But as far as we were concerned in those first days and weeks, McVeigh was only the first part of the puzzle. Our assumption was, and had to be, that the bombing was possibly the handiwork of organized terrorists, possibly from the Middle East. The attack resembled too many others whose origins were well established: the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon in the early 1980s and the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York only a few years earlier, to cite the most obvious examples. What’s more, a federal building was a natural and symbolic target for a foreign force intent on harming the United States. In truth, too, I think it was simply hard for any of us to really fathom that an American citizen—a military veteran at that—could hold such hatred for his country that he would slaughter wholesale so many innocent people, children among them.
That’s the mind-set with which I arrived at Oklahoma City, the lens through which I was viewing the case, and by those terms, the legal effort on the ground simply wasn’t sufficient. The lawyers on hand at the local U.S. Attorney’s Office were undoubtedly competent people, but the office lacked a cadre of prosecutors experienced in crisis situations. The pace was too leisurely. Search warrants were dripping out; other court applications were being created and processed far too slowly. To pick up the pace, I detailed my chief counsel, Howard Shapiro, to sit out in Oklahoma City and hold people’s feet to the fire. Howard had been with me in Atlanta when we took over the investigation of the mail bombings that would eventually lead us to Walter Leroy Moody. He knew how to get things done on the fly.
I never thought for a moment that my decision to put Howard in charge would be popular, and it wasn’t. I was micromanaging, which nobody likes the boss to do. Inevitably, I was insulting the attorneys in place out there. I would have been sore myself had I been in their shoes. But I wasn’t running a popularity contest. I was overseeing the investigation of a probable conspiracy that resulted in horrific deaths, and the better a conspiracy is organized, the faster it breaks apart and disappears once the crime has been committed. Speed is everything—speed and pressure.
That’s also why I insisted we investigate Terry Nichols. McVeigh had been living on the Michigan farm owned by Nichols and his brother, James. The two of them—McVeigh and Terry Nichols—were close friends. James Nichols had bought fertilizer and fuel oil, critical components of the bomb that had destroyed the Murrah Building. None of it was perfect. Friendship isn’t a crime, and just about every farmer buys fuel oil and fertilizer at one time or another. I certainly took my hits for pressing law-enforcement officials to arrest and charge Nichols: hits from our own field-office people who didn’t want to charge him and who didn’t like being overruled any more than the U.S. attorneys liked having a baby-sitter assigned to them; hits from a federal judge, too, who thought the Bureau had gone over the line. But if the conspiracy was bigger than what we had found to date, I wanted maximum pressure put on the subject (or subjects) and their lawyers.
It was Timothy McVeigh himself, by the way, who persuaded me that the conspiracy didn’t go beyond what we had uncovered. The more he talked, the more we learned about him, the more it seemed evident that his was largely a self-conspiracy, abetted by Terry Nichols and to a lesser extent by McVeigh’s old army buddy Michael Fortier, who had foreknowledge of the bombing plot but failed to act on it. But that was six months out, just about the time we were ready to take McVeigh to trial. Until then, it was my duty and obligation to assume the opposite and to act based on that assumption. Any competent FBI director, I hope, would have done the same.
On June 2, 1997, Timothy McVeigh was found guilty of murdering in cold blood 168 of his fellow citizens, then perhaps the most heinous crime on American soil in the twentieth century. Eleven days later, he was sentenced to death by lethal injection for his crimes. By year’s end, Terry Nichols had been convicted in a separate trial on manslaughter and conspiracy charges for which he would be sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole.
Unfortunately, though, that wasn’t the end of Timothy McVeigh. In early May 2001, a week before McVeigh was to be executed, we told his lawyers that the FBI had inadvertently withheld more than three thousand pages of documents. On May 11, Attorney General John Ashcroft delayed McVeigh’s execution for a month, and on May 15, we expanded our search for more documents. No one was happy about the mix-up, and if Ashcroft was upset with the FBI, I never saw or heard it. He was concerned about the delay, sure. I was, too. I was also disappointed by what had caused it, and in testimony before the House Appropriations Committee on May 16, I took full responsibility for the failure. I was in the driver’s seat. We should have done better. But a little perspective, please.
Investigations of the sort we undertook in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing are a massive effort, unimaginable to someone who has never been in the middle of one. This case alone generated some 3.5 tons of evidence, nearly a billion separate pieces of information. FBI agents conducted more than 28,000 interviews and examined 13.2 million hotel reservations, 3.1 million Ryder truck rental records, and 628,000 airline reservation records. Storing so much information, sorting it, reporting it—they were all Herculean tasks. We did not perform well on a very tiny portion of it this time. Our technology was not up to the challenge. Some of our field offices sent in summaries of the information without the underlying documentation. Some wrongly concluded that the information they held was so extraneous to the task at hand that they never submitted it at all. Other mistakes of judgment were made. Human error happens, and I deeply regretted it and still do, not because justice was compromised—it clearly wasn’t—but because the errors marred an otherwise exemplary investigation and because the delays at the end delayed the punishment of a horrendous act.
