by Tim Weiner
“He came to believe that I was trying to undo his presidency,” Freeh wrote in a memoir. The director soon regretted accepting his appointment at the FBI. But he would not leave for fear that the president would replace him with a political hack.
Freeh knew the estrangement undermined the FBI. “The lost resources and lost time alone were monumental,” he wrote. “So much that should have been straightforward became problematic in the extreme.” But he felt compelled to keep a distance from the president. It deepened as the years went by. It became a danger to the United States.
“One of the greatest flaws that our government now faces,” warned James Steinberg, the deputy national security adviser, was an FBI that stood in silence and isolation, “totally disconnected from the president or the White House.”
The chief counterterrorism aides at the National Security Council, Steven Simon and Daniel Benjamin, found Freeh “extraordinarily unresponsive” to their growing fears of a terrorist attack. “His mistrust of the White House grew so strong that it seems to have blinded him,” they wrote. But they knew that Clinton could do nothing about it: “The one remedy available to the President by law, dismissing Freeh, was a political impossibility. A chief executive who was being investigated by the FBI could not fire the FBI director: it would be another Saturday Night Massacre, the second coming of Richard Nixon.”
Freeh, who had finished law school in the final months of the Watergate scandal, came to conclude that Clinton was worse than Nixon. The director’s sense of virtue, highly developed since his days as an altar boy, served as a cleansing force after the reign of Judge Sessions, and his reverence for the Bureau, rooted in his six years as a street agent, ran deep. But they did not sanctify the FBI. His cultivation of Congress brought the Bureau a billion-dollar budget increase and thousands of new agents. But it did not make the FBI a more powerful institution of government. Freeh was personally incorruptible. But the FBI was not.
Freeh infuriated the White House almost every day for more than seven years. One case among many was the FBI’s immense investigation into allegations that China’s intelligence services had bought political influence at the White House through illegal campaign contributions. When President Clinton expressed disbelief at the allegations, Freeh responded that the White House was lying.
The Bureau spent far more time and energy on the case than it did on any terrorism investigation during the Clinton years. It brought several criminal charges against Chinese contributors, some of whom were influence peddlers without particular ideologies or politics. But Freeh’s FBI managed to bury the fact that its most highly valued source on Chinese espionage in the United States, a politically wired California woman named Katrina Leung, had been spying for China throughout the 1980s and 1990s. All the while, she was having sex with the special agent in charge of her case, a top supervisor of the FBI’s China Squad, James J. Smith—and occasionally with a leading FBI counterintelligence expert on China, William Cleveland. The Bureau paid Leung more than $1.7 million for her work as an intelligence asset.
The FBI suspected for the better part of a decade that Leung was a double agent. But no one wanted to embarrass the Bureau. The case festered for years. Not until after Freeh’s departure was it clear that the Chinese, Russian, and Cuban intelligence services all had penetrated the FBI in the 1990s.
So had a member of the world’s most dangerous and least-known terrorist organization. His name was Ali Mohamed. Al-Qaeda had a double agent posing as an informer for the FBI.
“MAKE THE AMERICAN PEOPLE SUFFER”
The United States did not suffer a single terrorist attack, foreign or domestic, in 1994. But the threat of a catastrophic blow against the nation became part of the everyday life of the FBI at the start of 1995.
“Merely solving this type of crime is not enough,” Freeh told Congress in a written statement at the time. “It is equally important that the FBI thwart terrorism before such acts can be perpetrated.” But without intelligence, the Bureau would have to depend on blind luck and shoe leather.
On the night of January 6, 1995, Ramzi Yousef, the architect of the World Trade Center bomb, was in a sixth-floor apartment in Manila, the capital of the Philippines, cooking chemicals with his colleague Abdul Hakim Murad. At about 10:45 P.M., a security guard saw the two men running downstairs, carrying their shoes. Smoke poured from their apartment window. Murad was arrested, but Yousef escaped and caught a flight out of Manila.
