The Secrets of the FBI

by Ronald Kessler

  Because the White House objected on the grounds of executive privilege, Starr’s investigators never interviewed Hillary. However, “one of our agents got the brunt of one of her rampages,” Copeland says. As he was serving a subpoena in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House, the FBI agent made the mistake of saying hello to Hillary as she passed him.

  “He dared to speak to her in the hallway,” Copeland says. “She had a standing rule that no one spoke to her when she was going from one location to another. In fact, anyone who would see her coming would just step into the first available office.” But the agent “didn’t know the ground rules,” Copeland says. “As he was leaving, she got out of the elevator and was approaching him,” Copeland says.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Clinton,” the agent said.

  “She jumped all over him,” Copeland says. “ ‘How dare you? You people are just destroying my husband.’ It was that vast right-wing conspiracy rant. Then she had to tack on something to the effect of ‘And where do you buy your suits? Penney’s?’ ”

  For many weeks, the agent told no one about the encounter.

  “Finally, he told me about it,” Copeland says. “And he said, ‘I was wearing the best suit I owned.’ ”

  14

  BRICK AGENT

  HAVING WITNESSED WILLIAM SESSIONS’ ABUSES, FBI agents were overjoyed when President Clinton nominated Louis J. Freeh to be director on July 20, 1993. A federal judge and a former federal prosecutor, Freeh had begun his career as an FBI agent. Finally, agents thought, they would have a director who understood what they do and could manage the bureau effectively.

  Unlike Sessions, who referred to himself as “your director,” Freeh insisted on being called by his first name. But while Freeh bonded with street agents and dispensed with the perks that Sessions so loved, Freeh brought to the job his own idiosyncrasies.

  Freeh’s concept of investigations was limited to what he had done as an agent ten years earlier—knocking on doors and interviewing people. He did not understand that technology had become essential to law enforcement. He had no use for computers and did not use email.

  Weldon L. Kennedy, whom Freeh appointed associate deputy director for administration, remembered that Freeh kept a computer on the credenza behind his desk.

  “I never saw him use it, nor did I ever see it turned on,” Kennedy says.

  By the time Freeh left, just before 9/11, the FBI’s personal computers were so primitive that no one would take them even as a donation to a church. They were pre-Pentium machines, incapable of using current software, reading a CD-ROM, or even working with a mouse. The FBI’s internal email was so slow that agents used their personal email addresses instead. The FBI system did not allow email outside the agency. Often because of funds from the Justice Department, local police were far more technologically advanced than the bureau. Because few of the FBI’s computers could handle graphics, agents would ask local police departments to email photos of suspects to their home computers.

  As their primary computer, agents were expected to use something called an Automated Case Support System. Developed in the mid-1990s, it used 1980s technology. It could not connect to the Internet and did not use a mouse. The system was so slow and useless that for investigations alone, the bureau had developed forty-two additional, separate systems that agents used instead of the main system. Each of these additional systems had to be checked to make sure all references to an individual had been obtained.

  “Brick agents,” especially those from New York, tend to see management as the enemy. Freeh never lost that mentality. Even when he had promoted a manager himself, Freeh saw the official as a threat to his own authority and treated him or her with suspicion and hostility.

  “Freeh took away from the SACs the desire to make decisions because they feared repercussions,” says Anthony E. Daniels, whom Freeh named assistant FBI director to head the Washington field office. “They were terrified of him. Freeh had contempt for management.”

  “Freeh said he wants everything straight. The first person who told it to him straight, he cut his head off. If an agent brought him bad news, he killed the messenger and pushed him out,” Weldon Kennedy says.

  For all his faults, Hoover understood the importance of the press. It could enhance the power of the FBI by creating an image, albeit embellished, of his agents as supermen. If people believed in the bureau, they were more likely to cooperate with agents. As part of their training, SACs under Webster gave mock press conferences. Having been an agent fewer than six years, Freeh never got near the FBI’s press operations. He saw the bureau as an arm of prosecutors—who usually speak to the media only at formal press conferences—rather than as an American institution accountable to the public.

