My FBI

by Louis J. Freeh

  The enemy meanwhile was arming itself with trucks loaded with five thousand pounds of explosive, with suicide boats and 747s packed with our own people. Our warrants could help us snatch a Ramzi Yousef and bring him back to the United States to face justice. Their trucks and boats and planes could rip the face off a military barracks, split open embassies, topple the tallest towers in Manhattan, and set fire to the very headquarters of American military might. That’s what we learned on 9/11: al Qaeda is not the Cosa Nostra, and Osama bin Laden is not a John Gotti or a Ted Kaczynski.

  I had been in dozens of meetings before 9/11, sessions called specifically to discuss terrorism. We all saw the problem. I can remember Senator Bob Kerrey using the phrase “acts of war” long before the country was prepared to admit that’s what they were. We knew what steps to take, too. I’d served on the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security—the so-called Gore Commission, chaired by the vice president—convened to improve air safety in the wake of the crash of TWA 800. Our report, issued in February 1997, warned that the airline industry and operations were vulnerable at multiple points to hijackings and terrorist attacks, but basically nothing was done about it. Politicians were worried that the public wouldn’t tolerate long lines at security checkpoints. The airlines didn’t want to spend the money to beef up their own defenses. Appalled by the prospect of greatly increased user fees to help offset the proposed multibillion-dollar changes, the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association questioned the commission’s independence and objectivity. What should have been a big step forward in the fight against terrorism devolved into the usual inside-the-Beltway brawl.

  I’d seen the evidence of the ongoing war with my own eyes, too, at Dhahran, in East Africa, on the USS Cole at the Port of Aden, and elsewhere. But until 9/11, we lacked the political leadership and more important the political will to do what had to be done, and that ran right across both administrations I served under.

  During my scant five months in the first George W. Bush term, I found the White House better organized than it had been under Bill Clinton. Not surprisingly, I thought the new president had a more personal touch than his predecessor. I was pleased that the Bush team had been far more supportive than the Clinton one in going after the Khobar Towers bombers and winning indictments against them. But the nation’s fundamental approach to Osama bin Laden and his ilk was no different after the inauguration of January 21, 2001, than it had been before. We were fighting criminals, not an enemy force.

  The Joint Intelligence Committees said as much in a report issued in December 2002: “ … neither President Clinton nor President Bush nor their National Security Councils put the government or the Intelligence Community on a war footing before September 11 th.”

  As a measure of our unwillingness to look reality square in the eye, the 2000 presidential campaign spoke volumes. Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda had repeatedly declared war on the United States—in a 1996 fatwa and again in 1998 in a more strongly worded directive to kill Americans anywhere. And they had backed up their words with bloody deeds. They were a clear and present danger, yet not only did we refuse to declare war back on them, we virtually refused to discuss the matter in public.

  I will always remember standing on the deck of the USS Cole in mid-October 2000. A suicide boat had attacked the navy guided-missile destroyer, blown a forty-five-foot hole in her port side, and killed seventeen U.S. sailors. The explosion had rolled the side of the ship up as if it were the lid of some giant sardine can. In front of and below me, our agents and navy personnel were working with unbelievable care and respect as they removed human remains from the tangled mess of steel. It was monstrous, a clear act of war by a sworn opponent of the United States, right in the middle of a heated presidential campaign. Yet within forty-eight hours, the Cole had virtually disappeared from the news cycle. As for the campaign itself, the attack was a nonissue. I can’t recall either candidate ever raising it, or the larger terrorist threat it spoke of, in any serious, ongoing way.

  I had been the one who had gone to Pakistan in 2000 to ask for Pervez Musharraf’s help in capturing Osama bin Laden because, before September 11, 2001, bin Laden was a law-enforcement issue. We had outstanding warrants against him. That was our reason for pursuing him. If our government had a different mind-set, the secretaries of state and defense would have been in Lahore with me, or instead of me. Or perhaps Sandy Berger. But that wasn’t the case.

