My FBI

by Louis J. Freeh

  It wasn’t as if we didn’t have successful models of active intervention in front of us. In 1980, the Drug Enforcement Agency and the FBI obtained arrest warrants for Manuel Noriega, a narco-terrorist who also happened to be the head of a sovereign state. Nobody could have expected even heavily armed DEA and FBI agents to drive up to the presidential palace in Panama City and arrest Noriega. Yet that’s essentially what happened after the political decision was made to invade Panama and support the arrest with overwhelming U.S. military force. Consequently, Noriega, whose years of drug trafficking killed at least as many Americans as died on 9/11, was brought back to the United States, tried, and convicted.

  As with Noriega, so with Osama bin Laden. We were drowning in legal authorities to pursue him. We had warrants for his arrest; we had tried and convicted his lieutenants in heinous crimes against American citizens. Bin Laden was on the FBI Most Wanted List; he was all over Interpol. What we lacked wasn’t the authority to pursue bin Laden and al Qaeda to the far corners of the earth. What we lacked was the spine to do it and the vision to see bin Laden and al Qaeda for what they were, and are.

  By mid-August of 1998, Osama bin Laden had issued his fatwa against Americans everywhere. His forces had savaged the U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi. Yet even then, the thought of going after him in his Afghan redoubt with anything more than an offshore Tomahawk attack seemed to pose unacceptable risks, politically and militarily. As late as 2000, the Clinton administration was considering and ultimately rejecting other plans to launch preemptive strikes against al Qaeda and their Taliban hosts and confederates. Again, the cost was too high, the political will lacking. By noon of September 11, 2001, with the World Trade Center towers reduced to rubble and the Pentagon still burning, everyone could see that the preemption had all been on the enemy’s side. But the reality of September 10 and before is just not the same as the reality of September 11 and afterward.

  September 11 was the difference—the bright line seared between a nation that sought to prosecute terrorists in its courts and one that hunted down and destroyed them using its global military might along with every available executive power.

  In a grim sense, 9/11 brought order out of chaos. Sifting through the millions of bits and bytes of intelligence gathered every day by the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Agency, and many other outposts is like drinking from a fire hydrant. But war concentrates the attention in a way that peace never can. War begins to tell you what to look for and who to look for and where to go looking. The same intelligence data that had little or no context before 9/11 was crawling with it afterward.

  September 11 also forced us, finally, to clarify the message we sent abroad to those who would be our enemies. For years, we had been feeding the terrorists’ embedded belief that the United States lacked the fortitude to fight a real war against them. In 1983, when Iran’s henchman surrogate, Hezbollah, murdered 243 marines in Beirut, Ronald Reagan responded by withdrawing U.S. military forces from the region. U.S. Navy divers, military attachés, CIA station chiefs, disabled cruise boat tourists, hundreds of innocent victims—Americans, Israelis, and Arabs—they all had been slaughtered wholesale for over two decades by ruthless terrorists virtually without fear of ever having to face American justice or military might. Iran’s most senior leaders planned, furnished, and carried out the 1996 murders of nineteen U.S. servicemen at Khobar Towers. As I’ve already shown, we had the goods on them, cold, yet the Clinton administration miserably failed to seek any redress. When the fascist Ba’ath regime in Baghdad tried to assassinate the first President Bush, our government responded by firing a few missiles into the Iraqi Intelligence Service’s headquarters, and by doing so after hours, to assure that we punished the cleaning staff of that genocidal organization rather than its leadership. Even Colonel Qaddafi’s mass murder of Americans over Lockerbie, Scotland, would ultimately be resolved with the trial of two token henchmen and the payment of cash to the victims’ families in lieu of real justice.

  The image of a lumbering giant stumbling around with a sign on its back reading “Kick Me” was not lost on our enemies. Nor was the message hard to miss. From al Qaeda’s risk analysis, what was there to lose in going after our embassies, our Aegis-class U.S. Navy cruisers, our citizens, even our homeland?

  I think it’s safe to say that we’ve gotten past that now. We send a different message these days, and America is a safer, not a more endangered, place for it. As individuals, we Americans may disagree on what battles to wage and where, for how long and with what resources, but as a nation we know we are at war.

  It’s no solace to the many, many families who lost loved ones on 9/11, but because of those attacks, we have begun to view the world as it is, not as we in our wonderful American naïveté hope it might be. That, I’m convinced, is the beginning of wisdom—but only the beginning. So much more remains to be done.

  With respect to the FBI in particular, Congress must provide both the legal authority and significant new funding so that the Bureau and its agents can manage encryption technology. Of course, privacy advocates are going to worry, but there’s no need for this technology to be any more intrusive than a wiretap on a phone line. Of course, the telecommunications industry wants to hold on to its trade secrets, but as I wrote earlier, it’s mind-boggling—insane in the extreme—that the lead agency in the war on terror lacks the legal standing and the technology to intercept and decrypt coded communications. It’s mind-boggling, too, that instead of legally compelling companies to hand over the keys to their encryption products, the Clinton administration actually permitted, with few restrictions, their shipment overseas.

