The Secrets of the FBI

by Ronald Kessler

  To Cummings’ amazement, the answer was, “That could never happen. We would lose our constituency. We could never admit to bringing someone to the FBI.”

  “Well, we’ve just defined the problem, haven’t we?” Cummings told them.

  After 9/11, says Cummings, imams in as many as 10 percent of the two thousand mosques in the United States preached jihad and hatred of America. About a quarter of the Muslims in America ages eighteen through twenty-nine believe that suicide bombings can be justified, according to a Pew Research Center poll. But in more recent years, “preaching jihad and hatred of the U.S. overtly has become more unusual and happens more in private,” Cummings says. Instead, “Radicalization on the Internet has risen to fill the void,” Cummings says.

  “If you look at the websites of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, or the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, you see a passive, almost obligatory approach to condemning terrorism,” Cummings says. “The most prominent crisis for the Arab and Muslim communities is this perception that they’re terrorists, when only a small fraction of them are. Why wouldn’t you have a very loud, active program that says murder of anyone is immoral, illegal, and not consistent with Islam, and anyone who supports terrorism or harbors a terrorist is a problem?”

  To be sure, some individual Muslims have brought leads to the FBI. That led to FBI cases in Lackawanna, New York; Lodi, California; and Atlanta, Georgia.

  “But I don’t see the community doing that,” Cummings says. “I talked to a very prominent imam in the U.S. We would have our sweets and our sweet tea. We would talk a lot about Islam. I would say we understand Islam and where they’re coming from. We’d tell him what our mission is, trying to keep people from murdering Americans, or anybody else for that matter.”

  Months later, the FBI found out that the man’s mosque had two extremists who were so radical that they kicked them out. Clearly, those two extremists would have been of interest to the FBI. If they only engaged in anti-American rhetoric, the FBI would leave them alone. More likely they were planning action to go with their rhetoric.

  Cummings asked the imam, “What happened?”

  “What do you mean?” the imam asked.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this?” the agent said.

  “Why would I tell you about this?” the imam said. “They’re not terrorists. They just hate the U.S. government.”

  Despite the FBI’s success in rolling up terrorists and preventing another attack, Cummings encountered a new threat: a growing movement to do away with the FBI’s counterterrorism effort and replace it with a new terror-fighting agency similar to the British MI5. Such an agency would have investigative powers but no law enforcement powers, as the FBI has.

  The idea was first floated by William E. Odom, a retired general and former head of the NSA. In a Washington Post op-ed headlined “Why the FBI Can’t Be Reformed,” Odom wrote that the FBI’s shortcomings in fighting the terrorist threat are systemic.

  “No one can turn a law enforcement agency into an effective intelligence agency,” he said. “Police work and intelligence work don’t mix. The skills and organizational incentives for each are antithetical. One might just as well expect baseball’s Washington Nationals to win football’s Super Bowl as believe the FBI can become competent at intelligence work.”

  These and other similar proposals to break up the FBI came from people who had never investigated terrorism cases and seemed to have no idea how the FBI investigates terrorism post-9/11. That did not stop members of Congress from endorsing the idea, giving them another chance to go on TV.

  In fact, the MI5 idea made little sense. It meant creating a new wall that would bifurcate the counterterrorism effort. In Great Britain, when an arrest must be made, MI5 presents the case to a police agency such as the Metropolitan Police, based at New Scotland Yard. MI5 then has the task of trying to persuade that agency to pursue it. Thus, rather than tearing down walls that impede cooperation and sharing of information, an American agency patterned after MI5 would create a new wall.

  More important, without law enforcement powers, MI5 cannot use the threat of prosecution to try to elicit cooperation and recruit informants. Because terrorists often finance their activities by smuggling cigarettes, selling stolen designer clothing, or dealing in drugs, the FBI’s structure makes it easy for the bureau to pass along leads from agents pursuing these cases to agents focused on counterterrorism.

  During creation of a new agency, the country would be vulnerable to attack as investigators are recruited and trained and as they try to develop relations with counterparts in foreign countries. The well-publicized chaos at the Department of Homeland Security, which combined twenty-two agencies and departments, is an illustration of what can happen initially when a new agency is created.

  The beauty of the FBI is that its focus on violations of criminal laws keeps its agents from violating civil liberties. Without that framework, agents might begin to stray into investigating political beliefs or dissent or even gathering personal information for the purpose of blackmailing political leaders, as they did when J. Edgar Hoover was director. In doing so, they would lose their compass, forgetting what their target is and botching investigations because of a lack of proper focus.

  Cummings considered nutty the idea of handing over such awesome powers to a new agency not trained in law enforcement. Cummings and other agents who worked with MI5 in Great Britain knew that the British officers’ work was constantly impeded by their lack of law enforcement powers, although recent changes have improved coordination between MI5 and the police.

