To me, the situation was ridiculous, so I began lobbying for a Gulfstream G-5. The price tag wasn’t cheap—about $40 million—but the need was obvious. Since the White House clearly wanted nothing to do with my G-5, I carried the case to Congress, to Ted Stevens of Alaska, who was then head of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and to Richard Shelby of Alabama, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Both of them agreed to see what could be done about the matter, and that’s when I got my first-ever call from the new director of the Office of Management and Budget in May 1998.
“You can’t do this,” he told me in no uncertain terms.
“What do you mean, I ‘can’t do this’?”
“You’re not authorized to make that request.”
I told him that we needed the aircraft and tried to make a quick case as to why, but he was unmoved.
“We’ve done an analysis,” he finally said, “and our view is you don’t need it.”
“Well,” I said, working hard to contain the white rage that was starting to build in me, “what’s your background in counterterrorism?”
No surprise: he didn’t like that, but I didn’t much care for what he had to say either.
A few weeks later, George Tenet and I went up to the House Intelligence Committee together to discuss our budget needs. Somewhere in the course of the hearing, the chairman said, “Oh, by the way, Director Freeh, do you guys need a long-range aircraft?”
It was a slow pitch, right over the middle, and I stood up to hit it out of the park, but I got a little too carried away. George, after all, needed a G-5 as badly as I did, and he had been chastised also by OMB just as I was for excessiveness, so I decided to go to bat for both of us.
“Yes, Mr. Chairman,” I answered, on my feet and eager to score, “we desperately need the aircraft, and for some reason, we can’t get the people at OMB to approve it.” Then I turned toward George, and added, “He needs one, too, and he needs one more than I do.”
George looked up at me and laughed, but I probably should have kept my mouth shut because he got the G-5 before the FBI did. I later would rib George—a close friend and excellent CIA director—that he should name his plane for the FBI.
Every year we would go through these ridiculous budget exercises. The Bureau would formulate what budget we thought we needed, then send the budget on to the Department of Justice with the expectation that our figures would be reduced to what we actually needed. Justice would then send it on to the Office of Management and Budget with the notion that it would be reduced further, and OMB would send it on to Congress in the same spirit so that if, finally, we had guessed right at the front end and submitted numbers sufficiently greater than what we actually wanted we might ultimately end up with what we needed. That’s how the process worked.
It was obvious to me and to many others that wiretapping statutes had fallen dangerously behind telecommunications technology. Wiretapping is a critical tool of law enforcement, used at all levels to penetrate the veil of secrecy that surrounds terrorists, organized crime, white-collar crooks, kidnapping plots, drug traffickers, and on and on. What’s more, the requirement that wiretaps be court-authorized serves as a critical check on excess eavesdropping. But by the early 1990s, cellular technology and other forms of digital communication had moved beyond the capacities of the old analog-based wiretapping laws and procedures. Without new ways to tap into new technologies, we were in danger of going deaf, on both the criminal and the national-security sides.
Jim Kallstrom, a great New York agent and longtime friend and colleague, told me about this problem within days after I became director. So I went to Webb Hubbell—then the associate attorney general, before legal troubles derailed his career in government—and explained the problem. Webb was very receptive. He understood our dilemma and arranged a meeting with John Podesta, an assistant to the president and later chief of staff himself, so I could garner support within the White House. John Podesta offered little help or interest.
“The White House is not going to expend any political capital on this issue,” he told me. “It’s too sensitive. We’ll get all the privacy groups on our case.”
We wouldn’t if we framed it right, I said. It’s not about privacy. It’s about expanding our technical ability, not our authority. But John’s mind, and presumably the White House’s behind him, was made up on the matter. So we did it on our own. We went office to the office on Capitol Hill and explained why the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), as it became known, was critically needed and why it wouldn’t infringe on any law-abiding American citizen’s privacy. We also fought tooth and nail with the telecommunications industry along the way because complying with the provisions of the act was going to require some accommodation on its part. And one by one, we began to win because we were right on the issue and because, whatever the politics, what we were proposing was just plain common sense. Tom Constantine, then the DEA administrator and one of the most respected law enforcement leaders in the nation, stood by the FBI shoulder to shoulder and made a huge difference. We also got the invaluable help of the executive director of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, Dan Rosenblatt, who enlisted hundreds of local and state police leaders from across the country.