  Hezbollah, Hamas, the Abu Nidal organization, and al Qaeda all use data scramblers to support their operations. A decade ago, Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing, was storing detailed plans to destroy United States airliners on encrypted files on his laptop computer. Yet even today, the FBI and other agencies are forced to conduct investigations of such groups and individuals with procedural devices forged in the last century during the infancy of the information-technology age. In all, it amounts to a huge gap in our public safety matrix.

  Congress also needs to significantly increase the number of FBI special agents and support positions devoted to counterterrorism. It needs to provide additional funding so that the Bureau and its experts can have access to emerging technologies and to research and development work going on in the private sector. And it needs to exempt the FBI from congressionally mandated compensation restrictions that forbid the Bureau from paying more than a low-level government salary to critically needed experts—Arabic and Farsi speakers, to cite only two obvious examples—who can command far greater pay in the private marketplace. As of the end of 2004, the FBI had on the order of 120,000 hours of intercepts that it lacked the manpower to translate. Does Congress think they’re going to magically transform themselves into English?

  I know this is an old refrain, from me and everyone else who ever headed up a major Washington bureaucracy: give me money, give me bodies, give me legislative authority. By the time you read these words, much of what I have advocated here might already have been seen to, but recent past history is not altogether promising. The simple fact is that when I testified before the 9/11 Commission in April 2004, two and a half years after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the FBI had been granted the authority to expand its pre-9/11 workforce by all of two hundred people, an increase of less than 2 percent—to do battle in a world we all agree has been fundamentally altered. That, too, is flat-out nuts. It’s time to get real.

  It’s time also for Congress to throw its full support behind the expansion of the FBI’s Legat offices overseas and behind its international training programs. That’s how we get eyes and ears abroad. That’s how we build the bridges and create the contacts that help us combat crime and terrorism in an increasingly borderless world. That’s how we spread our own system of justice and its built
-in protections to a world hungry for fair play. Of all the FBI’s programs, these two give American taxpayers the greatest ultimate return on the dollar.

  One more thing Congress needs to do: it needs to restructure the budget process so that the FBI director, the head of the Central Intelligence Agency, and the attorney general have greater authority to determine on their own the allocation of funding and resources as missions evolve and new threats emerge. The genius of so much of American industry is its suppleness, its ability to turn on a dime as economic and business conditions change here and around the globe, to pursue opportunity wherever it arises. America’s intelligence agencies, its crime fighters, and its lead counterterrorism forces need that same flexibility. Oversight, yes—the more, the merrier. Make the attorney general and the directors of the FBI and CIA defend their choices. Hold them accountable when they fall short. But enough with micromanagement. That’s how you turn horses into camels.

  I don’t think it does much good here to get into the specifics of some of the sweeping legislation that has been passed in the wake of 9/11: the Patriot Act and its extension, and the intelligence bill that President George W. Bush signed at the end of 2004, in particular. The courts, including the Supreme Court, will be deciding the merits of the various provisions of those acts and their mandates for years to come. As a lawyer and prosecutor, I’ve learned to wait until judges have had their say. But a few general thoughts on the rush to restructure and strengthen our intelligence gathering in the face of the global terrorism threat.

  First, I believe that establishing a separate Domestic Intelligence Service would be a major mistake. We Americans are rightly suspicious of a state secret-police force, even with all the constitutional protections we would still be entitled to. Standing up such a vast new division would also take at least a decade. These things just don’t happen overnight, and in the interim valuable time would be lost and valuable resources squandered when they are most needed. Rather than encourage cooperation between intelligence gathering and law enforcement—a vital necessity—the proposed new service would inevitably raise still more barriers and lead to still more turf wars. As I told the 9/11 Commission in response to a question from Chairman Thomas Kean, “If you thought the wall was a big one before, this would be a fortress.”

  What’s more, domestic intelligence divisions of the sort proposed simply don’t have much of a track record. The long-standing British domestic secret-police force, the model most often cited by proponents of a similar U.S. body, has had a multitude of problems, including its failure to spot would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid. I see nothing to convince me that our experience on this side of the ocean would be dramatically different. Give FBI agents the tools and the budget authority to do the job they have been assigned to do, and they’ll do it very well, and without having to skulk about in the dark. That’s not the American way, and it shouldn’t be.

  Contending that the FBI and CIA couldn’t or wouldn’t work together in the run-up to 9/11 might sell books and get you on the Sunday talk shows, but it simply is not true. George Tenet and I worked together extraordinarily well, as did the men and women who served under us.

  Courageous agents and officers from both services apprehended Ramzi Yousef from his fleabag Pakistani hotel and brought him back to stand trial in New York City. The joint bin Laden task force known as Alex Station gathered and disseminated to both agencies invaluable information about al Qaeda. No, we were never able to arrest Osama bin Laden and bring him back to the States for trial. No one has managed to do that yet even with the backing of a powerful military force. But thanks to Alex Station, we were able to identify and in many cases apprehend and disable al Qaeda’s leadership and its operatives and disrupt its plans, including plans to stage high-profile attacks on the eve of the millennium.

