My FBI

by Louis J. Freeh

  Officer three took the bait: I can help, he said. His price was pretty much what we expected: the cash reward, U.S. citizenship for himself, and relocation to the U.S. for his mother. Fine, we said. Give us Graysuit, and it’s all yours. He couldn’t, the officer said. He knew him only by his Soviet code name, Ramon, but he had plenty of records and other information that related to Graysuit, all of it lifted from Lubyanka, the infamous KGB headquarters. That’s what he was proposing to sell us for several million dollars plus other considerations: not our mole but the path to his door.

  “No way,” George Tenet and I both said when word got back to us. After all, we were kids from Queens and Jersey City—not easily fooled. First, we weren’t about to hand over any reward based on this guy’s representation that he had the goods that might get us what we were after. Second, no one walks out of Lubyanka with anything without at best getting his hands chopped off. Third, it just smelled too much like a scam. In truth, though, we had nothing better to go on, so we told the agents who were in contact with officer three to string him along until we saw what he could produce. A good thing we did, too, because when agents met with him in October 2000, on neutral ground in a European country, he turned over a remarkable amount of material: dates and times of meetings, amounts of payments, other detailed records and files, all of it smuggled out of what had supposedly been one of the most secure locations on earth.

  I’ll never forget being in my seventh-floor office at FBI headquarters a week or so later when Neil Gallagher, my longtime colleague and able national security chief, popped in.

  “What are you finding?” I asked him. The material had just arrived at our laboratory on the third floor, where it was being evaluated forensically.

  “You’ve got to come down and see,” he said. And so I did.

  The documents, Neil told me, appeared to be authentic. As advertised, they did everything but name Graysuit, but that wasn’t what he had dragged me down to the third floor to show me.

  “There’s a tape recording,” Neil said.

  The Russians, it turned out, wanted to find out who this guy was just as much as we did. They had been doing business with him for two decades and paid a bundle of money along the way. Even though the information he provided was very good, it offended their professional pride not to know who they were dealing with. Not only did Graysuit never meet with his handlers or contact them; they were never able to even get a photo of him, despite plenty of efforts on their part, but finally they got him to talk on the telephone, and that’s what our source had handed over to us: a casette of that conversation.

  “And?” I asked Neil.

  “And the guy’s Bob Hanssen.”

  As I mentioned, I’d had almost no professional contact with Hanssen during my then seven-plus years as director. He’d spent the last five years detailed to the Office of Foreign Missions and the Department of State. But I had that earlier contact with him through my church, and by the fall of 2000 I had a second personal connection to him as well. We each had a son attending the same Catholic school, The Heights School, in Potomac, Maryland.

  We couldn’t just go out and arrest Bob Hanssen. We wanted to catch him in the act of espionage. To that end, we started surveillance on his computer, his car, his phone, anywhere and everything that he might use to contact the Russians and transport himself to them. (We didn’t yet know that he never even told his handlers when he made drops or what he was dropping. He would simply stash the documents in one of several predesignated spots, and the Russians would leave the money in the same place for later retrieval.)

  Meanwhile, the headmaster of The Heights School had asked me to give a talk at the annual father-son night in December 2000. Not surprisingly, Hanssen was part of the official committee waiting to welcome me when I arrived that evening. Just to overwhelm the event with irony, the headmaster had also asked me to talk about a particular topic: ethics and integrity in government. There I was on the small stage, waiting to speak and knowing that the man sitting in front of me had sold his nation down the river; and there Bob Hanssen was, sitting by his son in the front row, not having the least idea that we had finally cracked his cover. I don’t think I ever showed it that evening—I certainly hope I didn’t—but the longer I sat, the angrier I got, not just at the fact that the man had betrayed his country for money (as much as $600,000 in the aggregate) and smeared the agency I led but also that he had betrayed his family. His crimes were going to come crashing down not just on his own very deserving head but also on the head of the unsuspecting boy sitting next to him as well as his wife and the rest of his family. To me, that was almost as unforgivable as the espionage itself.

  As we had with the Clinton administration, we briefed the incoming Bush team on the pending arrest. Andy Card, George W. Bush’s chief of staff in waiting, was particularly concerned that we not haul Hanssen in on Inauguration Day. But he needn’t have worried. We waited for Graysuit to make a drop so we could catch him in the act. When he finally did—on Sunday night, February 18, 2001, in the woods near a bridge at a local park in Vienna, Virginia—we arrested him on the site. Then we waited another day and a half before announcing the arrest, in the hope that we could nab one of his Russian masters picking up the goods. They didn’t, but at least we had cut the cancer out from inside us. Right after we arrested Hanssen, President Bush called me in our operations center and asked that I convey his thanks to the FBI personnel involved. It was the first time since I became director that a president—and Bush had been in office less than thirty days—had ever thanked the FBI for protecting the country.

