To my mom and dad,
who taught me all the good things I know and how to live
To my true hero and best friend, Marilyn,
who taught me how to love
To our six sons,
Justin, Brendan, Sean, Connor, Liam, and Colin,
who taught me how to give
Finally, to the men and women of the FBI,
who taught me the meaning of sacrifice
Table of Contents
Title Page
PREFACE
CHAPTER 1 - Khobar Towers
CHAPTER 2 - “Only If I Yell ‘Duck!’”
CHAPTER 3 - “You’re Not Really College Material”
CHAPTER 4 - “The FBI? You’re Crazy!”
CHAPTER 5 - “The Kid’s Got Nothing to Do with It”
CHAPTER 6 - “That’s Moody’s Bomb”
CHAPTER 7 - “If Anything Happens, You Drive. I’ll Shoot”
CHAPTER 8 - “ … and the Guy’s Bob Hanssen”
CHAPTER 9 - Bill and Me
CHAPTER 10 - 9/11
Epilogue
AFTERWORD
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX
Copyright Page
PREFACE
When I retired from the FBI in June 2001 I decided not to write this book. As director I had never sought publicity or the spotlight that sometimes corners public officials. In fact, I had intentionally shunned that role to the point that I declined the perfunctory gala retirement party that traditionally pays tribute to exiting heads of agencies. Instead, on my last day in office, June 25, 2001, I went down to the central FBI courtyard—where I was sworn in as director on September 1, 1993—and together with my family said thank you to the men and women of the FBI for the privilege of serving with them twice.
I had a most interesting and historic tenure as director. I was only the fifth occupant of that office since J. Edgar Hoover took over the Bureau in 1924. I was appointed by a Democrat after a Republican had appointed me as a federal judge. I had absolutely no political connections for the position, did not want to be considered, said no to the job at first, and made not a single effort to be appointed. Because of that I was able to serve with total independence.
I spent most of the almost eight years as director investigating the man who had appointed me. Although I served in one of the most sensitive positions during one of the most politically polarized times in the nation’s history, no member of Congress called for my removal on grounds of partisanship or unfairness. I gave thousands of speeches and made hundreds of public appearances before Congress, the media, and under the glare of critical scrutiny from the FBI, the United States, and sixty-eight foreign countries. Never once did I say or do anything that embarrassed or caused harm to the FBI or the nation. Nobody inside or outside the FBI ever credibly questioned my honor or integrity. And in over eighty years, I am the only FBI director who, without any pressure whatsoever, voluntarily relinquished that powerful office and returned to civilian life. According to President Bush, my retirement took him “by surprise,” which I clearly had not intended. I had been trusted with the country’s deepest secrets, which even today I would not divulge.
What brought me back to the FBI from the bench, and kept me there for almost eight years, was simple. It was what made me want to be an FBI agent as early as when I was twelve years old. And it was with me when at twenty-five I took my first of many oaths of office to protect and defend our country. My respect and affection for the men and women of the FBI and the extraordinary integrity and sacrifice of their daily work never ceases to overwhelm me. As director, I spent as much time with them as I could. I went to every FBI division several times during my tenure and on those daylong visits I met, listened to, and took photos with every one of our people who was there. I spent time with each separate squad—without the division chiefs being present—so I could understand and learn about what they were doing and needed.
In all the meetings, briefings, crises, and events in which I participated, never once did I lose my temper or yell or treat any member of the FBI disrespectfully or unprofessionally. I had too much respect for the most fundamental tenet of their service—each of them was ready to give up his or her life at any time for our country. This is very sobering.
I went to Quantico—the FBI training academy—several times each month. There, I would jog with the classes of new agents, take pictures with them, teach them, and shoot with them, and I made it a point to be at their graduations. I only missed three of them in eight years. At the graduations I would meet all of their families and thank them for also serving the FBI.
I did the same with all of our FBI National Academy classes: more than 8,000 senior police officers in four sessions each year—local, state, federal, and foreign—who attended the FBI Academy during my tenure. When overseas I always visited—and jogged—with the FBI agents, Marine Corps embassy details, and host country police officers who met with us.
My respect for the men and women of the FBI remains immense. I took every opportunity to thank and praise them. If one of them suffered a loss or personal tragedy, I would go see that person, make a telephone call, or send a note. I did the same for every law enforcement officer in the United States who was killed in the line of duty while I was director. Those calls to the various police chiefs, sheriffs, and agency chiefs were among the most difficult things I did.
More difficult were the tragic deaths of four FBI agents killed in the line of duty while I led them. I will never lose the sense of grief and responsibility I feel for the loss of these heroes: Martha Dixon Martinez, Mike Miller, Billy Christian, and Chuck Reed. The FBI and the nation will always be grateful to them and their families for making the supreme sacrifice to protect all of us. To honor them and the other thirty FBI agents killed in the line of duty since 1924, I commissioned a Martyr Memorial that is prominently displayed in every FBI office.