Democratic senator Pat Leahy of Vermont, a key member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, came onboard, as did Don Edwards, the powerful House Democrat from California. Edwards was a former FBI agent but not a natural supporter of court-authorized wiretapping. Pat Leahy, on the other hand, was an experienced prosecutor and understood like few in Washington the dangers faced and sacrifices made by law enforcement officers. Once when our family was visiting him and Marcelle in Vermont, a border patrol officer was wounded on duty, and Pat rushed to the hospital, where I watched him hold the wounded officer’s hand. Pat was one of the finest leaders I met in Washington.
Conrad Burns, a Republican senator not predisposed toward us, held out until the Montana State Law Enforcement Association, and particularly the sheriffs, began deluging his office with faxes, and more faxes, and still more. Senator Burns could count, and he was hoping to be able to campaign in the next election without picking up a moving-violation ticket from every sheriff he had disappointed. (I happened to be in Senator Burns’s office when the faxes started pouring in. We could see his resistance weakening with each new towering stack his secretary carried into the office.) The act we proposed was finally passed in October 1994, without the White House raising a finger, and America is a safer place for it.
Here’s one last example of what I’m talking about because it shows how thoroughly our political landscape gets defined by narrow self-interest. By 1994, we had determined that we needed to place an FBI legat with the U.S. embassy in Moscow. Russian organized crime was on the rise globally, and the U.S. was not exempt from its reach. Today, Brighton Beach next to Coney Island looks like a Hollywood set for a gangster movie, except all the thugs are talking Russian, but even back then, a decade ago, the trend lines were unmistakable, and so were the problems. Just as with the Sicilian gangsters who started pouring into New York in the 1960s and ’70s, we didn’t know the language this time either, and we were having trouble building trust within the community. A Moscow Legat could open up lines of communication with police and other law-enforcement agencies there. We could begin to share information that would give both nations a leg up in the fight against this common enemy, and we’d have someone to call when American citizens disappeared on the streets of Moscow, as was beginning to happen with alarming regularity.
I knew it would sound strange in certain corners of Washington—even at the Bureau—to talk about an FBI agent in Moscow, but to me, the need was pressing and the reasoning obvious. So I ran the idea by Tony Lake, then the national security adviser, and waited to see what the response would be, and the response was not long in arising.
“Can you come over and talk about this?” Tony asked. “Woolsey is all upset.”
Thus came to pass one of the crazier meetings I was to attend during my eight years as director. Jim Woolsey, then head of the CIA, Tony Lake, and I gathered for lunch in Tony’s office, and Woolsey protested.
His message was something like “Russia is ours,” after I had explained what lay behind my proposal.
“I don’t want agents only in Russia,” I shot back. “I want one in Budapest and in Bucharest,” and on and on.
“But we have officers in all those places,” Jim said, aghast.
“They’re spies! We need police officers.”
While Jim was reeling from that, I went on to explain that FBI Legats scattered throughout the former communist world were only phase one of the plan. I also wanted to set up a police training academy. I’d already spoken with officials in Hungary about the academy, and they were willing to cosponsor it and help find a location in Budapest. As I talked on, I could see that the CIA director was beginning to warm to the idea.
“You might have a point,” he finally agreed.
“Sure, I do,” I said, inspired to even more oratory. “Training their police will strengthen our relationships throughout the region, and it will be good for the people in those countries as well. The more the police know about scientific investigations and forensics, the more likely they are to look for fingerprints instead of beating someone up to get a confession. We’ll teach the police there the same way we do at Quantico. Good training enforces the rule of law.”
