The Threat

by Andrew G. McCabe

  This book will tell how some of these investigations have worked, in a way that is faithful to both aspects of investigation I mentioned above: exploratory and procedural, open-ended and exacting, driven by individual curiosity and executed to the institution’s strict legal standards. I will tell the human story of how it looked and felt and smelled to do the work I did, alongside the men and women I have been honored to work with. I will also highlight a few specific elements of how we work as an institution that, in my view, more citizens should be aware of: the FBI’s investigative techniques; the way it gathers and presents intelligence; and the set of ironclad authorities on which FBI investigations are based.

  It is a point of urgency for Americans to understand what the FBI really does, and why it matters, so that the citizens of this country can join together for the common good, to protect our common interests and our common concerns against very real and rising threats by those in foreign governments, and in our own, who intend to unravel the rule of law in the United States.

  Let me state the proposition openly: The work of the FBI is being undermined by the current president. He and his partisan supporters have become corrosive to the organization. In public remarks and on social media, he has continued to beat the drum about the “lies and corruption going on at the highest levels of the FBI!” On Twitter alone, Trump has identified the FBI with the “Deep State,” the pejorative term he uses to refer to professional public servants who conduct the nation’s business without regard to politics; he has called Jim Comey “a terrible and corrupt leader”; he has called the investigation of Russian interference in the elections and possible ties with his campaign “perhaps the most tainted and corrupt case EVER!”; and he has referred to two of the investigators on the Russia case, themselves, as “a fraud against our Nation,” “hating frauds,” and “incompetent and corrupt.” His insults have emboldened legions of goons to push further. Even mainstream news outlets have been unable to refrain from trafficking in destructive clickbait, juxtaposing the terms “FBI” and “corruption” in headlines over stories ostensibly covering “both sides” of the brawl that now passes for argument. TRUMP SUPPORTERS SAY MCCABE FIRING EXPOSES FBI CORRUPTION—that’s not Breitbart, it’s USA Today.

  I knew this administration would be different from the last one. What I did not expect was the suspicion that so many members of this administration would train on those involved in intelligence gathering. The president has compared the intelligence community to Nazi Germany. He has asserted the essential equivalence of the U.S. government and the regime in Russia, proclaiming that “we have a lot of killers.… You think our country is so innocent?” He has stated in a press conference before the world, walking it back only under duress, and even then without conviction, that he values the word of the Russian president more highly than the collective opinion of his own intelligence services. When the president of the United States attacks the intelligence community and demeans the people who have been charged with keeping the country safe—and when he embraces conspiracy theories that politicize the FBI’s most critical work—it has a direct impact on our ability to collect, analyze, and present intelligence that is essential to the security of the United States.

  The FBI must perform a balancing act. To keep the American people safe, the FBI must be independent of the White House. At the same time, it must maintain a close functional relationship with the White House. Since the start of the Trump administration, that relationship has been in profound jeopardy. The president has stepped over bright ethical and moral lines wherever he has encountered them. His unpredictable, often draconian behavior is dangerous—a threat to both the Bureau and the nation.

  2

  Answering the Call

  TRAINING DAYS, AND THE FIRST BIG CASE

  The Road to Quantico

  That first meeting with President Trump, in the spring of 2017, was my first time inside the Oval Office, but it wasn’t my first time at the Oval Office door. In 1992, while I was in law school, I spent the summer working as an unpaid intern at the Department of Justice. One evening, a small group was given a White House tour. When we passed by the Oval Office, I remember, there was a velvet rope across the frame of the open door, as if in an old house that had been turned into a museum—which, considered from a certain angle, the White House was. We peeked in. The main thing my memory retained from that moment was the flash of the gold drapes.

  That Justice Department internship turned out to be a turning point in my life. I was not a kid who watched The F.B.I.—the TV show starring Efrem Zimbalist Jr. as agent Lewis Erskine. The call to be an agent did not come to me early in a clear and direct way. It was indirect and slow to emerge. I did things that did not connect, and then by a process of elimination, which distilled into conviction, ended up gravitating to the Bureau.

  I had grown up in the suburbs, and my dad was a corporate executive. Like a lot of kids on my block, I imagine, I looked forward to a life that was a grown-up version of the one I was already living. In college, at Duke, I took the required courses and the ones I thought I should take, eventually making my way to art history and political science. I was drawn to stories of real people—people in pursuit of love, advantage, power, salvation. In law school, at Washington University in St. Louis, I was again drawn to stories of human drama, now in the context of crime and punishment. My summer internship at the Department of Justice, in the criminal-fraud section, involved a lot of scut work—research, modest writing assignments. But I also got to read the case files and, most important, a type of document called a 302.