The police searched the apartment and found a smoldering bomb factory—chemicals, timers, batteries, fuses—along with documents and a laptop computer. The data, locked in encrypted files, took many days to decode and decipher. But they confirmed Murad’s confession to the most ambitious plot in the annals of international terrorism.
The Manila plan was code-named Bojinka. Yousef and five of his allies intended to place sophisticated time bombs aboard a dozen 747s—United, Delta, and Northwest flights bound for the United States from Manila, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Bangkok, and Taipei. Each man would board a flight, leave on its first stopover, and catch another connection. A few hours later, the bombs would bring down the 747s over the Pacific. If the flights were full and the plot went off as planned, roughly 3,500 people would die over the course of a day, as the bombs exploded one by one.
The United States announced a $2 million reward for information leading to the arrest of Yousef. Three weeks later, one of his cohorts cashed in.
On February 7, the Pakistani military intelligence service, in the company of a handful of armed State Department security officers, arrested Yousef at a bed-and-breakfast not far from the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad. The next day, three FBI agents flew him back to the United States. On the plane, Yousef proudly claimed credit for the World Trade Center bombing. Lew Schiliro, the FBI’s top agent in New York, met the flight and escorted a blindfolded Yousef onto a helicopter. They were headed for the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan.
The night was clear and cold. The helicopter banked over New York Harbor. “We allowed him to remove the blindfold,” Schiliro remembered. “He focused his eyes as the helicopter was adjacent to the World Trade Center. One of the agents that was onboard the helicopter said to Mr. Yousef that the World Trade Center was still standing. And in no uncertain terms, Yousef’s response was ‘It would not have been, had we had more money.’ ”
On March 20, a millennial Japanese cult called Aum Shinrikyo, led by a blind guru claiming to be Jesus Christ incarnate, released vials of homemade nerve gas inside five subway cars in Toyko. Fifteen people were killed, dozens blinded, and thousands injured. Aum Shinrikyo had thousands of members, controlled tens of millions of dollars, and already had conducted attempts at mass murder using anthrax and botulism. But not a single American intelligence officer knew anything about the cult.
On April 12, the police in Manila turned Abdul Hakim Murad over to FBI special agents Frank Pellegrino and Tom Donlon. Their captive spoke freely to the agents as they flew to Alaska, refueled, and took off for New York. He was a Kuwaiti who had attended two flight schools in the United States; he had dreamed of hijacking a plane in Washington and crashing it into the headquarters of the CIA. Murad told the FBI agents that he had been working on the Bojinka plot with Ramzi Yousef for six months. He said the goal was “to make the American people and the American government suffer” for the foreign policy of the United States in the Middle East.
On April 19, a rented Ryder truck loaded with 4,800 pounds of fuel oil and ammonium nitrate blew up the nine-story federal government headquarters in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Terrorism experts on television immediately blamed the attack on Islamic fundamentalists. But the perpetrator was a patriotic American. A right-wing militant named Timothy McVeigh had chosen the second anniversary of the Branch Davidian disaster in Texas to attack an outpost of the government of the United States. A highway patrolman arrested McVeigh ninety minutes after the explosion. He was speeding down the interstate with a gun in his g
love box and no license plates on his car. The FBI found the axle of his rented truck, with its telltale vehicle identification number, two blocks from the blast. The evidence was ironclad within two days, though the FBI relentlessly conducted twenty-five thousand interviews over the next two years. The Oklahoma City bombing was by far the deadliest terrorist attack in the history of the United States. The explosion killed 168 people and wounded 850.
On April 24, the president of the California Forestry Association, the timber industry lobbying group, was killed by a bomb inside a package mailed to his office. It was the latest of sixteen deadly attacks attributed by the FBI to an unknown suspect. The investigation—called UNABOM because the first targets were universities and airlines—had been going on for seventeen years.
