The Secrets of the FBI

by Ronald Kessler

  As it turned out, Gray himself had been improperly passing on the FBI’s form FD-302 reports of interviews from the Watergate investigation to John Dean, the White House counsel. On June 21, 1972, White House aides Dean and John Ehrlichman met with Gray and told him to destroy political sabotage files from Hunt’s safe in the Executive Office Building. They told him the material consisted of “national security documents” unrelated to Watergate, Gray later revealed. Six months later, Gray burned some of the documents in his family’s incinerator.

  After learning from Ehrlichman that Dean was cooperating with the U.S. attorney and would be revealing what had transpired on June 21, Gray told his congressional supporter, Senator Lowell Weicker, so that Weicker would be prepared for that revelation. Weicker leaked the item about the destruction of documents to the press.

  On April 23, 1973, Leonard M. “Bucky” Walters, an assistant FBI director, was carpooling to work with William Soyars, another assistant director. Walters told Soyars that he planned to resign that day over Gray’s destruction of evidence. Soyars pledged to do the same. At nine in the morning, Walters met with W. Mark Felt, the top FBI official under Gray.

  “I told Felt that I would not work for a director who had destroyed evidence in a case the FBI was investigating,” Walters says. “I told him I would retire by the end of the day. I also told him I would ask the other assistant directors to do the same.”

  In the next half hour, Walters called each of the other assistant directors. To a man, they all agreed to resign. Walters gave the news to Felt, who said he would tell Gray. An hour later, at ten-thirty in the morning, Gray called a meeting of the executive conference and announced that he would leave that day.

  Later, when Gray was subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury investigating Watergate, Agent Lano, who was one of those Gray had accused of leaking to Woodward and Bernstein, made sure he personally served Gray with the subpoena.

  In addition to seven Watergate burglars and accomplices, forty government officials were eventually indicted on charges of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury. Among those ultimately convicted were Attorney General John N. Mitchell, White House counsel Dean, White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, and domestic policy advisor John Ehrlichman. Nixon himself was named an unindicted co-conspirator and driven from office.

  The fact that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post were breaking stories on the investigation, portraying a coordinated campaign and cover-up of political espionage carried out by top Nixon aides, helped to ensure that the FBI probe would not be suppressed. But it still grates on Lano and some other agents that the two reporters obtained leaks from the FBI and that the public thinks they solved the Watergate case.

  On the other hand, Mindermann says, “Their stories actually really, really helped us, because it kept the investigation going. It was critical to have that silent public support out there. You can only keep an investigation like this going if you have the kind of publicity that the Washington Post provided through Woodward and Bernstein, because lacking that, you’re going to be shut down, one way or the other.”

  “The media served a significant purpose,” says Edward R. Leary, another agent on the case. “On the one hand, it was a pain in the neck to us because what would be published in the paper was generally one day to two months behind where we were. We would have to go up the chain with information to explain or critique what was on the street. Why should we be bothered telling whoever wanted to know whether an article was accurate? On the other hand, through media involvement, clearly public focus was placed on the incident, and the glare of the public spotlight eventually opened some doors that would have been closed to us.”

  Each of the agents on the squad had different theories about the identity of Deep Throat. In discussing the stories with his editors, Woodward would refer to one of his sources, who was knowledgeable but not always forthcoming, as “my friend.” Possessed of a wry sense of humor, Howard Simons, then the managing editor of the Washington Post, dubbed the source “Deep Throat” after an X-rated movie then in the news. Because of the notoriety attached to the name, this Watergate source acquired a status far beyond that of other sources who were also important and to this day remain anonymous.

  Some FBI agents thought Deep Throat was a composite meant to fuzz up the identities of Woodward and Bernstein’s sources. That was a misunderstanding of how the name evolved. As a Washington Post reporter during Watergate, I sat next to Bernstein. Each evening, Woodward would stand over Bernstein, who was the better writer, and Bernstein would type out their stories as they discussed their information and sources.

  It was clear from those conversations that they had a number of legitimate sources. They had directories of White House and CREEP personnel and were running down the list, knocking on doors in the middle of the night. In some cases, the FBI thought they had obtained reports of FBI interviews, when in fact the reporters—as in the case of bookkeeper Judy Hoback—had conducted their own interviews with the same individuals. There was no reason to conflate sources.

  It would turn out to be ironic that Gray had assigned W. Mark Felt, who was Deep Throat, to investigate the leaks. Felt and Edward Miller were later prosecuted for signing off on illegal break-ins that Miller says Gray approved. In preparation for that case, the FBI in 1979 asked agent Paul V. Daly to look into the Watergate investigation to determine if anything troublesome might surface. Daly talked with Dick Long, who headed the white-collar crime section at headquarters and supervised the Watergate investigation.

  “We were just trying to find out exactly what might come out, and Long told me, ‘Well, you know, Mark [Felt] was Deep Throat,’ ” Daly says.

  Long, who has since died, never said how he claimed to know who Deep Throat was.

