As a rule, I’d wake Marilyn around 6:30, just as the sun was rising. By then, John Griglione would be waiting outside in our Chevy Suburban.
By 7:00 most mornings, I’d be at my desk in the Hoover Building, going through e-mails, teletypes from the overseas offices, the newspapers, other reports that had come in overnight. At 8:00, the FBI’s senior executive staff—eight to ten people in all, some permanent, some rotating in and out as the situation demanded—would gather in my office for a daily update. More briefings and meetings filled much of the rest of the day.
I could have cocooned myself in my office, been constantly busy, and rarely left, but I made a point of doing just the opposite. Around lunch, I’d head up to the cafeteria, not really to eat and not in the midst of some phalanx of high-ranking officials but just to walk around by myself and chat casually with the people I ran into. I tried to leave the building on my own most days, too, even when I didn’t have an official meeting scheduled somewhere else. I’d stop at a nearby Au Bon Pain for coffee or wander across the street to the Justice Department, walking alone, again chatting with the agents and FBI personnel I ran across. I wanted everyone to know that I wasn’t off in some unapproachable privacy zone.
At first, I could tell it was a big deal. What’s up with the director? But soon enough, we got used to each other’s company, and I was the better informed because of it. I’d do the same thing when I went down to the FBI Academy at Quantico or visited our field offices—sit down with agents, who do the real work for the FBI, without their special agent in charge (SAC), so I could better understand what the job was like at street level. This was the best way to get real-time and unfiltered information about our organization. It was also thrilling to have the routine privilege of talking to and thanking the always impressive men and women of the FBI. Over my almost eight years as director, I visited each of our fifty-six field offices several times.
During the course of an average week, I might meet with two or three foreign officials who were visiting Washington: the head of the French intelligence service, say, or a South American delegation. Sometimes I’d meet with ambassadors. Attorney General Janet Reno and I got together at least once a week, almost always in her office, and almost always I came by myself, not with a whole detail of FBI brass. As the counterterrorism threat grew, I’d meet at least once a week with CIA director George Tenet at my office, or in Langley, or in the office set aside for the CIA chief in the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House. As I said, George and I became close friends and I have great respect and affection for him. There were other meetings on a more or less regular basis: with the drug czar, with the national security adviser, with assistant secretaries of this and that. Our law-enforcement brief stretched in innumerable directions and overlapped with nearly every department and agency in Washington, or so it sometimes seemed. For reasons I’ll get into later, I almost never met with Bill Clinton or even talked with him, but communication with the White House was constant.
I made it a point to leave the office whenever I could by no later than 7 P.M. Marilyn and I had things we needed to spend time on, and I wanted to be home with my family in any event, but there was a second reason. Washington operates by an odd macho code of hours. If I stayed past 7:00, so would most of my top people, and if I announced that I was coming in on a Saturday morning to catch up on some work, practically the entire staff would come in then, too. The only way to get people to go home was to leave myself, so I did. Maybe once a month, I would quietly drive down to the office on a Saturday and work until midday.
The children were through with dinner most nights when I got home, but I’d help with their homework, do baths, get them to bed, and sometimes go out to a school or church meeting. Then the rest of the workday would begin. I had a tiny office at home that the FBI technical people had fitted with a safe and secure communications. I’d settle in there for more paperwork or to meet with one of my staff or an agent who would stop by on some particular matter. Obviously, the postage-stamp home office was in some ways just an extension of my large one on Pennsylvania Avenue, but the kids knew their dad was at home, downstairs, while they slept. That made a big difference to me.
By midnight or 1:00, I’d finally get to bed. Do the math, and you’ll see that I rarely slept more than five hours. I had been doing that for a long time, and I’ll probably pay a price for it someday, but for me, five hours has always seemed just about enough bedtime. Almost invariably, the morning run served to revive me. I never took a sick day the entire time.