This eleven-week barrage of bombs and plots seemed disconnected—a madman in the Midwest, a millennial cult in Japan, a jihad cell in Manila. But there were patterns in it. Bomb throwers once wanted to create political theater. Now they wanted to burn the theater down. Terrorism once had been a game of nations. Now it was starting to look like a global gang war.
Terrorism was in a state of transformation. Counterterrorism was not.
After the Manila bomb plot was discovered, President Clinton sought a dramatic expansion of the FBI’s wiretapping and surveillance powers. The most conservative Congress in twenty years stopped him. Congress stripped the bill of its major statutes—and revived them all six years later in the Patriot Act.
Months of haggling left only three meaningful measures. The new legislation controlled the sale of explosives. It created secret trial procedures for terrorism suspects. And it gave the president a green light to “disrupt, dismantle and destroy international infrastructures used by international terrorists.” International infrastructures was political language. The intent of the law was clear: destroy the terrorists. But first the United States had to find them.
On June 21, 1995, Clinton signed a secret order intended to create a new regime of American counterterrorism. He placed the FBI at its pinnacle. How this could work when the president and the FBI director would not speak was left, like so much else, unsaid.
“We will not allow terrorism to succeed,” Presidential Decision Directive 39 (PDD 39) began. “Through our law-enforcement efforts, we shall make clear that there is no higher priority than the pursuit, arrest, and prosecution of terrorists.”
PDD 39 placed the FBI in charge of detecting hidden arsenals of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons with “robust and rapidly deployable counterterrorism teams.” Hoover had started worrying about that threat nearly fifty years before. The FBI had fewer than five agents dedicated to weapons of mass destruction in 1995. Attorney General Reno immediately asked Congress for 175 more. She got them.
The directive made the rendition of terrorist suspects—kidnapping them abroad and bringing them to trial—“a matter of the highest priority” for the FBI. Rendition had been used rarely, and with fanfare, under Presidents Reagan and Bush in the past decade. It would become a commonplace under Clinton, but carried out in secret.
The president told the Bureau to “collect, analyze and disseminate intelligence on terrorist groups and on activities of international terrorists in the United States.” That order had no real precedent. The FBI could gather intelligence well enough. But it had no capacity to analyze it. It lacked three essential elements: it did not have the people, it did not have the computers, and it did not have the time.
The directive contained one hurdle still higher: “The Directors of Central Intelligence and FBI together shall personally ensure that their Agencies achieve maximum cooperation regarding terrorism,” it said. “The CIA and FBI shall ensure timely exchanges of terrorist information.” They had to share intelligence. They had to talk to one another. They had to work together.
The task of enforcing this shotgun wedding fell to one of the authors of the presidential directive, the intelligence director of the National Security Council, a cigar-chomping, tightly wound, forty-two-year-old staff man named George J. Tenet. On July 3, 1995, twelve days after the president signed the order, Tenet took office as the deputy director of Central Intelligence. He ran the CIA from day to day, and he continued to run it for the next nine years. He soon became the acting director, then the director, and Louis Freeh swore him in at his ascension.
Forging links with the FBI was one of the many seemingly impossible missions Tenet faced. He thought he could make it happen. He started by making friends with Freeh. Tenet’s parents ran a Greek diner in Queens. Freeh’s father had been a trucking company dispatcher in Brooklyn. The two men got along; they trusted each other. Maybe the FBI and the CIA could get along as well.
They decided to trade counterterrorism chiefs. Four senior FBI agents were seconded to the Agency; four CIA officers were deputized at the Bureau. The swap became known as the hostage exchange program. Almost no one volunteered.
Dale Watson, the FBI assistant special agent in charge in Kansas City, was selected as the first hostage. He was informed that he would become the number-two man at the CIA’s new counterterrorism center. He was as qualified as anyone: he had worked the Oklahoma City bombing as well as the Bureau’s counterintelligence operations against Iranian spies. Watson weighed the chances of success and decided to stay in Kansas City. He said no twice. The third time was an order. He would rise in two years’ time to become the FBI’s counterterrorist in chief.