  Traditionally, the FBI had allowed reporters to interview agents about cases where convictions had been obtained. But Freeh decided that no case should be discussed until all appeals were exhausted—a process that often took decades. It meant that scarcely any FBI cases could be discussed.

  Under Freeh, even favorable feature stories about the profiling program and other FBI successes were blocked. Because Freeh would not allow press officers to give the FBI’s side, negative stories appeared without presenting the bureau’s side.

  That policy was particularly harmful when it came to the increasingly wild charges about FBI involvement at both Ruby Ridge and Waco. While both occurred under William Sessions, Freeh was director when the incidents became politically charged. Rather than letting the FBI correct false claims and place the incidents in context, Freeh, with great fanfare, called news conferences or issued statements to deplore what had happened and announce disciplinary actions. In doing so, he made himself look good at the expense of the bureau.

  “We needed to respond to these outlandish accusations and put out the facts quickly,” says Bob Ricks, one of the SACs in charge at Waco. “Even when we were called murderers, we were supposed to sit there and smile,” he says. “I had never seen the FBI in that position before. No one was willing to defend the FBI because these problems had not happened on Freeh’s watch.”

  As part of his jihad against headquarters, Freeh began slashing experienced headquarters personnel and sending them to the field. He referred to them as “drones.” Weldon Kennedy warned Freeh that the bureau needed to keep experienced people on hand to supervise cases. Kennedy felt impelled to intervene when Freeh wanted to transfer an agent in the laboratory who was the world’s foremost expert on shoe and tire treads to the Jacksonville field office to do background checks.

  John W. Hicks, the assistant director in charge of the lab, also forcefully warned Freeh about the personnel cuts, saying the quality of work would suffer and backlogs would grow if he proceeded with his plan to transfer to the street half of the 130 agents who were lab examiners. It was foolish to turn experts with decades of experience in ballistics or explosives into street agents. But Freeh’s animus toward headquarters would not be appeased. When Freeh ignored him, Hicks resigned from the bureau.

  Because Freeh wanted the most experienced agents to leave headquarters for the field, seasoned supervisors in Chinese counterintelligence were gone. As a result, no one was in a position to direct the investigation of Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwanese-born scientist at Los Alamos National Lab who was suspected of passing intelligence secrets to China. The FBI botched the investigation through a series of decisions.

  “Because Freeh did not have the evidence for a classic espionage case, he painted this as a devastating case and tried to cover up the lack of evidence by bringing a fifty-nine-count indictment citing vague and unsupportable charges,” former spy prosecutor John Martin says.

  At Lee’s bail hearing in December 1999, the government convinced a judge that Lee was so dangerous he had to be jailed without bail. Lee spent nine months in restrictive conditions. A small light burned constantly in his cell so he could be watched. During his daily hour of exercise, Lee was required to wear leg shac
kles.

  To show how deceitful Lee was, Robert Messemer, a new agent on the case, said at the bail hearing that Lee told a colleague he wanted to borrow his computer so he could download a “resumé.” In fact, Messemer testified, Lee borrowed the computer to download classified files.

  During discovery proceedings, the defense found that Messemer had testified falsely. Lee’s colleague never told the FBI that Lee had said he wanted to download a resumé. Lee had told the colleague the truth—that he needed the computer to download files. At a second bail hearing on August 17, 2000, Messemer claimed he had made an honest mistake. The admission was devastating.

  In 1985 alone, the FBI under Webster arrested eleven major spies without a single claim that rights had been violated or that the FBI had acted improperly. Neither Webster nor Martin, the Justice Department’s chief spy prosecutor, would have approved what Martin described as an obviously flawed indictment because of lack of evidence.

  Outraged that he had been “led astray … by the executive branch of our government,” Judge James A. Parker freed the sixty-one-year-old Lee on September 13, 2000. The judge said his jailing “embarrassed our entire nation and each of us who is a citizen of it.” Sobs could be heard coming from Lee’s friends and family.