As crazy as it seems, I could have worked a lot more—traveled extensively, hung around the White House all weekend long. More than a few people in the administration did, and they often complained the whole way that they had no time left over for their families, that their marriages were suffering, that they didn’t “have a life.” My guess is that at least in some cases they wanted that lifestyle, but official Washington is a work-obsessed city. People get caught up in that. They’re only happy if the world is in perpetual crisis, and if it’s not, they act as if it were. To my mind, it’s a pathology.
My own feeling is that if I had put in any more hours on the job, I would just have been spinning my wheels, and I didn’t want to let it come to that. To help make sure it didn’t, I filled a long wall in my office with my kids’ drawings—eight years’ worth of them by the end, a reminder to me every time I looked up at them that there was another reality out there, that life didn’t begin and end in this large box I occupied halfway between Capitol Hill and the White House.
In much the same spirit, Marilyn and I never discussed my job when I got home in the evening. It was our unwritten rule, religiously followed. The small window of time I had between my downtown workday and my at-home one was an FBI-free zone. Marilyn had two more children during my time as director: Liam Patrick and Colin Michael. (Appropriately, Colin was born at the same hospital in Reston, Virginia, where we took his brothers dozens of times to be patched up after one household disaster or another.) As a mother of six boys, Marilyn performed flawlessly. She had wanted to be a juvenile probation officer and had majored in criminal justice at Mercy-hurst College in Erie, PA. This fortunately dovetailed with raising six boys. But she still had more than enough on her plate, and we had plenty of family matters to discuss without dragging in my small daily victories and setbacks. The kids caught the spirit, too. I can think of maybe one or two times they asked about my work, no more.
Off-loading anxiety or passing on gossip is not part of my nature in any event, but if I had an issue I was grappling with, something I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around, I had plenty of resources: the senior officials who worked for me, some of whom I had known for decades; fellow judges, my old network from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, including Bob Fiske; for big matters, Bill Webster, who had served as head of both the FBI and CIA and was always a willing and wise listener; sometimes for the biggest items, the first President Bush.
It was also impossible in my role as FBI director to ignore the threats to my family and to me personally. I said no to the escort cars, the security trailer in the backyard, and the armor-plated behemoth to chauffeur me around because Marilyn and I didn’t want the Freeh family living in a bubble at the end of the street. We were in the leafy suburbs of Washington, D.C., not along the Green Line in Beirut or the Green Zone in Baghdad. I also didn’t want to be surrounded by a posse-size security detail the way other directors had been—in part for the same reason but also because if someone did come after me, I didn’t want a lot of other people hurt or worse. I was the target, not anyone else.
But I tried to be no more stupid than I had to be. By the time I took over as director, I’d had a lifetime’s worth of exposure to the dark side of the human psyche. My friend Giovanni Falcone and his wife had been blown up in Sicily. I had visited with Helen Vance not long after she was badly wounded and her husband, Judge Robert Vance, gruesomely murdered by one o
f Roy Moody’s mail bombs, and I still call Helen every year on the anniversary of that attack. Whether it was true or not, I had to assume that bad people had me on their radar screen. I had put bin Laden on the FBI’s “top-ten” list and oversaw his investigation, indictment, and fugitive hunt. I always assumed my family and I were big targets.
The mail took care of itself. Every package and envelope addressed to our house was intercepted by the FBI and cleared before being delivered to our home. In one form or another, that’s standard operating procedure these days for high-ranking government officials.
The children were another matter. During my eight years as director, Marilyn and I never stopped worrying about their safety. Short of putting them into something like a witness protection program, there was no way to protect the kids completely, and if I had been inclined to such radical measures, I wouldn’t have taken the job in the first place. In the world we live in, zero risk doesn’t exist.
I felt much the same about having agents following the boys around school all day. It’s just not a natural way for a kid to grow up. Instead, we opted for small, practical fixes. Because predictable routes are the most vulnerable moment for an attack or abduction, our people followed the children to and from school. We also made sure the administrators and teachers knew about our concerns for the boys’ welfare, and we’re still grateful for the excellent job those school officials did in setting up and maintaining procedures to screen anyone coming into the buildings. The Fairfax County, Virginia, police also patrolled the house several times a day and were our first responders in case of emergency.