In the end, I left the FBI with great pride, gratitude, and a sense of privilege. Over the eight years, I had probably received hundreds of awards, plaques, honors, degrees, etc., on my travels. All of them were important yet none of them adorned my office on the seventh floor at FBI headquarters. Instead, I had a few personal photos and, by the time I left, an entire wall of drawings and sketches done by our six sons from 1993 to 2001. They were taped up on the wall without much design or order right next to my desk. I chose that wall so I could look at them during phone calls or meetings when I needed to keep my focus on reality and what, at the end of any Washington, D.C., day, is really important. I did that pretty well. I promised myself when I became director that I wouldn’t be one of those D.C. types who would announce—usually when things were going south—that they were leaving government in order to spend more time with their family. I actually spent all the time I needed with them while director. When a reporter asked me my two most important accomplishments in Washington, without hesitation I said, “Liam and Colin.”
But none of the above was the impetus behind writing this book. I decided to write My FBI to tell the story of very special heroes: the men and women of the FBI. These extraordinary Americans are best described by the FBI Core Values (see here), which I helped to write and define. The consistent dedication, sacrifice, honesty, and grace under pressure that they exhibit in the most stressful and dangerous of circumstances are a model for all of us. They inspired me every day, and the honor of serving with them will remain the pride of my professional life.
The cases and anecdotes, triumphs and tragedies in these pages will help Americans to understand and honor their very special service. It will also serve to correct the many mistaken, sometimes even craven, interpretations of what the FBI has actually achieved against almost insurmountable odds with both honor and skill. Various know-nothing
Talking Heads who have inaccurately portrayed what the FBI does best also require this rebuttal. But mostly, and I reiterate, My FBI has much less to do with me than with the men and women of the FBI whom I honor and love. Their story can be told through my experiences with them. All Americans and people of liberty can join in my celebration of their good work.
CHAPTER 1
Khobar Towers
Shortly before 10:00 P.M. local time on June 25, 1996, a Datsun driven by Hani al-Sayegh, a prominent member of the Saudi branch of Hezbollah, or “Party of God,” pulled into the far corner of a parking lot adjacent to Building 131 at the King Abdul Aziz Airbase in Dhahran, along the oil-rich Persian Gulf coast of Saudi Arabia. The eight-story apartment structure was part of a housing complex known collectively as Khobar Towers, then home to more than two thousand American, British, French, and Saudi troops. Building 131 was occupied almost exclusively by members of the U.S. Air Force, enforcing the no-fly zone that had been in effect over southern Iraq ever since the end of the first Gulf War. With al-Sayegh in the Datsun was Abdallah al-Jarash, who had been recruited into Hezbollah at the Sayyeda Zeinab shrine in Damascus.
A few minutes later, a white, four-door Chevrolet Caprice entered the parking lot and waited for the Datsun to blink its lights—the all-clear signal. When it did, a tanker truck followed the Chevy into the lot. The truck had been purchased earlier that month from a Saudi dealership for approximately 75,000 Saudi riyals and taken to a farm outside Qatif, twenty minutes or so from Dhahran. There it had been outfitted with some five thousand pounds of explosives and turned into a massive bomb.
After the truck backed up to a fence just in front of the north side of Building 131, the driver, Ahmed al-Mughassil, commander of the military wing of the Saudi Hezbollah, and his passenger, Ali al-Houri, a main Hezbollah recruiter, leaped from the cab, raced to the Chevy, and drove off, followed by the Datsun.
Sgt. Alfredo Guerrero was pulling sentry duty on the rooftop at Building 131 when he saw the driver and passenger abandon the truck and the two cars speed away. Almost certain that they were staring at a bomb in the lot below them, Guerrero and two other sentries sounded an alarm. Then Guerrero, who had been stationed in Dhahran for only a month, began to race through the top floors of Building 131, warning people to leave. The sergeant had cleared the better part of two floors when the tank truck exploded, ripping a crater thirty-five feet deep and eighty-five feet wide and shearing off the north face of the apartment building.
Despite the heroism of Alfredo Guerrero, who escaped without serious injury, nineteen Americans were murdered at Khobar Towers and more than five dozen others were hospitalized. In all, 372 U.S. military personnel suffered wounds in the explosion. Khobar was the most deadly attack on American citizens abroad in thirteen years, since the October, 1983 explosion at a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, killed 241 marines. And the totals might have been far higher. In his haste, the driver of the truck had parked perpendicular to Building 131. Had he parked parallel and delivered the impact of the explosion along a broader front, he might have succeeded in toppling the entire structure, with a catastrophically greater loss of life.
My wife, Marilyn, and I and our children were visiting my parents at their home in North Bergen, New Jersey, when the Khobar terrorists struck. June 25, 1996, was a Tuesday, not a Saturday or a Sunday, but the day afforded a rare chance to get everyone together. I’d kept my schedule light. Just as important, schools had let out only a few days earlier, and summer camps and other activities would soon kick in. Marilyn and I grabbed a small window of opportunity, and as so often seems to happen in hyperbusy lives, the window closed before we were ever quite through it. My mother was preparing dinner for the family when the FBI command center called to tell me that the attack had taken place a half hour earlier. (Saudi Arabia is seven hours ahead of East Coast time.) I’d never heard of Khobar Towers, but that was irrelevant. Marilyn and I immediately began to refill the car with the kids and their gear.