By now, Woolsey was practically out of his seat with excitement. He would provide all the necessary equipment, then rig the equipment to find out what they’re talking about. The CIA could recruit police right through the academy! I said the FBI would never do that.
Tony Lake had long before taken to studying the ceiling. He didn’t want to be any part of this train wreck, but when Jim and I were through miscommunicating, Tony gave me the White House’s go-ahead for the Moscow Legat and promised to coordinate, which he ably did. Within four years we had opened legat offices everywhere from Moscow to Tallinn, Estonia, to Riyadh and Islamabad and Almaty in Kazakhstan. It wasn’t always easy to convince officials in places like New Delhi that the FBI and the CIA weren’t interchangeable, that we wouldn’t be operational, and that—Jim Woolsey’s notions notwithstanding—we were actually trying to help their law enforcement agencies, not penetrate them. (I was never able to convince the Chinese of that although a legat was eventually admitted after I left in June 2001.) But far more often than not, we succeeded and in the process began to build a global network of trust.
The brains and excruciatingly complex work necessary to expand from seventeen to forty-four legats in eight years were supplied by Bob and Jim Bucknam. Their incredible skill, diplomacy, and tenacity were responsible for this historic transformation of the FBI. Dick Holbrooke, one of the country’s most brilliant diplomats and global thinkers, also gave us continuous guidance and helped forge our foreign strategy.
We also began training what would become a river of thousands upon thousands of foreign law-enforcement officials in a downtown Budapest building that had once been a military-police barracks, then home to a cavalry regiment, and finally, in the communist era, a headquarters for the secret police. That’s the kind of irony I’ll take any day, but none of it ever could have happened if the usual politics of self-interest had prevailed.
Later, with the counsel of my friend and mentor Elie Wiesel, the FBI set up a multinational task force in Bucharest known as the Southeast European Cooperative Initiative (SECI). This thriving, highly successful regional task force—the first organized police effort in the region—is dedicated to stopping the sexual trafficking of women.
For a decade now I’ve been taking an informal poll among people outside the Bureau who ask me about its work: how many FBI agents do you think there are? Often, I’ll provide a few numbers just to create some context. Chicago has a police force of 12,000 officers. New York City uses 44,000 officers to police all five of its boroughs. And the FBI? Often, I’ll get estimates in the 60,000 to 100,000 range, sometimes higher. In fact, the FBI makes do with less than 12,000 agents, fewer than Chicago to police a whole nation and increasingly the world.
The public tends to think of the Bureau as a vast national police force armed with unlimited powers and a sweeping mandate to peek under virtually everyone’s tent flap whenever it wants to. The reality is far different. The American people never wanted a national police force—the occupying British army soured them on that idea before America was ever born—and they don’t have one or want one now. Nor does the FBI have an unlimited mandate or even a very rational one. That’s why the loony notion of a domestic, MI-5 style secret police force to fight terrorists will never be accepted by Americans.
The Bureau has grown reactively far more than it has grown logically. We’ve had to constantly stretch old legislation to cover new conditions. Too frequently, also, we have been a dumping ground for popular causes that everyone in Congress can rally behind but that few in power want to fund. (The “Deadbeat Dads” legislation of the mid-1990s comes quickly to mind, a laudable cause given the number of fathers who fail to meet their court-ordered support payments and the hardship that can follow, but a responsibility for which Congress added not one thin additional dime to the FBI’s budget.) More often than not, powers have been granted to the Bureau grudgingly, not willingly; after the fact, not before it; as a corrective, not a preventive. As director, I sometimes thought I was running a huge crisis-intervention unit, except that each new crisis seemed to add permanent responsibilities to the Bureau’s purview without necessarily expanding the resources to take them on.
