The Secrets of the FBI

by Ronald Kessler

  Babar pled guilty to five counts of providing, and conspiring to provide, money and supplies to al Qaeda terrorists fighting in Afghanistan against U.S. international forces. In March 2006, Babar testified against the men accused of plotting bomb attacks in London in March 2004, a plot rolled up in what was known as Operation Crevice. Because of what prosecutors called his “extraordinary” cooperation with the FBI, he was released from prison in December 2010.

  22

  ARMED AND DANGEROUS

  THE FBI ACADEMY SITS ON 547 ACRES OF LAND OFF I-95 IN Quantico, Virginia. Pink and white begonias bloom beside the tree-lined entrance road and around the pleasant campus of twenty-one tan brick buildings. In the shade of a passageway between buildings, a tiny spotted baby doe awaits its mother’s return.

  From a rise just beyond the parking lots, volleys of gunfire ring out like the sound of a firing squad. No one flinches. Trainees and staff walk purposefully through the 9/11 Memorial Courtyard, inured to the barrages coming from firearms training at the range. At the FBI Academy, the sound of bullets is as common as birdsong.

  On the wall in the leadership development corridor, a hand-lettered sign offers a gentle reminder: “Be kinder than necessary, for everyone you meet is fighting some kind of a battle.”

  Going back to the Hoover era, that has been the FBI’s approach: treat suspects with respect, then lock them up. But Hoover would not recognize today’s academy and its twenty-week training program that turns ordinary men and women into FBI agents.

  As one of his first acts, Robert Mueller ordered a training program for analysts at the academy and more training in data mining and leadership. In 2008, he created the FBI School of Intelligence, where “prevention” is the watchword. Trainees are taught the importance of “not only knowing what we know but knowing what we don’t know,” says agent Jeffrey Mazanec. “It’s knowing what you don’t know so you can collect against it. We have to be proactive; we don’t have the privilege of reacting.”

  Each year, seventy thousand apply to be new agents. Fewer than a thousand are accepted and graduate from the training program. The average age is thirty, and for most, this is a second career. Most of the trainees have law degrees or other advanced degrees.

  While in training, new agents live in dormitories. They are taught how to arrest the bad guys in a fake little town with an alarming crime rate. It’s known as Hogan’s Alley, where the sign “Hogan’s Alley Have a Nice Day” welcomes unsuspecting visitors.

  A big feature is the Bank of Hogan, which has the reputation, unproven, of being the most held-up bank in America. If the bank is not robbed twice a week, it could go out of business. And there’s a mailbox. It is sealed shut because people used to deposit their mail, and since it’s a fake town, no mail carrier would ever pick it up. Still, with all the shoot-’em-ups going on around it, you might well expect a dead letter box.

  Visitors pass the Tall Pines area, a park named for the bureau’s first encounter with the notorious bank robber John Dillinger in 1934. While agents surrounded Little Bohemia Lodge in Wisconsin, where he was staying, Dillinger escaped through the tall pines. But three months later, special agents Clarence Hurt and Charles Winstead shot and killed Dillinger on July 22, 1934, in front of Chicago’s Biograph Theater. At the Biograph replica in Hogan’s Alley, the marquee always advertises “Manhattan Melodrama” with Clark Gable and Myrna Loy. The show never closes because it was the last movie Dillinger ever watched.

  In this mockup of a little town, there’s also a handful of faux boutiques and bars, a deli that sells real sandwiches, and Pollitt’s Computer Repair Center. The slogan painted on the store window speaks to all computer-plagued passersby: “It Is What It Is.”

  At the moment, explains John Wilson, the mayor of Hogan’s Alley, also known as the practical applications manager, an extortion money drop is happening at the motel. Trainees are expected to take down the bad guys. The suspects are armed and dangerous. Tires screech, sirens wail. Crime scenarios are staged all day long in Hogan’s Alley, and many of them conclude at the motel, where instructors and a legal expert evaluate agent trainees on how they respond.