My predecessor as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, William Sessions, had traveled with a large security detail, including a driver. He might have been wise to do so: the world is full of nuts. But I had been an FBI agent myself, one of the grunts, and I didn’t choose to live in the grand style now that I ran the place. Nor did Marilyn and I want our children to grow up thinking they were in protective custody or that they had to travel in a convoy to see their own grandparents.
I was at the wheel of my own car, heading unaccompanied down the New Jersey Turnpike, when I first discussed the attack with Attorney General Janet Reno, my direct boss and first line of communication with the Clinton administration. I also talked with then Deputy National Security Adviser Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger in those early hours after the attack. Sandy, who would take over as the principal adviser the next year with the resignation of Anthony Lake, was helping coordinate the national-security response, and the FBI was a vital part of that. I was on an unsecure car-phone line, though, and if Janet and Sandy did have more information than I had already picked up, they were unable to share it with me. In those early hours and for months to come, we all had far more questions than answers.
Six and a half hours after Khobar Towers was hit and Building 131 destroyed—about 10:00 P.M. East Coast time—Marilyn and I were pulling into our driveway in Great Falls, Virginia, just as Bill Clinton first announced the attack to the public, in a brief address from the Oval Office.
“The explosion appears to be the work of terrorists,” the president explained. “If that’s the case, like all Americans I am outraged by it. The cowards who committed this murderous act must not go unpunished. Within a few hours, an FBI team will be on its way to Saudi Arabia to assist in the investigation … .”
The president closed by echoing a point he had made earlier: “Let me say it again: We will pursue this,” he said with a stern voice. “America takes care of our own. Those who did it must not go unpunished.”
Those were words—and a promise—I would not forget.
For the FBI, the Khobar Towers attack was indeed a call to action. The Bureau’s primary responsibilities were and remain domestic, but during my first three years as director, we had been expanding our global presence. Crime and terrorism had gone multinational, and we had to do so ourselves if we were to combat it effectively within our own borders. The Bureau also had specific extraterritorial responsibility for bombings where Americans were killed. That gave us jurisdiction, and we needed to exercise it as quickly as possible.
Crime scenes can grow stale in a hurry. Evidence is lost, or it decays beyond any useful capacity. Well-meaning efforts to clear up the site of a human disaster can destroy vital information about angles of impact, the size of an explosion, and the nature of the explosive materials themselves. Often, too, the smallest and most easily lost remnants can be the most telling. A piece of circuit board no bigger than a fingernail found in the fields around Lockerbie, Scotland, ultimately led us to the Libyans who had blown Pan Am flight 103 out of the sky. We didn’t want to miss something similar in this instance.
All that is standard operating procedure for any crime scene, but from the very beginning it was clear that the attack on Khobar Towers was no ordinary criminal event. For one thing, it had occurred in an extraordinary place. Although it has long been one of America’s most vital allies in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia ranks among the world’s most closed societies. The usual problems of gaining access to a crime scene on foreign soil and establishing liaison with local authorities—never easy when you fly agents in to work an investigation—were compounded in this case not just by the secrecy that surrounds everything on the Arabian Peninsula but also by the special evidentiary needs of a legal system based on Islamic religious law, the Sharia. Just as Saudi overzealousness at the crime site could destroy evidence for us, so insensitivity on our part could destroy the admissibility of evidence for the Saudis.
The real possibility existed, too, that wher
ever the attack had been planned and whoever had carried it out, local fundamentalists might well be involved. Saudi Arabia’s able ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, had been quick to announce a reward of 10 million riyals (then about $3 million in U.S. dollars) for information leading to the arrest of the bombers. But the kingdom exists in a delicate balance between its vast ruling monarchy and the Wahhabis, the more conservative Muslims who control the streets and mosques. Were the attackers foreign or homegrown terrorists? Either way, we were walking into the middle of an incendiary arrangement, to the discomfort of both sides.
The previous fall, following a similar bombing attack on a Riyadh compound where U.S. civilian contractors were training members of the Saudi National Guard, authorities had rounded up several suspects and questioned them over a period of many months. Just about a month before the Khobar attack, Saudi authorities had broadcast the subjects’ confessions on state-controlled television, then beheaded the penitents before we had a chance to interview them, or even sit in on interviews the Saudis conducted. Again, the haste of the executions raised questions in the Clinton administration over what was being served: justice or expediency?
We had more jurisdiction in the crime this time than we’d had in that earlier bombing—nineteen dead U.S. servicemen, as opposed to five murdered Department of Defense contractors—but there was no guarantee the Saudi royal family would see it that way or cooperate to any greater degree even if they did. Without that cooperation, we would end up once again spinning our wheels in the sand.
Marilyn and I had no sooner unloaded the kids and their bags than I turned around and headed the two dozen miles back into Washington, to the command center at the FBI headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue. In those days, the official name of the facility—the Strategic Investigations and Operations Center—was almost as large as the space itself: three rooms on the third floor, maybe two thousand square feet in all, crammed with monitors and secure phones with direct lines to the White House, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, and elsewhere.
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