  In announcing the arrest February 20, I also announced that Judge William Webster—not only one of my predecessors but also a former CIA director—had agreed to lead an inquiry into the Bureau’s internal security functions. There’s probably no way to foolproof any organization against a determined traitor, but we have to make it as hard as possible for any such person to get in a position to sell out his country. In that announcement, I also let my own feelings show. Bob Hanssen and I had been in different training classes, but we’d joined the Bureau within a year of each other. What he had done was personal with me.

  Since becoming director over seven years ago, I have administered the FBI oath to each graduating class of special agents at the FBI Academy. Each time, I share the pride and sanctity of those words when new agents swear to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” and to “bear true faith and allegiance to the same.”

  Regrettably, I stand here today both saddened and outraged. An FBI agent who raised his right hand and spoke those words over twenty-five years ago has been charged today with violating that oath in the most egregious and reprehensible manner imaginable. The FBI entrusted him with some of the most sensitive secrets of the United States government and instead of being humbled by this honor, Hanssen has allegedly abused and betrayed that trust. The crimes alleged are an affront not only to his fellow FBI employees but to the American people, not to mention the pain and suffering he has brought upon his family. Our hearts go out to them. I take solace and satisfaction, however, that the FBI succeeded in this investigation. As an agency, we lived up to our responsibility, regardless of how painful it might be.

  One more thing Bob Hanssen did to my tenure as FBI director: he was mostly responsible for extending it another six or so months longer than I had intended.

  I had expected to announce my retirement after the November 2000 election. That would have been seven years plus a few months in office, and that seemed enough to me. The new president would appoint the next director for a ten-year term, and I would stay on briefly for the transition. Besides, the oldest boys were just about to reach college age. Once again, I was pressed by family circumstances to earn something beyond a government wage.

  Then, of course, the November election didn’t end, and didn’t end, and didn’t end. We had identified Hanssen by mid-November. By December,
when the Supreme Court found itself inserted into the middle of the election process, Hanssen was very much on my mind. No matter where we brought him down or how, his arrest was going to be a large black mark on a Bureau I had devoted a sizable chunk of my adult life to. I couldn’t let my successor bear that burden. I’d have to do it myself. By then, too, a light was at long last beginning to shine at the end of the long Khobar Towers tunnel. I had briefed President Bush on the case and Iran’s involvement. His response was immediate and fearless: “Go make the case.” Appropriately, he followed up on his father’s earlier and critical efforts to get FBI access to Saudi witnesses. The Khobar families and I will always be thankful to him for his leadership. If there was a chance of seeing that resolved on my watch, of seeing the families come to closure, I had to stick around, especially if my presence might help to make the difference. We were also still in the middle of a long, hard-fought campaign to gain the funding so that we could begin to upgrade our technology, and we were making significant improvements in our counterterrorism capabilities.

  All those factors weighed in my decision making, but there was a final reason, too, for staying on past the end of the Clinton administration. The president’s and my relationship was toxic by that time. Not only was he actively hostile toward me, he was hostile to the FBI generally. My departure might be one last opportunity for retaliation. Quite frankly, I was worried about whom he might appoint as my successor, even on a temporary basis.

  CHAPTER 9

  Bill and Me

  I never expected to be Bill Clinton’s best friend in Washington. We had gotten along well when I came down to the White House to talk about taking the job as director. My Rose Garden introduction to the media was a joy. The president had been as deft with my children as he was with me. But Bill Clinton is a master politician—as I wrote earlier, maybe the best of his generation. Winning people over is what masterful politicians do.

  It was obvious to me, even in that first meeting, that we had differences of temperament. He seemed to wear his heart on his sleeve. I’m more cautious by nature. Maybe because of my training as a federal prosecutor, I’ve learned to keep a check on my emotions. There were times I literally wanted to strangle the people I was trying to put behind bars. Roy Moody, to cite one obvious example, is an odious human being, a remorseless killer. But losing my temper at him in the courtroom wouldn’t have done the cause any good, nor would justice have been truly served if I had been anything less than fair in prosecuting Moody. That’s a hard line to walk, but over the years, I had come to edit my responses carefully before I spoke. Bill Clinton is almost the opposite. Like his big sprawling autobiography, he himself is big and sprawling and, basically, unedited. That was his strength as a politician, but it was also his great weakness as president.

  But if I didn’t expect to be pals with the president, I did think we would have plenty to hash over. He had been a law professor briefly before he started pursuing elected office. The first post he won was as Arkansas attorney general. He was so articulate, so obviously smart, and in our initial interview, he appeared to have a deep interest in law enforcement and an almost encyclopedic knowledge of some of the crises the FBI had faced in recent years: Ruby Ridge and, especially, Waco. Drug-enforcement issues, the Wall Street prosecutions—he was on top of everything. An activist president was certain, I thought, to take an active interest in the Bureau and its leadership. Again, I was wrong.

  Someone asked me not long ago how often I met with the president early in my service as FBI director, before things turned sour between us. To the best of my recollection, the answer is one time, maybe two, maybe three times in the entire seven-plus years I worked under Bill Clinton. Add in phone calls, and the total might climb to half a dozen, on the outside. Jim Woolsey, who took over the CIA at the start of the first Clinton administration, had the same experience: virtually no meetings, virtually no calls, essentially a wall of silence.