  Hogan’s Alley is growing, now sprawling over seven acres, as evidenced by the three tactical houses recently built on Memorial Drive. At 102 Memorial Drive, a matronly white-haired woman sits on a sofa in the living room and leafs through a pile of magazines. Polly Raines, an actor hired by the FBI, leans back with a Mona Lisa smile. She has been handcuffed and shot at. She says her husband also role-plays, and she shares with her visitors that “he’s a bad guy today. He has been arrested thousands of times.”

  Around the corner is the big motel where no one ever checks in or out and guests don’t have to check their guns. As the extortion money scenario wraps up, shots are fired and a ne’er-do-well collapses outside his room. The blue weapons that the trainees carry shoot blanks, but the acting is good.

  Another bad guy yells, “Somebody call an ambulance!” The trainees ignore him. Could be a diversionary tactic. Meanwhile, lying facedown on the concrete, the ne’er-do-well doesn’t move. His friend yells again: “Get a f—— ambulance!” No ambulance arrives. The scenario ends in arrests, then evaluations begin.

  Meanwhile, over at the Tactical and Emergency Vehicle Operations Center, agent Stanley Switala, wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses, shows off how agents are trained to drive through rough terrain. As he starts out driving in a 4 × 4 all-terrain Jeep Grand Cherokee Laredo on a strip of grass, you realize this isn’t going to be any ordinary ride in the country. When he mentions “front end swing” and “rear wheel cheat,” he’s talking not about infidelity but about the ins and outs of tight turns.

  Switala drives up a twenty-five-degree slope into a woodland, where young elm, maple, oak, tulip poplar, beech, and pine trees crowd the muddy tracks of the off-road course, which stretches more than a mile. This is what Switala calls “tight quarters driving,” where “you realize the four corners of the vehicle.” There’s no breathing room on either side, but he negotiates it as though he does it every day, which he probably does.

  “In the woods, your depth perception is off,” because of all the trees and the sunlight’s dappling effect at certain times of day, he says. “I find it’s even better without my sunglasses on off-roading,” he says as he turns sharply at a trail marker.

  He talks about the bridge he is crossing, made of poles. You look back behind you, and it is literally two poles, one for each tire. The gentle ride under the green canopy turns into a stomach churner, up hillsides at a cockeyed angle, like the breathless climb on a roller-coaster before it plummets.

  The off-road training is for tactical units like the Hostage Rescue Team and SWAT teams, but all agent trainees must drive an obstacle course with FBI sedans. This obstacle course is a giant playground dotted with orange cones close together in serpentine lines. Every cone knocked down costs the trainee a deduction of 5 points from a starting score of 100. Passing is 75. Another exercise requires trainees to drive the same course of tight turns with a Bu-car in reverse the whole time.

  Trainees must also pass collision avoidance, where the trainee is supposed to drive safely while reading maps, getting questioned over the radio, and looking out the window to identify characteristics of a bad guy—actually a mannequin—on the street.

  Inside a classroom that houses the Firearms Training Simulator, trainees watch different arrest scenarios on a large screen. As the interactive video plays on the screen, the agent trainees act as though they’re in the scenario, making life-or-death decisions in a situation that is quickly unraveling. They are ready to shoot their digital pistol if necessary. Is a suspect going for a gun or a cell phone? Trainees don’t have to know for sure, but they have to have a reasonable belief before they fire. They can’t wait until the bad guy shoots them.

  For future agents, the Firearms Training Simulator is stress inoculation: to keep your head when others are losing theirs. Beware the sympathetic refle
x—keep your finger off the trigger until you’re ready to fire. And if you must fire, go for the center mass or head shot.

  And watch out for “Tina,” a tricky scenario where the suspect on the big screen is a woman in a plaid shirt and jeans working in a warehouse. You and another agent are attempting to question her. As her anger grows, she knocks down your partner and comes at you with a karate kick. It’s too late for talk. To your surprise, she takes your service weapon and shoots you.

  “We use deadly force to eliminate an imminent threat,” agent Jonathan Rudd says. “We continue application of force as the threat continues. We don’t fire warning shots, we don’t shoot to disable. Shooting at the chest area gives you the best chance for incapacitating. Just because we shoot someone in this center mass area doesn’t mean it’s going to kill them.”