  Yes, we had gone after bin Laden with a salvo of Tomahawk missiles back in 1998. That was the one exception, in retaliation for the embassy bombings in East Africa. Otherwise, he was always a legal problem, a fugitive from justice. Even the ambitious 1998 Alex Station plan to snatch bin Laden from his lair using Special Forces, FBI agents, and Afghani troops turned on the indictments we held. The Justice Department and the FBI were the ones with the standing to go after him because before 9/11, bin Laden was, by our government’s definition, an international criminal, not an imminent national-security threat. Afterward, we saw him for what he was, the head of a shadowy army intent on carrying the terror war to our shores and murdering as many Americans as he could, anywhere the opportunity presented itself. The change in mind-set changed everything with it.

  A small but telling example of what I’m talking about: it must have been early in 2000 when Brian Stafford, then the director of the Secret Service, called to ask for my help. Shortly after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, the section of Pennsylvania Avenue that runs in front of the Treasury Department, the White House, and the Old Executive Office Building had been closed to vehicular traffic, but the decision had never been popular with D.C. politicians or with commuters. The traffic that used to regularly rumble past the White House had been shuffled off to the streets to the north, creating new rush-hour choke points.

  Local officials also didn’t like the message sent by the concrete barricades at either end of that historic stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue. They feared tourists would be scared to visit a city that acted as if it were under siege. The barricades didn’t sit well with some on the Hill either. America couldn’t look scared. Aestheticians and prominent architects were tut-tutting over the barricades as well. The long-range plan was to create an attractive pedestrian mall in front of the White House, but for the moment, those chunks of concrete were plain ugly.

  Finally, the White House itself had begun to buckle. D.C. mayor Anthony Williams and Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District’s nonvoting Democratic representative, had joined the fray. Pressure was building to let the cars roll by once more. That’s why Brian Stafford had called. He wanted my help in convincing the White House that the barricades were necessary. I had our people do a computer simulation of what would happen if a van packed with bomb materials (Timothy McVeigh was our model) exploded as close to the White House as it could get with the barricades removed. According to our simulation, the entire West Wing would have been blown away, pulverized, incinerated, and everyone within it killed. Brian Stafford took those results to Sandy Berger—whose office happens to be in the West Wing—and the agitation to remove the barricades disappeared. But that’s a good index of where most people’s heads were prior to 9/11. As far as the White House was concerned, blocking off Pennsylvania Avenue was about politics, not national security.

  We took the threat of terrorism very seriously as the end of the millennium neared. The celebrations planned across the nation and around the world to mark the flip-over from 1999 to 2000 were target-rich environments, rife with symbolic value. Terrorists love to play on apocalyptic fears. Al Qaeda in particular had shown in East Africa and in Yemen that it was capable of staging complex attacks beyond its own base, and of course a fatwa had been issued, religious authority to kill.

  As events turned out, we were right to be concerned. Al Qaeda had planned a three-prong attack meant to span the globe. Ahmed Ressam was assigned, among other less lethal tasks, the job of bombing Los Angeles International Airport. Had he not been stopped by U.S. Customs i
nspectors as he tried to enter Washington State via ferry from Canada in a car packed with explosives, Ressam might even have succeeded. Instead, he was found guilty by a federal jury on nine counts of plotting terrorist attacks against millennium celebrations along the West Coast of the United States.

  Jordanian intelligence services quashed an al Qaeda cell that had been charged with reducing to rubble the Amman Radisson, whose four hundred rooms had been booked almost entirely by Americans and Israelis gathered to celebrate the millennium. Other sites in Jordan had been targeted as well. One terrorist had boasted that there wouldn’t be enough body bags in all of the kingdom to hold the dead. In Yemen, we simply got lucky. A Cole-like assault on a U.S. Navy destroyer, The Sullivans, failed when the attack vessel sunk in the mud under the weight of its own explosives.