On family trips we did everything we could to leave quietly, arrive without fanfare, and keep a low profile while we were enjoying ourselves, but that didn’t always work. We were down in Hilton Head, South Carolina, on vacation when one of the little ones gouged himself somehow. I was sitting with him in the hospital, waiting for someone to sew him up, when a couple of local deputies brought in four manacled prisoners for treatment.
“Wait a minute,” one of the prisoners said after he’d eyed me for a while. “I know you from somewhere.”
“Naw,” I told him, “we’re from out of town.”
“No, no,” he persisted, “I’ve seen you!”
“Of course, you have,” one of the deputies finally piped up. “He’s the FBI director.”
“Thanks,” I told him. Another cover blown.
For my protection, John Griglione and I had that machine gun in the console of our Suburban for the commute into and out of town, and I carried a 9-mm handgun with me everywhere I went when I left home or the office: as I walked out on Pennsylvania Avenue to get a cup of coffee, to meetings with the attorney general or in the White House or at the CIA, on planes and trains, at church, at school plays, driving the family car on vacations, in the evening when I worked at my home office. Just about the only times I ever took off the gun were when I slept—and then it was on the nightstand, just a hand’s reach away—and in the early morning, when I went jogging. (That’s not entirely rational, I realize, given that I was running alone down darkened streets, but some things you just have to take on faith.)
In truth, I assumed that if very capable people did decide to come after me, they would probably succeed whether I was packing my trusty 9-mm or surrounded by agents willing to lay down their lives for me or not, but I kept it close at hand all the same, both for protection and as a constant reminder never to let down my guard. Over the years, I suspect that mind-set has become a more general habit of personality.
Think of yourself as running a company that produces everything from applesauce to zippers; a company with 535 members on its board of directors, three-quarters of whom must run for reelection every two years; then imagine yourself reporting as CEO up through a chain of command with a dozen different agendas, under constant media scrutiny, knowing that every memorandum, every piece of paper, every smallest secret is in constant danger of being leaked. And then give your employees weapons and send them out to perform the country’s most dangerous work. Give yourself a firearm, too, and work like a dog from sunup to well after sundown, and you’ll have some idea of what the FBI director’s job is like. Most important, keep in mind that everything the FBI does every day impacts directly on the nation’s safety and precious liberties. In sum, every bit of our work is controversial.
Every day brought some amazing, sometimes frightening new twist to the old imperatives of law enforcement. And that was just when things were fairly calm, when the Bureau was in the midst of doing what it does for a living, not what earns it front-page headlines and scathing editorial comment. When the TV cameras started rolling, when there were call slips from every major newspaper and television news outlet stacked on my desk, when bombs were exploding in public venues and spies were crawling out from under the woodwork—that’s when the job really got demanding.
How did I get through it? That’s an easy one. The calm and steadfast nature of Marilyn and the 28,000 FBI heroes—agents and other personnel—who did their difficult jobs superbly with fidelity, bravery, and integrity. They made the temporary occupant of the director’s office look better than he ever was.
One agent of very special note was John Collingwood. When I first met him at FBI headquarters in 1981, he appeared to be a shy, retiring lawyer of few words. I later saw him as the FBI’s champion on the Hill and with the media, a man who was able to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat every time. John thrived on crisis, and with eternal optimism and flawless judgment on the most sensitive issues, he was the FBI’s beacon in every storm. Immensely respected and trusted in Congress, the FBI, and throughout the media, John always came up with the right solution to the worst problem. I recall many stints at the witness tables on the Hill—I testified more than any other official in D.C.—where after feeling particularly beaten up at a hearing, John would put his arm around me and say, “This is great. You got killed, but we’ll get a lot of money to fix this.” He was right.
