I was in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, serving under Rudy Giuliani, when we went after Marc Rich. Rudy, who would later become the Republican mayor of New York, wasn’t consulted on the pardon. Nor was my colleague Sandy Weinberg, who had been the lead counsel on the case. Nor was Janet Reno, who was by definition the government’s highest-ranking lawyer and should have had a say in the matter. I had long been beyond the pale as far as Bill Clinton was concerned, but I should have been consulted, too. Rich was a fugitive, after all. He might have been enjoying the life of Riley, but warrants existed for his arrest. It might have been nice to let the FBI know beforehand that we could tear them all up and roll out the red carpet instead. At the least, the president could have given us an advance peek at his plans, but we didn’t find out Marc Rich was a free man until the morning of George W. Bush’s inauguration.
All that was damning enough—it was worse than that—but Rich’s former wife, Denise, was the final straw. A political fund-raiser and a longtime advocate for her ex-husband’s pardon, Denise Rich had donated more than a million dollars to the Democratic Party during the eight years Bill Clinton had been president. Even if the pardon had had any merit, the stench of the circumstances should have been enough to dissuade the president. It didn’t, of course. That wasn’t Bill Clinton.
I’ll leave the final word on my ex-boss and the forty-second president of the United States to one of Clinton’s former students from his days as a professor at the University of Arkansas School of Law, Susan Weber Wright.
Although she had been appointed a U.S. district judge by the first President Bush, as I was, Wright had enjoyed a temporary hero status among Clinton supporters when she dismissed a suit against the president by Paula Jones. In that case, Wright had ruled that even if Jones’s claims were true, they didn’t amount to a violation of her civil rights as the suit claimed. But that didn’t end the matter. On January 17, 1998, the president had been deposed as part of the discovery in Jones’s suit, and in that session he had denied having sexual relationships with Monica Lewinsky. Eight months later, the president acknowledged in a national address that, while his testimony in the Jones trial was “legally accurate,” he had indeed enjoyed a relationship with the former White House intern that was “not appropriate” and “wrong.”
For Judge Wright, that was enough. She cited Clinton for civil contempt for lying about his relationship with Lewinsky—the first time a sitting president has ever been so cited—and she asked the Arkansas Supreme Court’s Committee on Professional Conduct to determine whether the president should forfeit his license to practice law in the state. The committee did eventually decide to suspend Bill Clinton’s license for a period of five years, embarrassment enough, but it was the words of Judge Wright’s April 13, 1999, decision that I found so searing.
“The court takes no pleasure whatsoever in holding this nation’s president in contempt of court and is acutely aware, as was the Supreme Court, that the president ‘occupies a unique office with powers and responsibilities so vast and important that the public interest demands that he devote his undivided time and attention to his public duties,’” she wrote, “ … [but] there simply is no escaping the fact that the president deliberately violated this court’s discovery orders and thereby undermined the integrity of the judicial system.”
In case anyone missed the point, Judge Wright drove it home again:
“Simply put, the president’s deposition testimony regarding whether he had ever been alone with Ms. Lewinsky was intentionally false, and his statements regarding whether he had ever engaged in sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky likewise were intentionally false, notwithstanding tortured definitions and interpretations of the term ‘sexual relations.’
“ … [T]he President’s contumacious conduct in this case, coming as it did from a member of the bar and the chief law enforcement officer of this nation, was without justification and undermined the integrity of the judicial system.”
Maybe I’m simply a law freak, a stick in the mud. Maybe I lack an adequate appreciation for the distinctions between the public and private man. Bill Clinton still argues that Ken Starr and all the other prosecutors who went after him were trying to “criminalize” his personal life. It might surprise the ex-president, but I actually have some sympathy for that argument, at least in broad terms. Ken Starr decidedly was not among them, but I do think there were people out to get Bill Clinton, people who would stop at virtually nothing to bring him down. You could argue that Clinton didn’t have to offer up so many targets, but fair’s fair, and the president did get hammered from all sides.
Judge Wright’s contempt citation had nothing to do with the relationship per se; it had to do with the president’s shameful efforts to cover up the relationship. As an attorney, as a onetime law professor and state attorney general, Bill Clinton knew the rules. He knew what the law and the legal code of ethics required of him, and in an attempt to save his skin, he intentionally violated those rules and sullied the highest office in the land. To me, it was the most devastating moment of my entire tenure as director. I thought and I still think that the presidency hit an all-time low with that citation, perhaps only equaled by Richard Nixon, about as low as a benchmark can go.
If a federal judge were ever to say those same words or their equivalent to me, and if I knew them to be true as Bill Clinton must know them to be, I think I would be so devastated that I might never show my face in public again. The ex-president, however, seems to suffer no such pangs of conscience. Perhaps that says more than I could possibly add here.