  By the afternoon of December 31, 1999, the FBI’s Strategic Information and Operations Center, or SIOC, was already full. Representatives of every relevant governmental body were on hand, from the CIA to the Department of Defense, the White House, and on down the line—not necessarily the directors, the George Tenets and Bill Cohens, but senior people in a position to get things done in a hurry if necessary. The attorney general was there. So were all my top people. The place was packed. Every desk was taken, every room was full. It was the only time I would ever see the place bursting at the seams like that. And we weren’t just sitting on our hands. At one point, we needed to throw together an electronic surveillance warrant related to the Ahmed Ressam investigation just then breaking open on the West Coast. I can remember picking up a pencil, hurriedly sketching out what the affidavit should say, and handing it over to the lawyers to begin processing.

  Terrorism was on all our minds, and we all breathed with relief as word came in of the foiled plots and as networks and operatives related to them began to be rolled up. Each new midnight that passed east to west around the globe without major incident was a cause for minor celebration.

  By a little before four that morning, when we finally stood down and had a quick debrief, every one of us at SIOC, I’m sure, felt good about what hadn’t happened that night. We had put ourselves on a war footing, and because we had, we had dodged whatever horrors the bad guys had intended for us. But rather than celebrate that fact, I found myself worried about what would happen when we went back to business as usual. For one evening, New Year’s Eve, we had seen the enemy for what it was and stared it down, but we had neither the will nor the resources to keep up the alert level. That’s what really frightened me: not December 31,1999, but January 1, 2000, and beyond.

  It was not only the threat of terrorist attacks that had occupied our attention in the crisis center that long day and night. The fact is, we worried equally about the information infrastructure as we did about bombs, as much about databases lost as we did about people killed. That’s where the bulk of the government’s focus and the White House’s attention rested: information security, not national security. Would computers fail to roll over to 2000 because of some fatal programming flaw? And if so, what would happen to the data stored within them? How about if banks, hospitals, insurers, and a whole raft of other data-dependent entities, private and public, lost their records? And how vulnerable were all these things to attack? For weeks we had had an entire SIOC wing set up as a 24/7 “watch center” to monitor and react to Internet attacks, infrastructure intrusions, anything that would threaten major components of the Internet or of critical-data business, government, or private sector continuity.

  In retrospect, with 9/11 behind us, that seems foolish. How can we worry as much about a database as about an enemy who would eventually fly commercial aircraft into office towers and the Pentagon and kill Americans by the thousands? But that’s the point I’m trying to make here: You can’t read history backward.

  All of which gets me to the self-appointed Paul Revere of 9/11, Richard A. Clarke. To hear Dick Clarke tell it, he was everywhere in the months, even years before September 11, 2001, prophetically warning of what was to so tragically befall this country. Presidents, cabinet secretaries, agency heads, national security advisers, leaders of Congress—they all had the benefit of his wisdom, apparently, and almost to a person they failed to heed it. I must have been among them because Clarke includes ten references to me in the index of his best-selling book Against All Enemies. But here’s what I remember about Dick Clarke: almost nothing of any significance.

  A career bureaucrat who began as an analyst in the Defense Department back in 1973, Clarke had been plucked off the National Security Council staff in May 1998 by Bill Clinton and appointed the first National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism. As titles go, it has a golden ring, but access is what counts in Washington, and Dick Clarke had very little.

  Janet Reno, myself, and others who were charged with monitoring and reacting to terrorist threats convened regularly with Sandy Berger to discuss national security issues. The deputy national security adviser would be on hand. So would other deputies at times, it wasn’t just top dogs. But Dick Clarke was almost never included in these so-called principals meetings. Given the grandeur of his title, I found his absence conspicuous.