In a sense, all this is nothing new. Up until the early 1930s, the FBI basically consisted of a bunch of accountants crunching numbers for J. Edgar Hoover in the hope of catching the Al Capones of the world cheating on their taxes. Agents weren’t even authorized to carry firearms. If they wanted to make an arrest in, say, Chicago, they had to call local police officers to go with them. Then along came the bank-robbery boom of the Great Depression, especially across the Midwest. Machine Gun Kelly, Pretty Boy Floyd, Ma Barker, Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, the whole mess of them—they were the terrorists of their day. The automobile—the getaway car—was the new technology that made it work, and just as with terrorists today, a ruthless disregard for life was the glue that held it all together.
One day in 1933 outside the Kansas City train station two unarmed FBI agents and a couple of local policeman were escorting a captured bank robber when a posse of his confederates ambushed the party, freed the felon, and left one of the agents and several of the policemen dead. In response, Congress gave agents authority to make arrests, work bank robberies, including pursuing the thieves across state lines, and the right to carry firearms. And thus the Bureau has grown ever since.
The bank-robbery terrorists of the Great Depression became the Soviet spies of the Cold War who became the domestic terrorists of the mid-1990s and the global terrorists of century’s end. The car, the cutting-edge crime technology of the Bureau’s birth years, yielded to the plane, the cell phone, the computer. And at every step along the way, the FBI has had to adjust and often wait for Congress to catch up with it and provide the relevant legislation. Systematic this is not.
It was the famous 1957 meeting of Mafia chieftains in Appalachia, New York, that awoke America to the pervasive role of organized crime in the economy and in society generally and years later led Congress to enact the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (or RICO) Act. And it was RICO that gave the Justice Department and the FBI greatly expanded powers to pursue the capos and dons and corrupt union heads and their business allies down all the rat holes where they were used to hiding out.
Similarly, it took all the horrors of the civil-rights movement—the murders in Philadelphia, Mississippi, ugly school-door confrontations, and too much more—to finally compel the creation of a Civil Rights Division within the Justice Department and an i
nvestigative and enforcement wing within the FBI. Meanwhile, the concept of civil rights keeps subdividing and expanding, and with every new interpretation, the Bureau gains more responsibilities. Today, the Bureau’s broad civil-rights agenda includes the National Church Arson Task Force, the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, Hate Crimes Working Groups, compliance with the Hate Crimes Statistics Act, as well as more traditional duties, including civil-rights violations by law enforcement officers.
The Bureau led the investigation into the brutalization by New York City police officers of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima. We did the work that resulted in the indictment for civil-rights violations of eight guards at the Corcoran State Prison in California. The Bureau was out front in the investigations of the death of James Byrd, Jr., the African-American dragged behind a pickup truck and finally decapitated in Texas in the summer of 1998, and Matthew Shepard, the gay college student murdered in Laramie, Wyoming, that same fall. We also led the investigation that resulted in a nearly twenty-year prison sentence for Lemrick Nelson after he had been acquitted by a local jury for the murder of Australian doctoral candidate Yankel Rosenbaum during the 1991 riots in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. Charles Price, also found guilty in the attack, was not even charged in state court.
During my tenure, we also set out to correct historic civil-rights wrongs: cases where murders were never prosecuted, or ones where likely suspects were never brought to trial or were let off by hung juries or outright acquitted. It took fourteen years to win the first conviction for the 1963 murders of four girls in the infamous bombing at Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church: an Alabama Klan leader known as Dynamite Bob Chambliss, who died in prison without ever admitting his guilt. I’d visited the church. I had been inspired by Frank Johnson and sworn in to office by him. I wanted us to go after the rest of the murderers, to finally close the books on that awful day, and we did. In 2001, Thomas Blanton Jr. was convicted in the murders and sentenced to life in prison, where he soon died. The next year the last of the bombers, Bobby Frank Cherry, drew a mandatory life sentence. He had lived free for forty years, his crime a barely concealed secret. To me, that was an insult to the very concept of justice for all citizens.
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