundmen and camera crews would be quiet as church mice, and me assuring him that this wasn’t going to happen. Finally, we struck a deal. CBS would give us a couple hours to do the search before it set up, and we would give the network some exclusive interviews in return. Dan Rather couldn’t have been more honorable on his end once the deal was struck. For our part, we burst into Kaczynski’s cabin unannounced by satellite dish trucks and found a wealth of evidence awaiting us, everything from fabricated explosive devices to the original of the manifesto and the typewriter used to produce it. And with that, one of the most frustrating cases the FBI had ever worked on—an eighteen-year wild-goose chase that had spanned the tenures of five directors and acting directors—was ended. Today, Ted Kaczynski, who murdered three people with his bombs and injured twenty-three others, is behind bars for the rest of his life.

  Once in a rare while, too, a case went so deep to the bone that I couldn’t help but feel raw anger.

  I’d been FBI director for only a few months when some of my top people dropped by to brief me on one of the most highly classified operations the Bureau had ever undertaken—so restricted that, even though I ran the place, no one could tell me the code word. Fine, I said, talk on, and the story was almost too incredible.

  For years, it turned out, the Bureau had had two agents living in a small Georgetown row house and posing as just another set of urban upwardly mobile DINKs (double income no kids, for those who forget the shorthand of the ’90s). These two, though, were more in the mining business than in anything normally associated with Washington. Out of their basement ran a tunnel that had been dug at huge effort and public expense with an eye to penetrating the then new Soviet embassy built on one of the city’s highest points, a place known locally as Mount Alto. (I should point out that this was in stark contrast to Moscow, where the new U.S. embassy had been built in a hollow surrounded by KGB listening stations. Beware, in other words, of democracies bearing gifts.) Naturally, my staff, or that part of it that was allowed in on the secret, was enormously proud of this fact.

  “We’re right under the code room!” they told me, practically bursting out of their suits.

  “Oh yeah?” I said, wondering where this was headed.

  “And all we have to do is go up a little farther and we’ll be in the code room!”

  “So why don’t you do it?”

  “Well,” came the answer, “we think their instrumentation will detect us if we do that.”

  “How much money did we spend on this?”

  “Millions of dollars.”

  “How long?”

  “Years.”

  “And you’re to the point where you’re almost there but can’t get there?”

  “That’s right—we can’t get there. We think it would be best if we filled in the tunnel.”

  “How much?”

  “Millions.”

  “How long?”

  “Years. Do you want to see the tunnel before we begin?”

  I told them no. I was already having a vision of a string of D.C. streets collapsing on top of our tunnel, creating an urban chasm that would point right from the Russian Embassy to our little row house—and from there, a second furrowed line of responsibility that would point directly to my seventh-floor office. Indeed, one evening I had dinner at the embassy and realized that I was treading softly on the floor.

  I had no way of knowing it at the time, but that was my first introduction to FBI agent Robert Hanssen and his treasonous sideline. Hanssen had already told the Russians about our tunnel, long before we determined we would never be able to use it. As for Bob Hanssen himself, we had already met once, briefly: he and I and our families attended the same Roman Catholic church, St. Catherine’s in Great Falls, Virginia. On one of the first Sundays after I had become director, he made a point of stopping me after mass and introducing himself. Over the next eight years, I would have virtually no direct contact with him, but his shadow hung heavily over my tenure.

  Oddly, given that the Soviet Union basically went out of business in 1989, the 1990s were the Decade of the Turncoat Soviet Spy. Aldrich Ames, a thirty-one-year veteran of the CIA, and his wife, Rosario, were arrested by the FBI in 1994 and charged with conspiracy to commit espionage. Ames had offered his services to the Soviets in 1985 while serving as chief of the Soviet branch of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. In the eight-plus years that followed, he had done untold damage to the Agency and his nation, and in the end he was sentenced to life in prison without parole for his crimes. (Rosario Ames drew sixty-three months in prison for abetting his espionage.)

