“If you don’t mind my asking,” I said, “what are you going to talk about?”
It was a personal visit, Bush told me. Over many years, he and the crown prince had gotten to know each other very well. Abdullah was passing through Washington again, this time on his way to Hawaii. They were meeting at Prince Bandar’s mansion in McLean.
“Well,” I said, “would you mind making a request on our behalf?”
“Sure.”
“We’re trying to get FBI agents to see the detainees in the Khobar Towers bombing. If the crown prince heard the request from you, I think it would be very effective.”
I made sure I was up-front with George Bush. I had no intention of using him to do an end run around his successor without his being in on the plan. We’re at an impasse, I told him. We’ve been trying to get our position to the Saudis at a high enough level to make a difference, but every time I seem to have assurances from on high in our administration that the matter will be brought up with the right people at the right time, it never is. Your help could go a long way to resolving this, I told the former president, but I don’t want to put you in an uncomfortable position. I wasn’t exaggerating on that last point. I didn’t, but I felt as if I had run out of other alternatives for fulfilling the promise that had been made twenty-seven months earlier when the dust was still settling over the ruins of Building 131.
When the ex-president agreed, to my great delight, I wrote out talking points and faxed them to him. Then I sat back and waited, but not for long.
“I raised it,” Bush said when he called me that Saturday afternoon. “They seem interested. I think you’ll be hearing from them.”
I did, on Monday morning, from Prince Bandar.
“Louie,” he said, “can you come out here and talk with the crown prince?”
A few hours later, on September 29, 1998, I was being waved through Bandar’s gates again, this time along with Dale Watson, the FBI antiterrorism chief, and Wyche Fowler, the ambassador to Saudi Arabia, who happened to be back in the States at the time. Straight and dedicated, Fowler was putting himself at risk by challenging the White House to do the right thing on this case. Dale ran our counterterrorism (or CT) section and later the newly formed CT Division, and was my right hand in the most important FBI cases of the decade, the single best–qualified and knowledgeable CT leader and expert we had. None of the FBI’s progress in this area would have happened without him.
“Tell me what you need,” the crown prince said after he had received us.
“We need Your Highness to get our agents into the facility where the Khobar detainees are being held so we can interview them and come back to our courts and make the case against them.”
I assured him that we, the United States and the FBI, respected the Sharia and promised we would do all in our power not to corrupt the Saudi investigation or prosecution. But the gist of my statement was exactly what I had been trying to get someone at the top of the food chain to say to Crown Prince Abdullah all along: we need access.
The crown prince proposed a compromise. Our agents could submit questions to be put to the suspects by Saudi officials, and we could monitor the answers directly. When I agreed, he turned to Bandar and told him to call Prince Nayef with instructions that our agents could have access to the detainees as outlined above. After all the waiting, all the runaround, all the frustration, that was it.
I have no doubt that, but for President Bush’s personal intervention, we would never have gotten access to those critical witnesses. When I was finally able to tell the Khobar families about “41’s” role, they were extraordinarily grateful. I am also certain that “41”—war hero, model public servant, and one of the primary architects of the Soviet Empire’s collapse during his presidency—will be long regarded for his integrity, leadership, and historic accomplishments.
(I should add that when I first prepared to tell this story, in an article for the Wall Street Journal, I checked with former president Bush to see if he minded being named in print as the key intermediary. “Fire away!” he said, consistent to the end. I also got Prince Bandar’s permission to tell the story.)
Six weeks later, on November 9, FBI agents sat behind a one-way mirror at a Riyadh detention center while Mubahith officials asked 212 questions of eight separate detainees. In the new spirit of cooperation, the Saudis also gave us access to transcripts from other detainees as well as physical evidence they had collected for their own prosecution. The answers, along with the new materials and information we had previously uncovered or been handed by the Saudis, showed almost beyond a doubt that the Khobar Tower attacks had been sanctioned, funded, and directed by senior officials of the government of Iran. The Ministry of Intelligence and Security and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard had both been in on the planning and execution. The bombers had been trained by Iranians in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, where the Iranian-backed Hezbollah is based. They had been issued passports by the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria, that allowed them to cross the border into Saudi Arabia.