CHAPTER 8
“ … and the Guy’s Bob Hanssen”
I’m surprised that April 19, 1996, is not a day that the nation pauses to remember and mourn. Pearl Harbor Day and D-Day—December 7 and June 6—are engraved on the national conscience. September 11, I’m sure, won’t pass in my lifetime without some public event marking the destruction of the World Trade Center towers or the attack on the Pentagon. But April 19—the date of the worst terrorist attack ever inflicted on the United States by its own citizenry—goes virtually unrecognized except in Oklahoma City.
For an amateur, Timothy McVeigh was an accomplished bomber. With maybe 80 percent of the explosives that terrorists used on Khobar Towers, McVeigh managed to rip apart the nine-story Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and kill 168 of his countrymen, nearly nine times the number who died in the Saudi attack.
For me, the Oklahoma City bombing was an eerie preview of what I would see fourteen months later in Dhahran: the same army of law-enforcement officers and rescue workers crawling all over the crime scene (some of them in fact the very same people), the same red paint outlining the human remains that had yet to be collected for fear of destroying vital evidence, the same random debris scattered far and wide. But there was one difference I’ll never forget. The Murrah Federal Building had housed a child-care center. So much of the litter that lay around seemed to have come from there: pieces of construction paper, broken toys, little backpacks. Seeing it was devastating. Watching little bodies being pulled from that wreckage was worse.
I arrived roughly twenty-four hours after the bombing. I wanted to give our people time to set up without having to worry about looking after the director. The Monday-morning quarterbacks and second-guessers must have arrived on the next plane because they started complaining not long afterward and haven’t quieted down completely yet.
In fact, the Oklahoma City bombing is probably as good a place as any to begin dealing with how I ran the FBI.
My view of the d
irector’s role was to be in the field with the “street agents” whenever I could, especially when the stakes were high, but I didn’t rush off to Saudi Arabia or to Yemen, to East Africa or to Oklahoma City because I love airplanes or for the frequent-flyer miles—government servants don’t get them. And I certainly didn’t rush off because I wanted to be away from my family: that was the worst part of it. I made sure I was on location in those places because that’s what I understood, and still understand, the job to be.
As director, I could be significantly involved in a maximum of maybe twenty-five cases at any given time. That doesn’t mean I ignored the hundreds of others that were trying to bubble their way up to my office, but the simple reality of the position and of the limits of human attention is that no more than two dozen or so major cases could fit on the radar screen simultaneously: a major white-collar crime case; a big civil-rights case; an investigation of a high-ranking government figure, a terrorist attack involving loss of life, cases of a similar magnitude. Those are the ones I would be briefed on regularly, the ones about which I would request additional information, the ones sometimes I would get involved in more directly—requesting a better prosecutor, pushing through a search warrant or providing greater resources, doing liaison with a foreign power if that was called for, and occasionally also making sure I was on the ground at and around the crime scene because only there can you really see and sense what needs doing.
Oklahoma City is a case in point. Finding the immediate perpetrator was hardly a challenge at all because as good a bomb maker as Timothy McVeigh was, he was a lousy criminal when it came to avoiding arrest. Less than an hour and a half after he had laid waste to the Murrah Building, McVeigh was stopped for speeding in Perry, Oklahoma. If that wasn’t stupid enough, he had a gun jammed in his waistband. Guns aren’t rare in that part of the country, but the policeman who pulled McVeigh over had the good sense and training to smell something fishy about this one, and to detain McVeigh until he could check things out. Meanwhile, a very different type of policeman—Jim Norman, a bomb expert we had flown in from New York City—had uncovered an axle from the truck used in the bombing some two blocks from the explosion (and think of that: two blocks!) and was using the vehicle identification number stamped on it to trace the truck back to the Ryder agency that had rented it and from there to Timothy McVeigh. McVeigh was just about set for a bail hearing when the Bureau’s National Crime Information Center connected the dots and the police had their man. If McVeigh had walked from the bombing to the nearest precinct station and turned himself in, he couldn’t have made it much easier.
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