  “He never got into how he knew it,” Daly says, “other than to say, ‘We would brief Felt, and Felt would leak.’ ”

  For my book The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI, I interviewed Felt in August 2001 at the Santa Rosa, California, home where he was living with his daughter, Joan. Joan told me that a year earlier, Woodward had shown up unexpectedly at their home and had taken Felt to lunch. Joan said her father greeted Woodward like an old friend, and their mysterious meeting appeared to be more of a celebration than an interview.

  “Woodward just showed up at the door and said he was in the area,” Joan Felt said. “He came in a white limousine, which parked at a schoolyard about ten blocks away. He walked to the house. He asked if it was okay to have a martini with my father at lunch, and I said it would be fine.”

  After Woodward left the house to get the limousine, which was parked almost three-quarters of a mile east at Comstock Junior High School, Joan Felt went out and caught up with him to give him further instructions about what her father could eat for lunch, she told me. They walked together to the limo, and Joan Felt rode back with Woodward to pick up her father.

  Having suffered the effects of a stroke, Felt was in no position to provide credible information. When I interviewed him, he could not remember having had lunch with Woodward and confused Woodward with a government attorney. But Felt was compos mentis enough to tell me firmly, “I was definitely not Deep Throat.”

  There was no way Woodward would have gone to such lengths to conceal his visit unless Felt was Deep Throat. In the 2002 book, I wrote that the circumstances lent support to the notion that Felt was indeed Deep Throat, who subsequently revealed himself in 2005.

  “Without Felt’s feeding, confirming, and guiding those reporters who published information which stoked the public and drove political and public demands to keep the investigation alive, it is quite possible that we would not have made it as far as we eventually did,” Mindermann says. “Mark Felt is a real, genuine American hero.”

  7

  PROFILING

  CLARENCE M. KELLEY, WHO BECAME FBI DIRECTOR ON July 9, 1973, was well aware of the bureau’s failings from the Hoover era. A former FBI
agent and police chief, Kelley quickly stopped the fixation with statistics and emphasized quality over quantity in pursuing cases. The burly, square-jawed Kelley demanded that investigations be opened only when there was reason to believe a violation of law had occurred. He encouraged pursuit of public corruption cases. He began a push to hire females and minorities. And he was open to modernizing the bureau.

  While the FBI during Hoover’s early years was a pioneer in applying science to solve crimes, Hoover later often vetoed innovations. So when agent Howard D. Teten began teaching police officers who attended the FBI National Academy, which is strictly for police, the rudiments of what became known as criminal profiling in the early 1970s, he and his supervisors never told the director what they were doing.

  The father of criminal profiling, Teten began to see a correlation between the crime scene and the person who committed the crime. In carrying out any action, criminals and noncriminals act in particular ways. For example, some writers use a computer, others pen and paper. Some write in the morning, some at night. Each writer has a unique style, with variations in grammar, sentence structure, and voice.

  In the same way, criminals carry out their crimes in distinctly personal ways. What they do, rather than what they say, betrays who they are. By reading those signs, profilers can often determine from the crime scene the kind of person who committed the crime and the fantasies that propelled him or her—in effect, the perpetrator’s signature. While profiling can be used to help solve any crime, it is especially useful in helping to solve the most vicious and emotional crimes—murder and rape.

  Profilers look at every aspect of the crime, including interviews, photographs, investigative reports, autopsy reports, and laboratory reports. What sets profiling apart from good police work is that the conclusions are based on patterns that emerge by matching the characteristics of thousands of crime scenes found in similar cases with the characteristics of the actual perpetrators who are later apprehended.

  Besides forensics and information gleaned from witnesses and other interviews, profilers look at motivation.

  “Why was this particular victim the target of this crime at this particular time?” says Mark A. Hilts, who heads the FBI’s unit that develops profiles to help solve crimes against adults. “We kind of get into the mind of the offender. And not in any kind of psychic manner, but just through understanding criminals and why they commit the crimes they do. How does the criminal gain control of his victim? How does he manipulate the victim? How does he maintain control? How does he select his victim in the first place?”

  With a profile, investigators can narrow a search and begin focusing on one or two individuals. At times, profiles are so uncannily accurate as to seem clairvoyant. When police found the mutilated torsos of two teenagers floating in a river, they identified them as a boy and girl who had been missing. The FBI profiled the killer as a male in his forties who knew the children. He probably led a macho lifestyle, wore western boots, often hunted and fished, and drove a four-wheel vehicle. He was self-employed, had been divorced several times, and had a minor criminal record.

  With the profile, the police focused on the children’s stepfather, who fit the description perfectly but had not previously been a suspect. They were able to develop enough additional information from witnesses to convict him of the murders the following year.

  The FBI had found that a murderer careful enough to dispose of a body in a river is usually more sophisticated and often an older person. If the body is dumped in a remote area, the killer is probably an outdoors person with knowledge of the area. When the slashes on the victim’s body are vicious and directed at the sex organs, the assailant often knows the person.

  If there is no sign of forced entry and the assailant stayed around at the crime scene to have a snack after killing the victim, he likely lived in the neighborhood and knew the victim. In contrast, killers who don’t feel comfortable in an apartment leave immediately.