Politics is the air Washington breathes, the water it drinks. It also can be the germ that infects you, and in the almost eight years I served as FBI director under Bill Clinton that danger was always present. We were investigating a sitting president during one of the most partisan periods in modern American history. Comity had broken down on Capitol Hill, particularly in the House of Representatives. Charges and countercharges flew every which way, but in all that time, there was never once a Democrat or a Republican who charged publicly that I had politicized the office I held or the Bureau I led or who called for my removal.
The closest anyone came was when Representative Bob Livingston of Louisiana, the Republican chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, got it in his head that my chief counsel, Howard Shapiro, had tipped the White House off to some investigation we were undertaking that might involve administration members. The charge was ridiculous. Howard is both an incredibly able attorney and absolutely honest. But Livingston wouldn’t let the matter drop. He wanted Howard to resign or, failing that, wanted me to fire him.
I went up to the Hill for one of the annual Appropriations Committee hearings. Normally a subcommittee chairman handles those matters, but Livingston himself showed up, clearly upset and loaded for bear, and started firing off all sorts of questions about Howard that had nothing to do with the matter at hand. Finally, I called him on it.
“Mr. Chairman,” I said, “if you’re not happy with what I’m doing, ask for my resignation. You do that, and I’ll take it very seriously.”
He didn’t. In fact, he backed off completely, never raised the issue again, and before too much longer was gone from Congress himself. But no one else called for my resignation either, then or at any other point, despite the deeply contentious political climate. That’s not something to be proud of. Keeping the director’s office politics-free should be baseline behavior, not the exception. But when I look back on my eight years in the post, I’m pleased that I was able to walk that fine line so successfully.
CHAPTER 10
9/11
I’ll never forget one of the last times I ever saw my mother alive. I’d started a new job that very day, as senior vice chairman of MBNA America, the giant credit-card issuer headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware. I had been gone from the director’s job for a little over two months by then, but Marilyn and the boys were staying on in Great Fall
s, Virginia, until the end of the year to ease the dislocation of a move. I was on my own, a temporary bachelor. MBNA and I had agreed that I would work part-time until after my mother died. She had only days left, and I wanted to be by her side as much as possible.
Mom was in the Palisades Medical Center, across the Hudson River from the Upper West Side of Manhattan and just below the bluff of Braddock Park, where I had played so many days as a kid. As I left the hospital that evening, a little after midnight, I looked down the river as I often did to admire the skyline of New York City. As always, the twin towers of the World Trade Center were glittering in the distance, the tallest and last things to be seen looking south across the island. September 11, 2001, was just beginning.
Marilyn was the first person to let me know what was happening. I was finding my way around a new office in Wilmington when she called to say that a commercial airliner had flown into the upper floors of one of the WTC towers. The place was on fire. An evacuation was under way. If I had been more focused on my old life than on my new one at that moment, I might have seen the warning signs more clearly, but like most people, I thought it was just a horrible, horrible accident.
When Dale Watson, the FBI’s assistant director for counterterrorism, called forty-five minutes later, the entire terrain had changed. The second tower had been hit. Dale told me that we were in the midst of a major attack. By then, his reaction was much the same as mine. We grieved for the people who had been injured and killed, but we also realized that the moment we had both feared and fought against had finally arrived. Dale and I had seen up close the war the enemy was waging on us in the Middle East and Africa. Now they had brought the fight to our own shores.
If there was any good at all to be found in the mayhem spreading across our television screens, it was that our government could no longer look away from places like Khobar Towers, no longer look away from the ruins of our embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam or the almost sunk USS Cole. Because of what had happened and because of where it happened, America would finally have to go to war in return. The events of the next hour or so—the hit on the Pentagon, the plane downed near Shanksville, Pennsylania—only confirmed for both of us what our hearts and minds first told us. (I feel certain, by the way, that the Shanksville airliner was headed for the U.S. Capitol. It’s a more powerful symbol abroad than the White House, and al Qaeda was going for the most potent American symbols it could find.)
I drove back to my mother’s hospital again that afternoon, a trip normally of about two hours that, on that infamous day, took more than triple that time. From my mother’s hospital window, we could see a pall of dust hanging over the site where the World Trade Center had been. Very soon, the victims across the river would start to take on a more personal face. My former international terrorism chief John O’Neill lay dead somewhere inside the rubble. He had been with Dale Watson and me in Saudi Arabia five years earlier, on the heels of the bombing at Khobar Towers. Less than a year earlier, in October 2000, John and I had stood side by side on the deck of the USS Cole after it had been attacked and nearly sunk by al Qaeda operatives. FBI special agent Leonard Hatton was also dead in the rubble. Like John O’Neill, Hatton gave his life helping to evacuate those who were still trapped in the towers. Every director bleeds for the violent death of every brave man and woman who served under his watch, and I still bleed for both men. Somewhere in that debris, too, were people I had grown up near and gone to school with.
A few days after 9/11, as the nation was mourning its losses and trying to understand what had happened, my father, my brothers, and I buried my mother. At every level—personal, public, and professional—it was as sad a time as I have ever known.