  Those three digits are almost a magic number for me: 302. After FBI agents go out and interview subjects in an investigation, they come back and, within five days—while memory is fresh—they have to write up the results of the interview on a form called the FD-302. I caught the 302 bug reading interview reports from a public corruption case involving a pugnacious U.S. senator, his brother, and some questionable interactions they had with a defense contractor. It was a complicated business that would go on for a long time, and now it seems like ancient history. But when I read the 302s from that case, I thought, This is it. This is the marrow of law enforcement. This is the record of a conversation: people whose job it is to enforce the law actually sitting down and talking with people suspected of breaking the law, or with witnesses to a crime, or with victims of a crime, or with those who simply might have some relevant information.

  Coming out of that summer, I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to be part of the conversations that I’d been reading about. I wanted to go out and find evidence and talk with people about the times they had crossed those invisible lines of law that structure our society, or with people who had information about others who had crossed those lines. But when I came out of law school, the Bureau wasn’t hiring. I became a small-town lawyer in New Jersey, waiting for a chance. On April 19, 1995, the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City took the lives of 168 people. The tragedy weighed heavily on me and reinforced my determination to continue seeking entry into the FBI.

  Becoming an agent would mean that I’d make a lot less money than I could have made if I had taken a different path, but my wife, Jill—we had just gotten married—supported my ambitions and never counted the cost. When I told her I wanted to join the FBI, she said I should do it, because she saw how much I wanted to do it. I worked from then on with a sense that something was calling me to service, even as it gradually dawned on me that this job would entail risk and the sacrifice of much more than money.

  On the Box

  In 1996, the Bureau’s doors reopened. At the time, the path to becoming a special agent started with a single page. To begin the process, you filled out a simple application and submitted it to your local field office. Anyone who failed to meet certain basic qualifications—such as having a college degree or being a U.S. citizen—was weeded out. If you made that first cut, your local field office began coordinating your backgrou
nd investigation and Phase One testing.

  Phase One was a series of standardized exercises meant to evaluate your intelligence and computational skills. It also included a personality evaluation. If you made it through Phase One, you would be recontacted by your field office and asked to submit an FD-140—an official Application for Employment in the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  Every FBI employee, by virtue of being an employee in good standing, holds a top secret (or “TS”) clearance. A TS clearance requires passing a stringent background investigation and polygraph examination. The FD-140 was the beginning, and the foundation, of the FBI’s background investigation. At ten pages long, the FD-140 required you to give the FBI information about every aspect of your life. Not just your name and address, but every name you had ever used and every place you had lived in the previous ten years. It asked not just where you currently worked but every place you had ever worked. In between those periods of work, the FBI wanted to know when and why you were unemployed. It wanted the name and address of every school you attended and the grades and degrees you received at each. If you were ever disciplined at school, the FBI wanted to know when and why, and what punishment you received.

  The FD-140 required you to give the FBI the names and addresses of all your family members and your spouse’s family members. If any of them had lived or worked overseas, the Bureau needed that information as well. The FBI asked you to provide three references, defined as “responsible adults of reputable standing” who had known you well for at least five years. In addition, they requested contact information for three “social acquaintances,” who could be your own age, and were presumably less reputable than your references, but who also had to have known you for five years.

  The application required that you list every foreign country you had ever visited and any contact you might have had while there with representatives of foreign governments. The FBI wanted the details of your military service and whether you were licensed to practice law. They asked about any run-ins you might have had with the authorities, and whether you owed money to any person or business.

  The FD-140 gave the Bureau a view into some aspects of your lifestyle. The FBI wanted to know if you had smoked marijuana during the previous three years or more than fifteen times total in your life, and whether you had used any other illegal drugs more than five times in the past decade. It sought to determine whether you were a communist, a fascist, or a subversive. Additionally, it wanted to know if you had ever supported the use of force to deny anyone his or her constitutional rights or had ever advocated the overthrow of the U.S. government. Before signing the application, the FBI let you know, and required you to acknowledge, that if hired you were expected to serve a minimum of three years and to move anywhere the Bureau ordered you to move at your own expense.

  With this information, the background investigation was officially under way. Your field office set about sending messages to other field offices to investigate and confirm every fact you presented on the FD-140. For instance, I was living in southern New Jersey when I applied to the FBI, so my application was processed by the Philadelphia field office. It included the facts that I had worked in Cherry Hill, New Jersey; Newark, New Jersey; and Washington, D.C. Philadelphia sent requests for follow-up investigation (referred to internally as “setting leads”) to themselves—for Cherry Hill—and to the Newark field office and the Washington field office. Their leads required agents and background investigators in those offices to contact and interview my former supervisors and confirm every aspect of my work history. This same tedious, labor-intensive effort would be directed at every fact on my FD-140, no matter where the work took place.