  To be sure, the Capitol was filled with yelping after 9/11 about the CIA and the FBI failing to communicate. Washington is never short of politicians willing to off-load their own share of the blame. But as far as I know, from the mid-1990s until the day I retired as director in June 2001, not a single member of Congress, including those on the various intelligence committees, ever once said to George Tenet or to me that there was any issue about our agencies not cooperating with one another.

  The FBI and the CIA did their job prior to 9/11, separately and in unison, and they are still doing their job today. Give them the freedom to be creative in pursuing terrorists, stifle the instinct to smother them both under some new überbureaucracy—a perfect Washington answer if ever there was one—and continue to back them up with the political will that was so tragically lacking in the years before September 2001, and both agencies will continue to do their jobs in the future. And Americans and America will be safer because of it.

  We also have to fight against the tendency to prepare for the last war when the world is changing constantly around us. September 11 was a horrific spectacle, full of pyrotechnics, and with a body count and audacity that guaranteed it would lead every newscast and every paper in every corner of the world for weeks and weeks to follow, but that doesn’t mean the next attack will look like the last one, at whatever magnitude greater or smaller.

  Yes, we have to be hypervigilant for attacks by land or sea, for nuclear backpack bombs, for reprises of the hijackings that turned our own passenger jets into enemy missiles, but we have to constantly think outside those boxes as well. Just before he stepped down as secretary of Health and Human Services, Tommy Thompson took a pasting in the media for warning about the vulnerability of America’s food chain to terrorist assault, but he was absolutely right to raise that red flag. Our food chains are vulnerable. So is our water supply. Spend all our energies protecting against high-explosive attacks, and we might miss an act of bio-terror with potentially far greater consequences.

  Anyone who has sweated through a summer brownout or blackout in a place like New York City knows the extreme discomfort that follows when the energy infrastructure fails, but a multiprong attack on the power grids that serve, say, the five largest U.S. metropolitan areas would have economic consequences that would dwarf the physical ones. Stock markets would close, traffic of all kinds would be in chaos, emergency services would disappear. That list could go on and on. Terrorists know as well as we do that homeland security begins with economic security. We have to do a better job of protecting on that front as well.

  America’s information infrastructure might be the most vulnerable point of all. Find a back door into the databanks of our financial institutions, our health-care providers, the accounting and ordering departments of our Fortune 500 companies, and the U.S.—and global—economy could take years to fully recover, with devastating effects for everyone. Unlike an attack on the energy grid, too, this one could be launched from anywhere on the globe. Some of the most troubling assaults that the FBI’s Infrastructure Protection Center dealt with during my time as director originated with an Internet service provider in Turkey, but ISPs are everywhere.

  “Information warfare” equally threatens our national security. We know that a number of foreign nations have developed information-warfare doctrine, programs, and capabilities for use against the U.S. and other nations. Aware that they can never match our military might with conventional or “kinetic” weapons, our enemies see cyber attacks on our critical infrastructures as a way to hit what they perceive as America’s Achilles heel: our growing dependence on information technology in government and commercial operations. Not long ago, two Chinese military officers published a book that called for the use of unconventional measures, including the propagation of computer viruses, to counterbalance the military power of the United States. A Russian official has also commented that an attack on a national infrastructure could, “by virtue of its catastrophic consequences, completely overlap with the use of [weapons] of mass destruction.”

  (The global reach of computer-launched terrorism and of white-collar computer crimes is another good reason as well for Congress to sup
port the expansion of the Bureau’s Legat offices.)

  We also need to constantly expand our understanding of who and what a “terrorist” can be. Post-9/11, the word inevitably conjures up a Middle Eastern jihadist bent on bringing the Great Satan down, but some of the most devastating pre-9/11 terrorist attacks within the United States were planned and carried out by our own citizens: Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma City, Eric Rudolph in Atlanta, and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski perhaps most notable among them. The publisher Forbes, Inc., the National Library of Medicine, and dozens of other businesses and organizations have all suffered crippling attacks on their data systems not by outside powers but by disgruntled former employees bent on revenge.

  In February 1999 remarks to a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Appropriations, I warned of “‘lone offender’ and extremist splinter elements of right-wing groups” that the FBI had “identified as possessing or attempting to develop/use chemical, biological or radiological materials.” I also spoke about the threat posed by “religious/apocalyptic sects that are unaffiliated with far-right extremists.” Those dangers are no less real today than they were then, and the more we concentrate our counterterrorism attention solely on external enemies, the more vulnerable we are to violent assaults homegrown under our nose.

  We need to remember, too, that an idea can be more powerful than an entire arsenal of missiles and bombs. The terrorist brief against the United States includes our superpower status and our determination to continue guaranteeing the presence of a Jewish state in Israel, but what the terrorists really hate is America’s diversity and its traditions of individual liberty. They are violently opposed to free ideas, to freedom of religion, to free markets and freedom for women. Worse, and what makes their acts increasingly desperate, they know that they are on the wrong side of history. From Athens to the Covenant of Abraham, from the Magna Carta to the Warsaw Uprising, men and women have shown beyond any shadow of a doubt that they want to be free; and increasingly, they are acting on that desire.