  A year later, in 1996, we arrested Harold Nicholson, a veteran CIA operations officer and former chief of station in Bucharest, as he was attempting to leave the U.S. to meet with agents of the Russian intelligence service. Eventually sentenced to twenty-three years in prison, Nicholson was the highest-ranking CIA official ever convicted of espionage. In both the Ames and Nicholson cases, the arrests were the fruit of significantly improved ties between the CIA and FBI, across the ranks and especially at the top. From day one, I had a great working relationship with John Deutsch, who was heading the CIA when these espionage cases popped, and with George Tenet, who succeeded him.

  The FBI came in for its own black eye in 1996 when Special Agent Earl Pitts, a counterintelligence officer and a thirteen-year veteran of the Bureau, was charged with espionage, attempted espionage, and communication of classified information, all of it over a five-year period beginning in 1987. On more than one occasion during the covert phase of our investigation, I walked past Pitts while traversing the corridors at Quantico and did a good rendition of hello as we passed each other. Pitts drew a twenty-seven-year sentence for his activities.

  Other arrests came down, as well. Late in 1998, we nabbed ten people who had been conducting espionage for the government of Cuba. About the same time, David Sheldon Boone, an army sergeant assigned to the National Security Agency, pled guilty in Alexandria’s U.S. district court to conspiracy to commit espionage for the KGB. We caught a husband-and-wife team that had been spying for the East Germans; both were convicted in 1998 of four counts of espionage. By then, the cold war had been in cessation for almost a decade, but you wouldn’t have known it from our National Security Division.

  The irony of breaking a spy case is simple. Finding a spy is terrible news. Not finding a spy is worse but not news.

  Try as we did, though, it was clear by 1997 that one mole was eluding us. We knew he was highly placed within the American intelligence community, probably in Washington, D.C. We knew he had been compromising important operations to the KGB over a long period of time, perhaps since the mid-1970s. We even had a code name for him: Graysuit. But we had no clue who Graysuit was.

  We had set up a huge team of CIA and FBI officers and agents, and located them off-site from both facilities, mainly at the old Washington Navy Yard. To make sure we weren’t inviting the fox inside the henhouse, we polygraphed and otherwise individually screened everyone who went into that team, and we kept the operation quiet enough, despite its size, that only an incredibly well-placed mole—someone extremely close to George Tenet or me—could have known of its existence.

  The arrests and subsequent interrogations of Ames, Nicholson, and Pitts had filled in many of the blank spots in our espionage files: cases where someone recruited by either the Agency or the Bureau had been compromised, killed, or arrested by the Russians, or ones where we had opened an investigation only to have the subject tipped off and skip town. But plenty of unexplained cases still remained, and those are the ones the team concentrated on. Still, by the end of the decade Graysuit was as big a mystery as he had been two years earlier.

  It was just about that time, late in 1999, that George Tenet and I held one of our regular meetings on the matter with our respective espionage and national security chiefs. We have news, they said. Our staffs have determined that the mole in all likelihood is somewhere insi
de the CIA. All the pieces, all the signs pointed that way.

  “Too bad,” I told George, half in jest. “Three strikes and you’re out.” But, of course, it was my strike, not his. I just didn’t know it yet.

  Frustrated and determined finally to stop the bleeding, George and I came up with a plan, something that hadn’t been tried before. We would pool our financial resources, come up with a reward large enough to garner attention among the new capitalists of the old People’s Paradise, and basically buy the mole’s identity. The sum we finally settled on was a seven-figure payment. That, we figured, should be enough to turn up some KGB equivalent of Aldrich Ames, especially if we supplemented the cash reward with additional incentives such as residency, protection, whatever was necessary.

  Once we had the money set aside, we had task-force analysts pore over their files and identify five senior KGB officers, all retired, who were likely to have had access to Graysuit’s identity in the normal course of their operations. Then we sent task force members overseas to approach each of the targets individually. The pitch was as simple as the plan: we are from the FBI and the CIA. We think you have information that would be very valuable to us, and we are willing to pay for it.

  One ex-KGB officer we contacted responded just as directly: go screw yourselves. Officer two wasn’t a lot more gracious. He might have information, he said, but he never returned any calls after that—and not surprisingly, either. The Soviet Union might have been gone by then, but selling out an asset as valuable as Graysuit was an almost certain death sentence if you were caught.