  After vetting the information in the FD-140, you would be called into a field office for a polygraph examination. The exam would begin benignly—with the polygraph turned off—as an FBI agent reviewed the information on your FD-140. She would ask you questions and give you a chance to clarify inconsistencies or explain things that might have come out during the background investigation. The agent would try to eliminate any ambiguity or confusion in advance of the questions that would follow.

  With questions prepared and issues clarified, the agent would set up the polygraph machine and, in FBI speak, “put you on the box.” It goes like this: You are sitting in a chair with wide, flat armrests. The agent tells you to place your arms flat on the rests. Forcefully, she admonishes you not to move. At all. She places a blood-pressure cuff on your upper arm and inflates it uncomfortably. She wraps a sensor around your chest. She attaches an additional sensor to a finger. Each of these sensors is attached by wire to a box on the desk next to you. The box has multiple needles on top and a roll of graph paper that stretches beneath the needles.

  When the exam begins, the agent asks you to provide yes or no answers only—the time for explanation and discussion is over. She starts by asking easy questions that call for obvious answers, such as, Are we in Philadelphia? or, Is your name Andrew McCabe? You answer Yes or No, and you don’t move. Between the questions, you can hear the dull scratch of a needle dragging across paper. You wonder what it is saying about you.

  Then she asks the real questions, which are derived from the information on your FD-140. The questions about drug use eliminate the largest number of candidates. People frequently minimize their history with drugs or lie about it altogether. Getting caught lying on the polygraph means you can’t pass the background investigation. Your dream of working for the FBI is over.

  I passed the polygraph, which meant I was officially “out of background” and still moving forward. There were still hurdles left—medical testing, Phase Two testing—but I was a giant step closer to the FBI Academy at Quantico.

  I rehearsed how I would quit my job—how I’d tell my boss—working out the phrasing to eliminate any room for objection. I have spent a lot of time thinking about this, I’d say, and I’ve decided to leave this law practice and to join the FBI. That’s what I did say, and my boss tried to talk me out of it. As had my parents. Not Jill. I took a 50 percent pay cut. To save money, we had to leave our apartment, in Haddonfield, New Jersey, and Jill moved in with a roommate. We had to be apart for the sixteen weeks of my special-agent training. I’d be in Quantico, Virginia, where the FBI Academy is located, and Jill would be almost two hundred miles away, doing her residency at Children’s Hospital, in Philadelphia. I started getting up early in the morning and running, so I’d be ready for the physical fitness tests. I rigged a pull-up bar, and I’d do a couple of pull-ups on the way out and a couple more on the way back.

  Hogan’s Alley

  Arriving at Quantico was like driving off a cliff. I had no idea what to expect. I was certainly excited, but I was stepping into a different world from the one I had known.

  It was a hot Sunday night when I drove from Philadelphia to Quantico. After getting out of the car and stretching my legs, I walked in the main entrance and immediately passed through the Hall of Heroes, surrounded by the faces and names and stories of those agents who had made the ultimate sacrifice. Then I went to my dorm. Two to a bedroom, four to a bathroom—just like college, even though most of us were almost ten years older than college students. The man I shared a room with was a former Army captain from Rhode Island.

  At that time, a new class of forty started at Quantico every other week. My class, NA9618—“NA” stands for “new agents”—was the year’s eighteenth class. All forty of us got sworn in as special agents that night. We swore an oath to protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. From that moment on, we were special agents in training.

  The next day we picked up our uniforms—hiking shoes, tan Royal Robbins cargo pants, and a dark blue FBI Academy polo shirt. We wore the uniform everywhere. No gym clothes were allowed on campus except at the gym. No jeans were allowed anywhere at the academy, ever.

  Then the classes started, covering the law and techniques of investigation: how to conduct an interview; how to wr
ite up a 302; how to handle all the different kinds of documents an agent has to handle; how to dust for fingerprints. The difference between the valedictorian and the person who came in second in our class was a wrong answer on a single fingerprint ID question on a single test. Our forensics teacher was one of the agents who had searched the cabin of Theodore Kaczynski, the “Unabomber.”

  The classes weren’t all brain work. Agents get a full-on physical education. Taking people into custody, defensive maneuvers, hand-to-hand combat. Everybody does some boxing. Everybody learns to clear a room. Everybody learns how to plan an arrest and how to make an arrest. An agent learns how to do all these things in many kinds of environments where you can imagine an arrest being made. A restaurant, a bar, a bank, a trailer park, a motel, a school. Those environments are packed into the most famous part of the campus at Quantico—Hogan’s Alley, a fake town, a full-sized replica community made up of all the kinds of places I just mentioned, and more, populated and run by character actors who live nearby. Every special agent in training learns the ropes in these false environments—figures out how to react and adapt in different situations.