  Lee pleaded guilty to a single felony count of illegally gathering and retaining national security data. He agreed to a sentence of time served and to sixty hours of debriefing under oath.

  Freeh also was responsible for the problems with the case of Richard Jewell. When a pipe bomb exploded during the Olympics at Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta on July 27, 1996, the FBI became interested in Jewell, a security guard who had alerted police to a suspicious green backpack just before one in the morning. Jewell appeared on TV to describe how he tried to help evacuate the area after the bombing, which killed two and injured 111.

  Three days later, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, citing unnamed sources, published a story saying Jewell was a suspect in the FBI’s investigation. The story pointed out that sometimes those who claim to be heroes at crime scenes are the perpetrators.

  Because of the story, the FBI decided to speed up its timetable for interviewing Jewell. That afternoon, agents Don Johnson and Diader Rosario drove to Jewell’s apartment and asked him if he would come into the field office. If Jewell could clear up questions to the agents’ satisfaction, they planned to drop their interest in him.

  Jewell agreed and followed the agents to the field office in his car. An hour and fifteen minutes into the interview, the agents were still reviewing Jewell’s background with him when Freeh called David W. “Woody” Johnson Jr., the FBI’s SAC in Atlanta. Johnson was in his office down the hall from the room where Jewell was being questioned. With him were other SACs and Kent B. Alexander, the U.S. attorney.

  Freeh said the agents should read Jewell his rights.

  Any agent fresh out of the FBI Academy at Quantico knows that, under a long line of court rulings, a suspect must be read his Miranda rights if he is in custody or is about to be arrested. In Jewell’s case, neither was true.

  Johnson pointed this out to Freeh, and Alexander told Freeh on the speakerphone he agreed with Johnson. But the director was adamant.

  Woody Johnson walked down the hallway and pulled out the two agents who were successfully interviewing Jewell and passed along Freeh’s instruction. The agents went back to the conference room and read Jewell his rights. Jewell said he would like to call an attorney, and that ended the interview.

  “If we could have continued with Jewell, we could have confirmed what he told us and cleared him more quickly,” Woody Johnson says.

  Three months later, the FBI cleared Jewell, as it could have done immediately if Freeh had not intervened. In the meantime, Jewell’s reputation had been besmirched. Eventually Eric Robert Rudolph, a fugitive, was charged with the bombing.

  When Eugene F. Glenn, head of the FBI’s field office in Salt Lake City, complained that the bureau’s inquiry into the Ruby Ridge fiasco amounted to a cover-up, Freeh’s general counsel, Howard M. Shapiro, responded that to raise such charges was “absolutely irresponsible and destructive to the FBI.” That was the mentality that had pervaded the bureau under J. Edgar Hoover.

  Freeh’s one positive contribution was expanding the FBI’s presence overseas. Having prosecuted a major FBI Mafia case called the “Pizza Connection,” Freeh recognized how global crime had become. By the time Freeh left, the FBI had forty-four overseas field offices, called legal attaché offices or legats, from Moscow and Panama City to Nairobi and Islamabad, compared with twenty when Freeh took over. It now has seventy-five legats or suboffices of legats. Freeh pushed the expansion despite opposition from some bureau officials who could not comprehend the need for an expanding presence overseas.

  But because of Freeh’s monumental missteps, it seemed the agency that Hoover had so lovingly created was self-destructing. Almost every six months, a new debacle erupted. By imposing his will in areas he knew little about, Freeh disrupted the normal deliberative processes within the FBI. His emphasis was on making himself look good in the short run. In the long term, that approach damaged the credibility and reputation of the FBI and had a far more disastrous impact on the bureau than Sessions’ abuses.

  15

  CATCHING HANSSEN

  IN THE MOVIE BREACH, AN FBI SUPERVISOR TELLS RYAN Phillippe, who portrays FBI support employee Eric O’Neill, “That was the worst spy in American history you just brought down.”

  But the real-life version of how the FBI uncovered Robert Hanssen, the agent who was the spy in its midst, is quite different and has never previously come out.