Timothy McVeigh’s lawyers naturally seized on the withheld records as a last chance to save their client, but both they and attorneys for Terry Nichols ultimately agreed that not a single one of those missing 3,135 pages of documents was relevant in the least. More important, judges so found.
As for me, I regarded our celebrated mix-up more as a sign of strength than of weakness. The missing material was discovered by manually, painstakingly inventorying our records—post conviction and post appeal—and comparing the results to discovery lists of exhibits that had been given over to the defense lawyers. No court compelled us to undertake that exercise, and no one intentionally kept back anything once it was under way and the discrepancies found. Had the finders kept quiet about the discovery, no one outside a tiny circle would have ever known. But that was what was so rewarding about how the matter was handled once the omissions were discovered. No one sat on the information. No one tried to push it off into a dark corner or sweep it under the rug. The FBI did exactly what the public should expect. It gave full disclosure.
Over the course of the eight years I was director, I had spent hundreds of hours at Quantico and in the field offices, telling our people that honesty was more important than the successful result of a case. For eight years I had been preaching accountability, assuring agents that it was okay to make mistakes so long as we acknowledged and learned from them. And this time we did it and took our lumps. The FBI was no longer an imperial culture. I’ll take some credit for that.
In the end, too, justice was done. On June 11, 2001, Timothy McVeigh was executed in Terre Haute, Indiana. Nichols later admitted his guilt and no other conspirators surfaced. The FBI was totally vindicated.
Washington is filled with lightning-rod jobs, from the presidency on down, but when it comes to taking heat, day in and day out from a multiplicity of directions, I’ll stack the job of FBI director up against any other position in town.
The pecking order that goes with the post almost guarantees you’ll remain in close combat. I reported to two judiciary committees, two appropriations committees, two intelligence committees, asas well as to the attorney general and the president. I happen to think that’s a good thing—a lot of people should be keeping an eye on the nation’s law
-enforcement apparatus and on its top cop—but no other agency head in Washington has reporting obligations on that scale.
No other agency that I can think of operates with our degree of transparency either. Like the FBI, the CIA also has a raft of reporting responsibilities. Like us, it gathers intelligence, a messy business in the best of times. (The best sources are generally not the best citizens, no matter what country you’re talking about.) But the CIA gets to hide behind a veil of secrecy when needed. I testified so often before congressional committees that I wore a rut in the pavement between the Hoover Building and Capitol Hill, and with very few exceptions those were public appearances. But no one on the Hill or elsewhere expected George Tenet to sit down in an open committee session with the tape recorders humming and the cameras whirring, and defend every last detail of some action his agency had taken. Given that CIA activity can sometimes involve “lethal findings”—basically, licenses to kill signed by the president and approved by Congress—almost no one on the Hill even wanted transparency from the mother ship out in Langley, Virginia. Some things are best left unsaid in public.
Not so the FBI. We’re a law-enforcement agency. At the end of the day, we don’t get to appear before secret tribunals and explain away our actions. We have to go before a court and a jury, and judges and juries expect and should expect us to abide by both the spirit and letter of the law.
FBI directors in my view should be judicious but not so cautious they won’t take necessary risks. We took plenty of risks during my tenure, both domestically and abroad. We went after Archer Daniels Midland. We snatched Ramzi Yousef, who was under indictment for murder in the first World Trade Center attack, from a hotel in Pakistan and just missed nabbing Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in Qatar. We thought outside the box when it was appropriate, and we fought for the tools that would let us operate outside the box and redefine it to the advantage of all Americans—digital wiretap authority, for example.
But the FBI isn’t the KGB. We can’t just go barging in someplace because we have suspicions or even because we’re 99 percent certain of what we’ll find. We can be creative, sure, but we can’t take liberties and perform experiments on the basic laws of the land. Court warrants, chains of custody with regard to evidence, indictments, due process—these obligations trace back not just to our own enabling statutes but to the very legal foundations of the Constitution, of our nation. Beyond such enduring restraints, any number of congressional committees over the years have imposed very exacting conditions on what our agents can and cannot do. During my time as director, Janet Reno and I added our own further strictures consistent with what we thought the intent of Congress and the courts to be. All that circumscribed our actions, but it also guaranteed, to the extent that guidelines can govern human behavior, that the FBI under my guidance would behave judiciously. I make no apology for that. To my mind, people should demand nothing less.
Simply put, the FBI that I inherited in the late summer of 1993 needed to improve credibility and trustworthiness. Some of that was historical. Probably no government agency in history has ever been better served by television than the Bureau was by The F.B.I., which debuted in 1965 and ran for nine seasons, 234 episodes in all. With Efrem Zimbalist Jr. starring as the incorruptible inspector Lew Erskine, the show treated the Bureau so reverentially that J. Edgar Hoover allowed scenes to be shot on location in its old headquarters at DOJ. But even as the cameras were rolling, the wheels were coming loose.