  In his book, Clarke recounts a critical “principals” meeting close to the millennium celebration when Sandy Berger looked hard at Janet, George Tenet, and me, and said, “‘We have stopped two sets of attacks planned for the millennium. You can bet your measly federal paycheck that there are more out there and we have to stop them too. I spoke with the president and he wants you all to know … this is it, nothing more important, all assets. We stop this fucker.’”

  Nice tale, but I was never at such a meeting, and Sandy Berger never would have spoken like that in front of the attorney general.

  Clarke tells another nice tale that seems to have him at the epicenter of activity the night of the millennium, nervously monitoring activity around the globe from the Y2K Coordination Center at the White House, then darting up to the White House roof to watch the fireworks on the Mall, then back downstairs to keep an eye on midnight as it crept west toward Los Angeles, and finally back to the roof to pop a bottle in celebration at 3 A.M. East Coast time. Maybe it all happened exactly as he writes. But I know for a fact that everyone who really mattered, the serious people, were all in SIOC on December 31 from 1:00 in the afternoon until past 3:00 the following morning, and Dick Clarke wasn’t among them. As for me, I was too tired to have champagne when the night was over. I just wanted to get home.

  The same was true during the Bush administration. If he was rushing around the executive branch, trying to make a case that we were in imminent danger of a terrorist attack on our shores, he wasn’t trying to make that case with me. He never spoke to me, never contacted me, never sent me a memo. I met often with Condoleezza Rice just as I had met often with Sandy Berger, and once again, Clarke was never there.

  Clarke’s portfolio shifted slightly in the Bush administration to information security, but in both roles he was basically a second-tier player. The only time he ever became visible was after a crisis. I’d turn on the secure television from the White House, and there Clarke would be, wanting to know in a very bureaucratic fashion what everyone was doing so he could report back to his superiors. As far as my senior associates and I were concerned, he never had a reputation as someone who pushed for things no one else wanted to do. That’s the persona he created for himself post-9/11.

  Nor is the other hero of Clarke’s book, John O’Neill, the John O’Neill I knew. O’Neill, Clarke writes, was too aggressive for my tastes; he thought too much outside the box. He was so willing to break crockery in his pursuit of Osama bin Laden that we essentially drove him out of the Bureau, which is how he happened to be director of security at the World Trade Center complex on September 11, 2001.

  I think I know why Clarke wrote those things. He and John O’Neill were very close, and he felt his death deeply, as I did. But the John O’Neill I worked with was never proposing anything different from what we
were already doing. There was no notion within the Bureau that we were holding him back from any course of action. He did have authority over counterterrorism issues, and he was very good at supervising criminal investigations in places like East Africa. We could investigate, do forensic exams, interview witnesses, recruit informants, collect intelligence, but we couldn’t go where the law wouldn’t allow us to go. O’Neill knew that, and he acted accordingly.

  One more thing: John O’Neill didn’t quit the FBI in disgust over our alleged temerity in fighting the terrorists. That’s another myth that Clarke created after the fact of the 9/11 attacks.

  For good measure, by the way, Clarke repeats in his book the rumor that I was a member of Opus Dei. Had he called me, I could have told him that was my brother, but he didn’t bother. To me, that about says it all: bad facts and no access.

  Epilogue

  September 11, 2001, did change everything—for the FBI and the CIA, for the nation and the American people, even for the world generally. All of us live today with a fundamentally different mind-set than we woke up with on that awful morning. But 9/11 didn’t change everything retroactively.

  On the day before we could no longer ignore the war we were in, the FBI couldn’t beg, borrow, or steal from Congress the funding necessary to fully upgrade and enlarge our counterterrorism manpower and operations. Far better to bankroll some new pork-barrel project back home where the voters are than to strengthen America’s defenses against such an amorphous and undeclared enemy. On the day after we could no longer ignore war, Congress couldn’t give us enough money, at least temporarily, and it couldn’t pass the Patriot Act quickly enough either. Congress, too, could finally see in the aftermath of 9/11 that the old paradigm no longer held.