  At least in those early days, I don’t think it was personal. Politics is what drove so many of the Clinton people and, I have to assume, the president himself. He just wasn’t very interested in intelligence gathering or in law enforcement, and that meant he wasn’t very interested in Jim Woolsey or me.

  It did become personal, though, even though we were so seldom in each other’s company. Oddly enough, Tom Hanks is one of those who helped drive an early wedge between the president and me.

  Floyd Clarke, who was briefly acting director of the FBI before I took over the job permanently, left me two great parting gifts: the wisdom of his long years with the Bureau and his secretary, Wanda Siford, who knew where all the secret switches were that get things done in large bureaucracies. No director has ever been better served than I was by Wanda and Noreen Gawley, and believe me, I needed them both.

  It was Wanda who called me one day fairly early in my tenure, so excited she could barely contain herself.

  “You and Marilyn have been invited to the White House by the Clintons,” she said, “a dinner and a private screening with … Tom Hanks!”

  “You’ll have to decline for us,” I told her.

  “What?”

  “Decline.”

  I could already hear the response at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. That was the least of my problems, though. The greater issue was Marilyn.

  “Are you going to tell her?” Wanda asked.

  “Nah,” I said, “I don’t think so.”

  “You better. She might hear about it later.”

  That sounded like advice I couldn’t ignore, so that evening I gathered my courage up, waited for an opening, and dropped the news.

  “Listen, Marilyn,” I said, “we got invited to the White House to have dinner with Tom Hanks and the president and some other people, but we can’t go.”

  “What do you mean, we can’t go?” she asked.

  After all, this was supposed to be one of the side benefits of having a spouse who had an exalted position like mine. Sure, the job just ate up time, but every now and again some really neat, memorable moment came your way in reward: a state dinner, one of those galas at the Kennedy Center, or an intimate little meal and movie screening with the First Couple and a famous star like Tom Hanks.

  “I can’t explain it,” I told her. “We just can’t.”

  Perplexed, I think, might be the right word to describe Marilyn’s reaction, but in fact, I really couldn’t tell her why.

  The FBI is an investigative agency; it says so right in the name. And the two absolute requirements of a good investigator are to remain independent and to maintain confidentiality. That was the hurdle. Marilyn didn’t know it, but she and I couldn’t socialize with Bill Clinton because he was already the subject of a criminal investigation.

  I had barely gotten used to my new office furniture back in late 1993 when the head of the FBI criminal division dropped by to ask if he could brief me on an Arkansas savings and loan case. Sure, I said, go ahead. Thus I first learned in detail of the soon-to-be-famous Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan and of its owner, Jim McDougal, and thus, too, I first glimpsed the tip of the iceberg that would come to be known as Whitewater.

  The whole case is way too complicated to go into here. McDougal had bought a small savings and loan early in the 1980s, renamed it Madison Guaranty, and watched it sink along with the rest of the industry during the S and L debacle that hit a few years later. That was a common tale in the mid-1980s, but Jim McDougal had friends in high places in Arkansas.

  As the world was soon to learn, McDougal and his wife, Susan, were old pals and business partners with Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton. In 1978, the four had spent more than $200,000 in borrowed money to purchase land along the White River in the Ozarks region of northwest Arkansas. The idea was to subdivide the property and sell it to retirees looking for a quiet place in the country, but soaring interest rates and a sour economy caught up with the plan almost before it was hatched, and both the Clintons and McDougals lost money on the deal.

 
Faced with another investment gone sour, Jim McDougal now sought permission from the Arkansas Securities Commissioner to offer preferred stock in Madison Guaranty and to launch a subsidiary that would provide brokerage services. The commissioner, a lawyer named Beverly Bassett Schaffer, was a niece of Dale Bumpers, a former two-term governor of the state who was by then serving the third of four terms in the U.S. Senate. Schaffer also had been appointed to her post by, naturally, Governor Bill Clinton. To second his effort, McDougal had a lawyer at the Rose law firm, the state’s leading attorneys, write a letter explaining and supporting the stock proposal. That lawyer, of course, was Hillary Clinton, the governor’s wife. Like a river at a delta, Whitewater would fork out from there in dozens of directions, but that was for later.

  I wasn’t at all sure what kind of case could or should be made against the Clintons out of all this Madison Guaranty mess, but by the time the briefing ended, two large issues seemed to be looming in front of us. Issue one was jurisdictional. The Madison investigation was under the aegis of the Justice Department, but for some truly weird reasons, Justice was working the case with the inspector general of the Department of Labor. No, I said, that doesn’t make any sense. At one level, I would have preferred that the whole business just disappear, but if the case had any merit, if it was going to be pursued any further, then it belonged under the FBI’s Criminal Division. I wasn’t just fighting for turf, I was trying to ensure that the people who were most experienced with the issues at play were the ones who handled the investigation. That’s what the Criminal Division does. Placing the matter there was not only the most logical solution, it was clearly the fairest for all parties involved.