Watson learned quickly on his new assignment that the Bureau and the Agency could perform remarkable feats of detection together. What to do with the intelligence they gathered was another question.
The FBI had obtained Ramzi Yousef’s address book from the police in the Philippines. Tracing the names and telephone numbers in the book, the Bureau discovered that a man in the emirate of Qatar using the name Khalid Sheikh had sent a $660 wire transfer to one of the World Trade Center bombers only days before the attack. The CIA learned five facts about the man in Qatar. He worked as a government engineer. He was Ramzi Yousef’s uncle. He was deeply involved in the plot to blow up 747s. He had been associated with al-Qaeda and its affiliates for seven years. His full name was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
A sealed and secret indictment against him was handed up by a federal grand jury in New York at the start of 1996. The CIA and the FBI located him in Doha, the capital of Qatar, a nation newly allied with the American military. They conferred in secret with the American ambassador, Patrick Theros, who had been the State Department’s counterterrorism deputy. Together they decided to ask the emir of Qatar for his help in hunting down Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The emir stalled. One of his ministers sent word to the suspect that the Americans were after him. Fleeing to a remote province of Pakistan, beyond the reach of American intelligence and law enforcement, and then across the border to Afghanistan, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed began working with al-Qaeda on a plan to finish what the World Trade Center bombers had started.
Watson came to understand that terrorists in the most remote nations on earth could strike the United States at will, attacking embassies, military bases, and other symbols of American power. The FBI as constituted could not dismantle or destroy them. It would have to be remade for that mission.
The Bureau had received hundreds of millions of dollars in extra funds from Congress to hire hundreds of new agents and intelligence analysts for the war on terror. Freeh doubled the number of his overseas legal attachés, creating an FBI presence in nations like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. He met with dozens of kings, princes, emirs, and other heads of state in his effort to create a worldwide intelligence service. The FBI now had unquestioned authority to take the lead when terrorists killed Americans abroad. Freeh himself took command of the investigation of the bombing of Khobar Towers in Dhahran, on the edge of the Persian Gulf in Saudi Arabia, on June 25, 1996.
Nineteen American military personnel had been killed, and 372 injured, when a tanker truck packed with explosives destroyed the eight-story Khobar T
owers housing complex. The bomb was slightly bigger than the one in Oklahoma City. The dead were members of the 4404th Fighter Wing, which patrolled the skies over Iraq, enforcing a no-fly zone from the King Abdul Aziz Airbase.
Freeh dispatched hundreds of agents and forensics experts to Dhahran, and he personally went with them. He remembered them sifting through tons of debris in the blazing heat, “exhausted, many sick and dehydrated, working until they literally dropped, in some cases, down on their knees, digging with their fingers,” sorting bits of human flesh and bone.
Freeh became obsessed with the case. Thirteen Saudis were implicated, but Freeh surmised, through circumstantial evidence, that the government of Iran was behind the bombing. He thought the case against Iran could be made in court. He also thought that he could flatter and cajole Saudi princes into sharing criminal evidence and, ultimately, handing over the suspects. When his charm offensive failed, he lashed out—first at the royal family, then at the president. Freeh became convinced that Clinton lacked the political will and the moral force to avenge the Americans killed at Khobar. He thought the United States should retaliate against Iran for an act of war. He pushed the case with a passionate and personal devotion for five years. But he was almost alone in his judgments. He did not persuade the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon, or the Justice Department to punish Iran’s mullahs or the Iranian military. Freeh was forced to conclude that “Khobar represented a national security threat far beyond the capability or authority of the FBI.”
While Freeh haggled with Saudi princes, the FBI opened a criminal case against the Saudi pariah Osama bin Laden in September 1996. He had been described in the CIA’s files up until then as a wealthy financier who bankrolled terrorism. But days before, bin Laden had issued his first declaration of war against the United States. In a message from Afghanistan, published by an Arabic-language newspaper in London, he had praised the Khobar bombing and warned America to withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia.