To me, it was a devastating indictment. I went to Janet Reno with the news, once the picture had become clear, and told her we had to brief Sandy Berger. We immediately briefed Sandy in his corner office in the White House’s fabled West Wing. His incredible response: “Who knows about this?” Sandy then opined that this was all hearsay. That was nonsense. Our sources were part of the conspiracy.
Later on, Sandy convened another meeting in the West Wing’s Situation Room. Bill Cohen was there; army general Henry Shelton, the rock-solid Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; CIA director George Tenet—all the principals, the usual suspects. I thought that we were meeting to discuss what our next move would be, given the fact that we now had solid evidence that Iranians, with involvement at the highest official levels, had blown up nineteen Americans. But I was wrong. The meeting started with how to deal with the press and with Congress, should news of the Iranian involvement in the Khobar murders leak outside of the room.
Remarkably (although that’s an insufficient word), Sandy’s people had prepared a script A and script B for spinning the story once it did become public: script A for Republicans on the Hill, script B for those nosy reporters from The Washington Post and The New York Times, etc. Clearly, someone had been having a nightmare that featured a headline along the lines of “FBI Investigation Determines Iran Responsible for Khobar Attack.”
“Wait a minute,” I finally said, “are we going to talk about the fact that Iranians killed nineteen Americans?”
I wasn’t the only person in the room who wanted to do that: General Shelton did. Others did. But it was Sandy’s meeting, not ours, and the national security adviser had other things on his mind. It seemed we were here to manage the issue, not do a damn thing about it.
At some point, I tried to catch George Tenet’s eye to give him one of those “What the hell is going on?” looks. Instead, I had to wait to buttonhole him as we were walking out of the meeting.
“Do you believe that?” I asked.
“We have a lot of meetings like that around here,” George answered.
George, General Shelton, and the Joint Chiefs were my staunchest allies. Once the Iranian sponsorship was clear, General Shelton invited me over to the storied “tank” at the Pentagon to give him a briefing. There, the Marine Corps commandant, Chuck Krulak, known for his candor and integrity, committed himself to doing whatever was necessary to bring the Khobar bombers to justice, even if that meant taking on the White House.
In the eight years I was to spend as FBI director, there was nothing to match that moment in the Situation Room for sheer disappointment. It’s a terrible story, but there’s a better postscript.
Thanks to our continuing—and continually improving—relationship with the Saudis and the Mubahith, we did finally get direct access to the Saudi detainees, and not just to those we had already seen from behind the one-way mirror. In the year 2000, we were able to question for the first time a Sa
udi Shi-ite named Mustafa al-Qassab. In the late 1980s, al-Qassab had traveled from Saudi Arabia to Iran to meet with Ahmed al-Mughassil, the commander of the military wing of the Saudi Hezbollah. Now, a decade later, al-Qassab laid out for us in detail the planning and logistics that had gone into the Khobar attack, traced the lineage irrefutably back to Tehran, and as far as I was concerned tied the whole package together for good. We still had to work our way around a wrong opinion from a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, a civil lawyer who had little knowledge of criminal law. But she, too, passed, as did the Clinton-Gore administration and its apparent indifference to Khobar Towers.
In my first postinauguration meeting with George W. Bush, I raised the issue of the ongoing investigation into the bombing and told him and Vice President Cheney about my frustrations. The president quickly assessed the situation and understood completely the implications of Iranian involvement. He suggested I talk to Condoleezza Rice, which I did that afternoon. Condi was a breath of fresh air, as she too sized up the situation and told me to pursue the indictment, letting the chips fall where they may. (We are fortunate to have her now as our secretary of state.) She sent me on to the new attorney general, and John Ashcroft let me have my new prosecutor of choice, James B. Comey Jr. John’s complete support and decisiveness in this important case was greatly appreciated and allowed us to get an indictment, and Jim Comey was just the guy to handle the matter.