  Along with physical and firearms training, recruits are schooled in ethics.

  “When you mow the lawn, you’re still the FBI,” as agent James T. Reese puts it. Agents may be asked by neighbors to intervene in situations they should avoid. “You should tell them to call the police,” Reese says. “What you do is give them a logical explanation for why we are not Batman.”

  The training program uses role players to teach trainees how to conduct interviews. Secretaries, agents, and cooks are enlisted to play the bad guy—or gal. But until Hogan’s Alley was built in 1987, trainees chased FBI agents who posed as criminals at the academy. One day, Vincent P. Doherty, then the academy’s feisty comptroller, was showing the facilities to official guests. Doherty happened to match a description given to a training class of the perpetrator of a bank fraud. A trainee spotted Doherty and gave the usual warning: “Freeze, FBI!”

  Saying he was giving a tour, Doherty said, “Get lost.”

  Whereupon she flipped Doherty, who found himself lying on the carpet.

  About 2 percent of agent trainees flunk out, are kicked out for rules infractions, or decide being an agent is not for them. Often that’s because they recognize that they may have to take another human life, and they simply cannot ever see themselves doing that.

  Recently a trainee was kicked out because he was arrested for driving while intoxicated while attending training. When he was assistant director over training, James D. McKenzie was walking through the academy when he saw a trainee buy a candy bar from a vending machine, rip it open, throw away the candy, and eat the wrapping. McKenzie called him into his office.

  “I was walking down this hall, and I saw you buy a candy bar, throw the candy bar away, and eat the paper,” he said to the trainee.

  “Yes,” the man said.

  “What did you do that for?”

  The trainee said that when he was a small child, his parents would not let him have candy in his room, so he would sneak it. “I would eat the candy, and then I would eat the paper so there wouldn’t be any evidence. After a while, I started to like the paper,” he told McKenzie.

  “Now, can you imagine this guy being an FBI agent?” McKenzie says. “This guy is out on a surveillance and gets hungry and eats the surveillance log. The guy is a couple of bubbles off center. Naturally, people like that don’t become FBI agents. He resigned based on that.”

  At the end of their training, newly minted agents are issued the .40-caliber Glock 23 they have trained on, along with a Colt M4 carbine, a Remington 870 12-gauge shotgun, and a Heckler & Koch MP5 10-millimeter submachine gun.

  “This is actually a calling I felt since undergraduate days,” says Ryan, a trainee from Indianapolis who is about to graduate. “This is something that I feel will make a difference, by helping to protect America.”

  23

  PREACHING JIHAD

  AS THE AGENT IN CHARGE OF COUNTERTERRORISM, ART Cummings, backed by Mueller, put out the word that no lead would be overlooked. Prior to 9/11, if an email came in saying that somebody was going to bomb the Sears Tower, “we would’ve looked at it and said, ‘This is just not realistic,’ ” Cummings says. “Now we begin knocking on every door. A lead may seem to be 99 percent absolute garbage. But we have no tolerance for the one-tenth of 1 percent. That could get somebody killed.”

  Hundreds of leads came in about Arab men acting suspiciously—talking in a bar about a terrorist operation, for example.

  “Now, is it realistic that Arab men, speaking English, drinking beer, would talk in public about an operation where people can overhear them?” Cummings asks. “I’d love to be able to say, ‘No, sorry, nothing’s going on in there.’ But maybe, just maybe, someone had a foolish moment, talked about something they were actually planning. No way would most of our counterparts go out on that. It may or may not make us better. Makes us busier. Because none of those kinds of leads has panned out.”

  Still, even as critics called the FBI broken and its agents dumb cops, the bureau began rolling up terrorists every few months. Cummings found that jihadists who were simply inspired by bin Laden rather than controlled by him were becoming more common. For example, Ali Al-Timimi, a spiritual leader at a mosque in northern Virginia, encouraged other individuals at a meeting to go to Pakistan to receive military training from Lashkar-e-Taiba, a designated foreign terrorist organization, in order to fight U.S. troops in Afghanistan. When they returned to the United States, the FBI had them under surveillance.