  Thus, based on a few elementary facts, the FBI can draw a profile of the killer as an older man who likes the outdoors, is familiar with the area where the body was left, knows the victim, and lived in the neighborhood.

  Using such analysis, the FBI over the years has helped solve thousands of cases so that serial murderers and serial rapists could not strike again.

  To supplement their knowledge, FBI profilers in the early years of the program interviewed offenders in prison. They began with assassins—Sirhan Sirhan, Sara Jane Moore, and Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme.

  At one point, Robert K. Ressler was interviewing Edmund E. Kemper III, who had killed his mother, grandparents, and six other people. Kemper was serving multiple life sentences in California. Hannibal Lecter, the serial killer played by Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs, was actually a composite of serial killers such as Kemper, who removed people’s heads and saved them as trophies; Edward Gein, who decorated his home with human skin; and Richard T. Chase, who ate the organs of his victims.

  When he was finished talking with Kemper in his cell just off death row, Ressler rang a buzzer to summon a guard to let him out. When the guard didn’t come, the 295-pound prisoner told Ressler to “relax.” He said the guards were changing shifts and delivering meals.

  “If I went ape-shit in here, you’d be in a lot of trouble, wouldn’t you?” said Kemper menacingly. “I could screw your head off and place it on the table to greet the guard.”

  Ressler was able to cool Kemper off by suggesting that he might have a concealed weapon. After that incident, agents interviewing inmates would take along a partner. And contrary to the impression created by Jodie Foster’s role in The Silence of the Lambs, the FBI would never send a trainee to interview anyone.

  A clear pattern emerged from the interviews. Most of the perpetrators lived a fantasy life that included enacting the types of crimes they had committed. The crime allowed them to realize their fantasies. Now that they knew what was inside their heads, the agents could better match what they saw at the crime scene with the way suspects carried out their crimes. How did suspects case an area before choosing a victim? What did they look for in a rape victim? Could a victim have said anything that would have dissuaded them from committing a rape? Did they keep trophies to remind them of their victims? If so, what were they? Did they tell anyone about their crimes or contact the victim after the crime?

  Roger Depue, who began working with Teten in 1973 and later headed the profiling unit at the FBI Academy, made profiling part of the FBI’s operations, assigning agents exclusively to develop profiles to help both the police and the bureau solve crimes.

  The profilers divided killers into two broad categories: organized and disorganized. Each type of killer has a different kind of fantasy. Each leaves his distinctive characteristics at the crime scene. And each has a set of personal characteristics that can help identify him.

  “The disorganized killer is the least sophisticated,” Depue says. “At the crime scene, agents see signs of rage and poor planning because he commits the crime spontaneously. He says nothing or very little to the victim. Suddenly he engages in violence. The weapon is a weapon of opportunity. For example, the killer may use a rock to beat a victim. He will leave the weapon at the crime scene. The scene has a lot of evidence, including blood, fibers, and hair. The body is found where the murder took place. No effort is made to conceal where it is.”

  The disorganized killer generally has below-average intelligence and is socially inadequate. “He prefers unskilled work and is sexually incompetent,” Depue says. “He tends to be a younger sibling in his family. His father’s work was unstable, and he often received harsh discipline as a child. He lives alone. Before the crime, he appears anxious. He usually does not use alcohol before committing the crime. He has minimal interest in news of the crime. After the crime, his behavior changes significantly. He may go on a drinking or drug binge or become highly religious.”

  The organized killer is the typical serial killer. H
e has average to above-average intelligence. He prefers skilled work and is sexually competent. His father had stable work, but he experienced inconsistent childhood discipline. He is usually an older sibling. Edmund E. Kemper III, John Wayne Gacy Jr., David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz, Ted Bundy, and Henry Lee Lucas were examples of organized serial killers.

  “The organized killer enjoys the predatory aspect of killing—hunting, manipulating, and gaining control of the victim,” Depue says. “He may select a certain kind of weapon, and he learns from experience. He often drinks before committing the crime and possesses social skills. He usually lives with someone. His car is in good condition. He follows the crime in the news media. After the crime, he may change jobs or leave town. He interacts with victims. Because he is so skilled, it is difficult to catch him. And when he is caught, everyone says, ‘I can’t believe he did it.’ ”

  An organized killer has a fantasy that drives him. “For example, Edmund Kemper told us he needed to have particular experiences with people. In order to do that, he had to ‘evict them from their bodies.’ In other words, he had to kill them,” Depue says.

  Many serial killers revisit the scene just to rekindle their fantasy. When he decided killing a particular woman was too risky, Berkowitz would return to the scene of a previous crime and reenact the murder, aiming his gun just as he had aimed it when he killed his victim. Jeffrey L. Dahmer kept photographs of his dismembered victims.

  Most perpetrators engage in ritualistic behavior that never changes. For example, after entering a home, a rapist might confront the victim in a particular way, while she is sleeping. He may stand over her and watch her as she sleeps, enjoying the sense of control he feels. He derives pleasure from the victim’s feeling of helplessness when she wakes up and sees him standing there, perhaps nude. As he improves his methods and becomes more organized, his ritual will remain the same because he commits the crime in order to enjoy the ritual.