I’d come to know Jim in New York when he was a young assistant U.S. attorney there. Later, he had gotten himself assigned to the office in Richmond, in his native Virginia, where he was doing a bang-up job of prosecuting federal gun crimes and sending a lot of very dangerous people to jail. (Jim would go on to become U.S. attorney in my old stomping grounds, the Southern District of New York, and later became the deputy attorney general of the United States. At six feet ten inches, he’s hard to miss in a crowd.) Within forty-five days, Jim Comey had accomplished what an entire administration had failed to do over the course of four and a half years. I will always be grateful for his leadership and pursuit of justice. On June 21, 2001, a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, returned a forty-six-count indictment against fourteen defendants charged with bombing the Khobar Towers housing complex and murdering nineteen Americans.
The timing of the indictment was not by chance. Had we failed to bring the charges by June 26, a number of the counts would have been barred by the five-year statute of limitations. There was a second reason, though, why June 21 was important. Many of the family members of those killed at Khobar Towers had gathered in Washington that day for a fifth-anniversary commemoration at Arlington National Cemetery, where a number of the murdered airmen were buried. I couldn’t tell them in advance that the indictment was pending: grand jury proceedings are secret. Nor could I promise the families that, even with the indictment, anyone would ever come to trial. As I write, the case is still open and pending. Warrants have been issued for the fourteen defendants and lodged with Interpol, but these are not people who are going to rush to turn themselves in to the nearest federal marshal or U.S. embassy. No grand jury indictment is ever anything more than just a piece of paper, but to these families, this particular one meant an enormous amount. It said that the government had followed up; that despite all the roadblocks and detours, we had remained committed to doing justice; that we were finally as good as our word.
(In his autobiography, My Life, Bill Clinton misstates not only the number of injured at Khobar Towers—“almost 300” in his account, as opposed to the 372 actually wounded—but the facts of the attack. He also appears to have somehow conflated the resolution of Khobar with that of the earlier attack on the Saudi National Guard building in Riyadh. “Eventually,” Clinton writes, “Saudi Arabia would execute the people it determined to be responsible for the attack.” Not so. Whether Clinton’s mistakes resulted from speed of composition or indifference to the fate of those killed at Khobar and their survivors, I’m not prepared to say.)
For me, too, the Arlington ceremony was a form of closure. I had informed President Bush on May 1 that I would be resigning as director of the FBI by the end of June; now I was literally on my way out the door. Chairs had been set up on a green rug at the cemetery. Sitting there, waiting my turn to address the families, I was reminded of another outdoor rug, this one in the desert under a relentless sun. In my mind’s eye, I could see the debris, the body parts outlined with red paint. Khobar Towers had been, I think, the biggest test for me, the case I felt the deepest about during my eight years as director of the Bureau. Now I had delivered on my own promise—something to feel good about in the storm of emotion that overwhelmed me at that moment.
Afterward, the families came back to my office for lunch. The place was a mess—boxes stacked on boxes—but my wonderful secretary, Noreen Gawley, who had been with me ever since my days as a judge and is with me still, managed to clear some space and provide us with a meal, even some beer to share if memory serves. We had a wonderful time talking, especially now that the indictments had been brought in, but my guests had an ulterior motive. They had pooled together and had two commemorative plaques made up for me. Two of the mothers, Fran Heiser and Catherine Adams, rose as we were finishing lunch to present them.