  On September 13, 2002, the FBI arrested five more homegrown terrorists in Lackawanna, New York, for providing material support to al Qaeda. A sixth man was rendered from Bahrain. The case began with an anonymous letter to the FBI, followed by the development of a source within the group, which professed to support bin Laden.

  The men were U.S. citizens of Yemeni descent who lived in a tight-knit rural community. The group flew to Afghanistan in the summer of 2001 to train at Osama bin Laden’s al-Farouq jihad camp. There, they studied how to make explosives, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, land mines, and other military equipment.

  Nobody suspected them of terrorist activities. Indeed, Yasein Taher had been voted the friendliest person in his 1996 high school graduating class. A former captain of the high school soccer team, he married his high school sweetheart, a former cheerleader. Another of the men arrested, Sahim Alwan, was a counselor at the Iroquois Job Center in Medina, New York.

  “There was a lot of rhetoric, but you know rhetoric’s rhetoric,” Cummings says. “Jihadi bravado, we call it. But in terms of law enforcement, jihadi bravado doesn’t get you anywhere other than show someone thinks that way. But that does give us enough predication to take a look at them.” As the FBI began investigating further, however, the bureau found that they were deadly serious.

  “They really wanted to do something,” Cummings says. “They went to training camps overseas, they came back, they lived in very, very austere conditions, lived in trailers. But they were second-generation Americans.”

  In March 2003, the suspects all agreed to plead guilty and cooperate with the FBI. They were sentenced to prison terms ranging from eight to ten years.

  While the writer of the letter tipping off the FBI to the Lackawanna case never came forward, he clearly was a Muslim who was a friend or family member of the terrorists. In another case of a Muslim providing leads to the FBI, the father of Mohamed Osman Mohamud tipped off the FBI to his son’s extremist proclivities. It turned out the son intended to wage violent jihad by blowing up a 2010 Christmas celebration in Portland, Oregon.

  The FBI has outreach programs to try to develop sources in the Muslim community and solicit tips, but Cummings has found little receptivity. He found that while Muslims have brought some cases to the FBI, Muslim leaders in particular are often in denial about the fact that the terrorists who threaten the United States are Muslims.

  “I had this discussion with the director of a very prominent Muslim organization here in D.C.,” Cummings says. “And he said, ‘Why are you guys always looking at the Muslim community?’ ”

  Cummings began laughing.

  “Okay, you know what I’ll do?” Cummings sa
id. “I’ll start an Irish squad, or how about a Japanese squad? You want me to waste my time and your taxpayer’s dollars going to look at the Irish? They’re not killing Americans. Right now, I’m going to put my money and my people in a place where the threat is.”

  Then Cummings told him to take a look at the cells the FBI had rolled up in the United States.

  “I can name the homegrown cells, all of whom are Muslim, all of whom were seeking to murder Americans,” Cummings said. “It’s not the Irish, it’s not the French, it’s not the Catholics, it’s not the Protestants, it’s the Muslims.”

  In response to such points, Muslim groups have told him he is rough around the edges.

  “I’m not rough around the edges,” Cummings tells them. “You’re just not used to straight talk.”

  They respond by getting angry at him.

  While Muslims will occasionally condemn al Qaeda, “rarely do we have them coming to us and saying, ‘There are three guys in the community that we’re very concerned about,’ ” Cummings says. “They want to fix it inside the community. They’re a closed group, a very, very closed group. It’s part of their culture that they want to settle the problem within their own communities. They’ve actually said that to us, which I then go crazy over.”

  On one hand, “they don’t want anyone to know they have extremists in their community,” Cummings says. “Well, beautiful. Except do you read the newspapers? Everyone already knows it. That horse has left the barn. So there’s a lot of talk about engagement, but realistically, we’ve got a long, long way to go.”

  At one meeting, a Muslim group suggested having a photo taken of their members with Bob Mueller to show their community isn’t a bunch of terrorists and that they are partners in the war on terror.

  Cummings responded, “Let me make a suggestion: When you bring to my attention real extremists who are here to plan and do something, who are here supporting terrorism, and I work that based on your information, then I promise you, I will have the director stand up on the stage with you.”