  Since 1986, the FBI had been trying to uncover a mole in the U.S. intelligence community. As one asset after another was arrested and executed by the KGB, both the FBI and CIA became convinced that the KGB had a high-ranking source whose revelations were leading to the compromise of American agents.

  The arrest of CIA officer Aldrich Ames in 1994 explained many of the roll-ups. He is blamed for the deaths of at least nine U.S. agents in the Soviet Union and for disclosing American counterintelligence techniques. But some of the compromises remained mysteries. The suspicion that another spy was giving up American assets became a certainty after the FBI began looking into whether American diplomat Felix Bloch was working for the Soviets.

  A longtime State Department employee, Bloch was deputy chief of mission in Vienna until 1987. In Paris, French counterintelligence officers conducting surveillance of Reino Gikman, a KGB officer, photographed Gikman having a drink with Bloch in the bar of the Hôtel Meurice on the rue de Rivoli on May 14, 1989. After downing whiskeys, Bloch and Gikman had dinner together in the hotel’s dark-paneled restaurant. At the end of their meal, Gikman walked off with a black carry-on bag, which Bloch had left under their table. They met again in Brussels on May 28. Meanwhile, French intelligence authorities informed the FBI of the meetings.

  On June 22, a man phoned Bloch and said he was calling on behalf of Pierre, the code name Gikman used with Bloch. In the intercepted conversation, the man cryptically told Bloch that Pierre could not see him in the near future because he was sick. “A contagious disease is suspected,” he said. “I am worried about you. You have to take care of yourself.” The warning meant that the KGB knew that Western intelligence agencies were aware of Bloch’s relationship with the Soviet spy agency.

  In November 1994, the FBI began a determined effort to uncover the spy who tipped off the KGB that Bloch’s contact with Gikman had been detected and who gave up other assets to the Soviets. Called Graysuit, the operation consisted of sixteen senior FBI agents under the supervision of agent Mike Rochford, who led an undercover FBI counterintelligence operation and later headed the FBI’s espionage section. In the end, it would be Rochford himself who recruited the Russian intelligence officer who gave up Hanssen and solved the case.

  To do that, Rochford had to develop trust. Professorial-looking, Rochford talks softly. You don’
t quickly trust someone whose features are too regular or whose hair is parted just so. Rochford’s face is slightly off balance. His salt-and-pepper hair is hopelessly flyaway. His silver-rimmed glasses slip down his nose, and so he can see you, he lowers his head, another habit that makes him seem deferential and therefore more trustworthy. Looking over his glasses with his soft blue eyes, he quietly says, “Uh-huh,” projecting sincerity and making his companion want to spill his guts.

  Relating the story of how Hanssen was uncovered for the first time, Rochford says, “I started a squad up, and I didn’t tell the people I wanted to join it. Instead, I was told I could take anyone I wanted, so I went around and identified the folks I wanted. All of a sudden they get these strange calls from the polygraph unit asking them to show up. They would take a polygraph test, and if they passed, the next person they saw was me. I had some of the best talent in the bureau in espionage matters.”

  Nearly all espionage cases have been solved because someone brings in a tip. Lacking that, Rochford developed a matrix of fifty-eight items that matched the spy he was looking for. Among the items was the fact that the “unsub” or unidentified subject, had the ability to give the KGB and later the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) reports on weekly meetings of the CIA’s counterintelligence center. The spy knew about the FBI’s investigation of Felix Bloch. He had access to highly classified technical penetrations of Soviet and later Russian establishments. He knew the identities of KGB officers who were spying for the CIA.

  The CIA controlled nearly all the operations that had been compromised. This mistakenly led both the FBI and CIA to assume that the spy came from that agency. Beginning with 235 unsubs, the squad narrowed the list of possible spies to thirty-five, then sixteen, then eight, and finally one. He was CIA officer Brian Kelley, who had access to most of the programs that had been compromised. He had led the effort within the CIA to investigate Bloch. By coincidence, he lived near Hanssen.