Hoover’s obsessive pursuit of the American Communist party led him to embrace a broad array of covert measures known as the Counter Intelligence Program—the infamous COINTELPRO. Unable to distinguish legitimate social protest from communist agitation, Hoover ended up going after iconic American figures, including Martin Luther King Jr. In 1975, the COINTELPRO excesses were dragged to the surface by the Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, known as the Church Committee after its chairman, the late senator Frank Church of Idaho. Mark Felt and others were convicted and later pardoned for running illegal FBI operations. By then, everyone knew that the Bureau—now under Hoover’s successor, L. Patrick Gray—had also grossly failed to exercise its political independence in the wake of the Watergate breakin.
But it wasn’t just past history that was haunting the Bureau when I took it over in September 1993. Waco and the horrible images of that consuming fire were still fresh in the public’s memory. So was the FBI’s standoff at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, with Randy Weaver and his family. Thanks to the newly embraced Internet, the disaffected could commune on-line, trade wild accusations about the Bureau and its actions, link them to some alleged global network, and spawn a whole new generation of off-the-wall conspiracy theorists. (Timothy McVeigh was one of them.)
Inevitably, all this had an effect on the public at large and on the media. The FBI labored under a presumption of guilt, not innocence. For some Americans, we were the heavies, the government thugs. As director, I never knew where I was going to be pressed from next—the media, Congress, the public generally.
Sometimes it was the backside of a case that jumped up and bit us from behind. The Branch Davidian standoff didn’t happen on my watch. If it had, I probably would have given the attorney general different advice on how to proceed and would have followed the playbook I used with the Freemen in Montana. As I told Bill Clinton when we first talked about the director’s job, the government, not David Koresh, had time on its side. But the fact that I was a federal judge working out of a Manhattan courthouse on the day all hell broke loose in Waco, Texas, didn’t prevent the case from keeping my attention while in office.
The Freeman siege was resolved peacefully without a shot being fired. I applied a formula of patience and the first-time use by the FBI of third-party negotiators: non-government people with whom the fringe Freeman identified. I will always be grateful both to Senator John McCain and then Congressman Bill Richardson who generously offered to act as our negotiators. Both of these fine public servants never sought any credit or publicity for their offer—a testament to their character and integrity. They should be recognized here. Not surprisingly, the Freeman matter ended without bloodshed and so, of course, generated very little press as a result. No inquiries, hearings, bombast, or even a thank-you to our agents for a job well done. My only regret and deep sadness there was the accidental death by car accident of Kevin Kramer, one of our best young agents.
Of the many issues that lingered long after the smoke had cleared in Waco, the one that absolutely, positively wouldn’t die was whether military CS—or gas—canisters had been fired by government forces surrounding the Branch Davidian compound on the final morning of the standoff and, more specifically, whether the canisters had ignited the conflagration that killed Koresh and seventy-four of his followers. I admit that the matter was not high on my must-attend-to list. The canister story had been kept alive by the conspiracy-theory networks and given added legs by lawyers pushing a wrongful-death suit. To me, that sounded like the usual pack of suspects. The evidence we had available to us suggested that the canisters had never been used. As for the fire itself, I never thought there was the least chance that it had been ignited by anyone other than Koresh himself.
When documents did finally surface, six years after the fact, that indicated we had in fact used the gas canisters, I went to Janet Reno and told her that we needed an outside investigator to take a fresh look at the whole scenario of the final hours at Waco and see how the canisters might have fit into the story line. Janet agreed, and she was able to convince John Danforth, the distinguished former Republican senator from Missouri, to head up the investigation.
I wasn’t any happier about this last-minute discovery than I had been when the missing McVeigh documents were found. I was even less happy when Danforth took FBI agents detailed to him and sent them secretly into our own headquarters to secure a group of files for his investigation. To me, going through the back door not only added to the gen
eral hysteria surrounding the Waco aftermath, it also was utterly unnecessary. We didn’t have the files under lock and key. All they had to do was walk in and ask for them, but courtesy, if nothing else, might suggest they announce themselves first. I called Danforth and told him as much.
“Look,” I said as best I can remember, “if you think you need to act in this manner, unilaterally, without any notice to us, then we’re not going to stand in your way. But to get all the records you want, it might be more productive to call me and let us help you with that.”
That, at least, put a stop to the cat-and-mouse games. Far more important, Danforth determined in the end that, while the canisters had indeed been used, they had been fired several hours prior to the onset of the blaze at targets far removed from the fire’s origins. Bottom line: the deaths at the Branch Davidian compound had been caused by the messianic lunatic who had brought his followers there in the first place. That’s the point, not the wild speculation; but long months passed in the director’s office where the emphasis seemed to be exactly the other way around.
Other times, compelling evidence intersected with political correctness in ways that served, to my mind, to hamstring the entire judicial process. I’m thinking specifically of Wen Ho Lee.
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