  “I find it astounding that anyone would take the position that what you want to do is essentially strip away the law enforcement powers and say, ‘Now go fight terrorism,’ ” Cummings says. “To think that you’re going to develop a domestic intelligence service from the ground up and do it in anything short of a decade before they can even crawl, let alone walk, is crazy. And then to think that they could do that and still have the organization grounded in the Constitution and the civil liberties that go with that, I think is crazy as well.”

  Fanning the movement to create an MI5, Richard A. Posner, a U.S. appeals court judge who wrote a book on intelligence, said in a Washington Post op-ed that the FBI is oriented toward “arrest and prosecution rather than toward the patient gathering of intelligence with a view to understanding and penetrating a terrorist network.”

  “The day we arrest someone is the day I can’t collect against him anymore,” Cummings observes. “I don’t know anything about him, I’m operating in the blind. And the day I take somebody off the street, leaving someone on the street who’s going to kill me tomorrow, that is the day I haven’t done my job.”

  “The FBI model of combining intelligence and law enforcement responsibility is the envy of allied services, including the British,” says John Martin, who, as chief of the U.S. Justice Department’s Counterespionage Section for twenty-five years, had extensive dealings with MI5.

  “Indeed,” he adds, “MI5 is constantly impeded by its inability to quickly translate intelligence operations into arrests and prosecutions. Setting up an MI5 in the United States would create a significant and unnecessary barrier to fighting terrorism and espionage at a time when this country needs to enhance its communications among agencies and to quickly react to terrorist threats.”

  24

  YEAR OF THE PONZI SCHEME

  AFTER 9/11, MUELLER SHIFTED 2,000 AGENTS WHO WERE working criminal cases to counterterrorism. That doubled the number of agents pursuing terrorists to 4,000 of the bureau’s then complement of about 11,000 agents. He also increased the number of supervisors working counterterrorism at headquarters from 30 to 850. As a result, good criminal cases involving white-collar crime or political corruption were not pursued.

  “I’ve been in meetings with U.S. attorneys where they were screaming for more agents for fraud cases,” says Thomas Fuentes, a forme
r FBI assistant director in charge of international operations.

  Agents—many of whom did not like change to begin with—grumbled about Mueller’s leadership. But as the economic downturn exposed shaky banks and other financial firms that had been cutting corners, Mueller began increasing the number of agents assigned to criminal work. He was able to do that because the number of agents within the bureau increased each year.

  Heading that effort was Thomas J. Harrington, the executive assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch. Harrington had wanted to become an agent ever since he took his FBI agent father to his kindergarten class in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, as part of show-and-tell. He saw how impressed and excited his classmates were.

  An accountant by training, Harrington moved up the bureau ladder supervising counterterrorism and financial fraud and becoming involved in improving FBI management and computer systems. In Denver, he put together an FBI undercover operation that took two FBI-controlled companies public to uncover corruption within the penny stock market. Harrington led a team of investigators to identify cases of abuse of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and, on behalf of the FBI, wrote a letter to the Pentagon objecting to some of the harsh interrogation practices used.

  As chief of the FBI’s criminal side, Harrington has seen close up the effects of the recession on financial crime.

  “The economy, unfortunately, began to fall apart on us,” Harrington says. “The last couple of years have been the year of the Ponzi scheme. We’ve had one huge investment fraud after another. I think Warren Buffett probably said it best: you don’t realize who’s swimming naked until the tide goes out. And that’s exactly what happened.”

  After his two sons turned him in, Bernard Madoff, seventy, admitted to two FBI agents who met with him at his Manhattan apartment that the investment arm of his firm was “basically a giant Ponzi scheme” and that it had been insolvent for years. The firm took in $22.5 billion but claimed in statements to investors that their accounts were worth $60 billion. Madoff’s undoing was the plunging stock market, preventing him from honoring requests by investors for their money. It was the biggest known Ponzi scheme in history, wiping out the life savings of thousands of investors. Instead of being worth millions, many found they had to subsist on social security payments.

  “These folks trusted this man because of who he was within his community,” says Patrick Carroll, the supervisory agent in charge of the investigation. “The victims lost a tremendous amount of money and their dignity because they felt they didn’t need to look into who he was. They trusted him.”

  Cases involving financial fraud are the most time-consuming, Harrington says. “The average bank failure case involving fraud is at least two years, from the time we open it to the time we can get to a charging document.”

  The size of the companies involved has also grown.

  “On 9/11 the number of cases under $100,000 was probably 70 percent of our workload,” Harrington says. “It’s totally flipped around. In fact, I barely have any cases under $100,000 in financial institution fraud. Sixty-eight percent of mortgage fraud work involves cases well over a million apiece.”

  The FBI’s response to the rising number of cases was to develop a more targeted approach when deciding which cases to pursue.

  “We’ve become more strategic, not necessarily mapping individual events per se but rather looking for the threats in a particular territory,” Harrington says. “You sit down with an SAC, and they clearly tell you what threats are in their territory. Previously, they would have tried to tell you about their cases. Today, if you ask them about gangs, they’ll talk about the size of their territory and how many gangs are present in that territory, how many gang members, what areas of the city they control, and then the case is a tool that they’re using to infiltrate or penetrate that organization and eventually disrupt and dismantle it.”