For any director of the FBI plaques are almost a plague. They come from every angle: the Boy Scouts of America, the State Police of Mongolia. At the end of your tour of duty, the government boxes them up and mails them to you, and then mails you a bill for the postage. I’ve got plaques I have probably never seen, dozens of them I’ve long since forgotten about. But not these. Not ever. One had been signed by all the survivors, children included, and decorated with nineteen purple hearts. At the center was this inscription: “To Louis Freeh, the Most Honest Man in Washington.” I don’t believe that for a second, but I know the depth of feeling out of which they composed that message, the despair that nothing might ever get done, that their dead might simply be forgotten. I’m proud that didn’t happen.
June 21, 2001, was my last official day as director of the FBI, the final curtain on twenty-six years of public service. Two years remained on my statutory ten-year term, but I’d finished most of what I wanted to do in Washington.
CHAPTER 2
“Only If I Yell ‘Duck!’”
Noon was my jogging time, a chance to escape the pressures of being a federal judge. My route was always the same—through East River Park and back again—and so regular was my regimen that the guards at the U.S. Courthouse on Foley Square in lower Manhattan had long ago stopped gawking when one of their distinguished jurists showed up at the door dressed like a gym rat. Today, though, I was wearing a suit when I came down the granite steps, not running gear. The date was Friday, July 16, 1993, and I was headed to Washington, D.C., to meet with Bill Clinton at the White House. If the president liked what he heard, he was going to offer me the position of director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. If I liked what I heard, I was going to accept.
If only it had been that simple, but in Washington almost nothing is.
The fact that I was being considered at all by the White House for the job was a classic happenstance of politics. Ever since he’d taken office, Bill Clinton had been determined to get rid of the FBI director he inherited from the first President Bush: Judge William S. Sessions, then less than five years through his statutory ten-year term. Clinton had cover for the move. Outgoing Republican attorney general Bill Barr had recommended it. The judge had thrown his own fuel on the fire, too. The bill of particulars against him included numerous incidents that could be interpreted as using his office for personal gain: business trips to San Francisco, where his daughter danced in the ballet; a security fence around his house that Sessions’s wife insisted be more aesthetically appealing than the usual government issue. Bill Sessions is an honorable man and I still think the case against him was mostly bunk, but blood was in the water, and the capital was buzzing that the new admin
istration was trying to politicize the Bureau.
The president had wanted to replace Sessions with his old Oxford pal, Richard Stearns, an able lawyer who later became a very respected district judge in Boston. Before he could do so, though, the first of many Clinton scandals bubbled up from far down in the bureaucracy. What became known inevitably as Travelgate was basically a patronage dust-up. Opponents in and out of government claimed that the Clintons and others were using the FBI to houseclean the White House Travel Office to make way for cousin Cornelia. It all blew over quickly enough, but the public already had early doubts about the president’s allegiance to strict ethical standards. Add Travelgate to that mix, and it became politically difficult, if not impossible, for the president to put a friend into the sensitive job of FBI director.
Thus it was that the administration decided to find a “stranger” to run the FBI. Not so strangely, maybe, I involuntarily became the one under consideration. I had, after all, spent six years as an FBI agent in New York City and another ten years there with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, winning convictions in some of the office’s highest-profile cases, in the nation’s highest-profile venue. Like Sessions and his predecessor, William Webster, I also had experience as a U.S. district judge. I’d even put in some time in Washington at what was then the new, massive J. Edgar Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest.
In 1980, after completing one of the Bureau’s first organized crime–labor racketeering cases, I was ordered to headquarters to set up a labor racketeering program in the Organized Crime Section. I can’t claim the ten months I spent in the capital were the happiest time of my life professionally. The transition from fast-moving investigations, informants, and wise-guy subjects to a windowless room deep in the bowels of the Hoover Building left me feeling suffocated, and I jumped at the chance to get back to the streets of New York via the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. Personally, though, Washington proved a bonanza. Not only did I get the chance to work with the legendary agent Jules Bonavolonta—my mentor and close friend—I also met a gorgeous redhead from Pittsburgh named Marilyn Coyle, an exceptional paralegal in the Bureau’s Civil Rights Unit whom I would have the undeserved good fortune to marry.
My FBI Page 4