By now, hundreds of thousands of pages of newsprint, untold broadcast hours, and dozens of books have been devoted to parsing what went wrong on 9/11. Both the Clinton and the Bush administrations have been blamed at least partially, and so has just about every relevant agency under both presidents. The Federal Aviation Administration paid insufficient attention to airplane security. The Immigration and Naturalization Service and the State Department and Customs should have done a better job of guarding our borders. The CIA didn’t have ears where it should have been listening or eyes where it should have been looking. At the FBI we lacked technological sophistication, and we let what could have been vital intelligence get trapped in the bureaucracy.
I’ve added my own accounts to the towering pile of words in testimony before the Joint Intelligence Committees on October 8, 2002, and before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on April 13, 2004, and in articles for the Wall Street Journal. Along the way I’ve picked up praise for how I ran the FBI in the eight years preceding the attacks and I’ve been hit with a few brickbats, too.
In these pages let me summarize what I’ve learned and what I’ve come to believe about that worst moment in our current American history: what went wrong at the core, what went right in the margins, and why I think we as a nation were fundamentally unprepared for what happened that day.
First, on the FBI and technology: we were in the Dark Ages. The most basic wonders of the computer revolution had not yet arrived at the Bureau. My guess is that the average twelve-year-old sitting at a desktop PC anywhere in America on the evening of September 10, 2001, had more computing power at his fingertips than almost any FBI agent had available at his or her workstation. That’s a pathetic record. We needed improved technological capacity desperately, but it’s not like we didn’t know it.
For years we had been asking Congress, almost begging it, for the money to upgrade our information technology systems, and for years Congress had been turning us down. The numbers get hard to follow here, but let me try to summarize them because I think the lesson is important. As early as 1992, before I came on board, the Bureau had begun planning for what became known as the Information Sharing Initiative, or ISI. The goals were less than ambitious by modern computing standards, but they’re a measure of how far behind the times the Bureau had fallen. We wanted to replace outdated desktops, upgrade network capacity so agents could electronically exchange large files and images, improve our analytical capacities, and allow information sharing with other law-enforcement and intelligence agencies. (That last item takes serious planning, by the way. The last thing anyone would ever want is for hackers to get into our files.) To fund all this, we estimated a cost of about $432 million. Then, once we had the plan together and the development work taken care of, we set out to find the money.
In 1998, we asked Congress for a total of $70 million for new technology: $20 million in basic funding for information technology and $50 million in new budget authority for ISI. Congress gave us $2 million of the requested $50 million, but it forbade us from spending any funds on ISI until we submitted a comprehensive implementation plan to Congress. Two years later we came back again, this time asking for $58.8 million: $20 million for base funding and $38.8 million in new budget authority for ISI. We got no new budget authority this time, and we were again prohibited from redirecting available funds to ISI. Meanwhile, the implementation plan we had submitted (and resubmitted) to Congress was caught up in a meat grinder over whether the work would be done in-house or by outside contractors, how the staging would be handled, and what the ultimate cost should be. When Congress finally did see a plan it could approve, the bottom line was less than half what we had initially proposed, not even adjusted for inflation.
If finding the money was hard, recruiting the people who could help us do the planning was no less difficult. Even relatively mid-level programmers were making fortunes in Silicon Valley in the late 1990s, at least by government pay standards. By an act of sheer good fortune, I was recommended to Bob Dies, who had run network operations for IBM. By even greater fortune, Bob had always wanted to work for the FBI and was looking for a challenge, and Lord only knows, we had that waiting for him. I remember so well Bob’s comment after he had completed his first in-depth review of our technology:
“You guys aren’t on life support,” he said. “You’re dead!”
Bob was right, and he would be a large part of the remedy. But we never could have gotten Bob on board had he not had a burning desire to serve his country. For salary, the best we could do was maybe 20 percent of what he had been previously earning. We couldn’t pay his moving costs either—standard practice in the private sector but a no-go when someone is being brought in from the outside to fill a government post.
It was Bob Dies who devised the e-FBI plan that Congress finally accepted, Bob who designed the whole Trilogy system that would take us off life support and bring us into the twenty-first century of computing and information technology. But even then, even when we had an expert in shop and a plan Congress had signed off on and an obvious, desperate need, Trilogy was never wholly funded—and this is the point—until after September 11, 2001.
Money, though, is not everything. Common sense helps a little, too. Bob Dies was not only great at cutting to the chase, at zeroing in on what needed doing; he also was extremely practical. The system he devised was capable of meeting all our needs, of upgrading us to the levels necessary, but it was also fitted to the reality in which we, and he, had to work. In automotive terms, Bob designed us a highly reliable Chevrolet fitted perfectly to a Chevy frame. Problem was, the FBI later insisted on a Cadillac: all the bells and whistles, all the amenities, just put it on the existing chassis as best you can. Bob kept telling them they couldn’t do it, that the extras would overwhelm the base. For his troubles, they drove him out the door, but that didn’t stop his prediction from proving absolutely right. Last time I looked, the Bureau was paying $2 million to an outside research firm in a final effort to see if anything could be salvaged from its $170-million computer overhaul.
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