  The meetings are held with Mueller. “When he hears things he doesn’t like, he brings it up and challenges them,” Harrington remarks.

  “I still have agents who will say, ‘When I joined the outfit I wanted to lock people up.’ They feel they’re spending too much time on these other things,” Harrington says. “The response typically from me is, ‘Well, what is the threat that you’re working? If it’s violent crimes, is it better today?’ Most will tell you it’s worse. And my thought is, ‘Okay, then our strategy has to change, and we have to be more focused.’ You can’t just arrest everybody who commits crimes. We’re going after the worst of the worst, trying to improve these communities as best we can.”

  Today, the FBI has sixty thousand ongoing criminal cases on everything from kidnappings to the Mafia. Responding to bank robberies is left largely to local police. Instead, cybercrime has become one of the highest priorities, both on the criminal side and on the national security side.

  “Some of that is illustrated most recently by Google, which has publicly come out and told folks about losing source code, and believing they’d lost it to Chinese operatives,” Harrington says. “There is a challenge on the national security side. Every day, government computers are being attacked by agents of foreign powers or criminal networks trying to seize as much data as possible, and then using it to their advantage.”

  Criminals who take control of tens of thousands of home and office computers through what are known as botnets are a dramatically growing threat. A botnet—short for “robot network”—allows a criminal to command any number of computers by introducing malicious programs such as spyware, viruses, worms, or Trojan horses into each computer through its Internet connection.

  With a single command, the master of the botnet can instruct each slave computer to contact a particular computer network, bringing it down because of the sheer demand on its ports. A company may lose millions of dollars in business. If the target is a police department or hospital, shutting down its computer system can jeopardize public safety or health.

  In addition, slave computers can be used to compromise still more computers for the botnet or to engage in phishing schemes, inducing people to give up their personal information in response to phony emails supposedly sent by banks.

  Harrington cites a group that looted the Royal Bank of Scotland of $9.5 million by stealing customers’ ATM card numbers and PINs. A flaw in the bank’s computer security allowed the intrusion.

  “We believe the numbers were then turned over to organized crime elements in Eastern Europe, and they then produced ATM cards,” Harrington says. “Within twelve to twenty-four hours, they took literally millions of dollars out of hundreds of ATM machines in dozens of countries. The currency was then reaggregated at some point and paid back to the organized crime syndicates.”

  Another new cybercrime involves locking down a company’s computer system and demanding cash in return for the key to unlocking it.

  “We’ve had some extortions recently where people have broken into a corporate system, and then basically locked the system down, password-protected it,” Harrington says. “So the corporation couldn’t even get access to its own data. And then the extortion begins with a request for a payment for the password.”

  Some companies have paid up. In other cases, the FBI’s Cyber Division has been able to break the codes and unlock the system.

  In 2009, the criminal side of the Cyber Division conducted investigations into 2,600 computer intrusions and 7,300 crimes committed with computers, leading to 1,900 convictions.

  At the same time, the FBI has seen an explosion in public corruption cases. Harrington cites the investigations of former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich and former U.S. Representative William J. Jefferson, a Louisiana Democrat, who kept $90,000 in cash in his freezer.

  Referring to such cases, Harrington says that unfortunately, “public servants sell out their services to the highest bidder in many cases.” The FBI has “more agents assigned to public corruption today than we’ve ever had in the history of the bureau,”
says Harrington, who subsequently was named associate deputy director of the FBI. “We have thirty-four hundred investigations pending, and over seven hundred agents are currently working public corruption matters. Which I guess cuts both ways. It’s good that we’re out there and we’re doing this; it’s unfortunate that it’s a target-rich environment.”

  Despite the explosion in current cases, Mueller decided to back an effort started by agent Cynthia Deitle to try to prosecute Ku Klux Klan members who killed blacks as far back as the 1960s. The effort had its genesis with the FBI’s success in reopening its investigation into the September 15, 1963, bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.

  That day, Denise McNair, eleven, and Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, and Addie Mae Collins, all fourteen, were dressed in white party dresses and patent leather shoes for a youth service. Nineteen bundled sticks of dynamite concealed under a stairwell exploded inches from them. All four died, and another girl, Sarah Collins, was blinded in one eye. The bombing shocked the country and contributed to passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

  No one was charged back then, but because of the FBI’s more recent efforts, former Ku Klux Klan members Thomas E. Blanton Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry were convicted in 2001 and 2002, respectively. The case was brought to a successful conclusion by the ingenuity and persistence of FBI agent William L. Flemming. Flemming worked the case after G. Robert “Rob” Langford, the SAC in Birmingham, decided to reopen the bombing case and start a fresh investigation.

  Since 2007, Deitle, who heads the FBI’s Civil Rights Unit, and her agents have investigated 122 cases from decades ago. About 20 percent turned out not to be murders or were not related to race. In many other cases, no state or federal laws existing back then could be applied, the suspects had already been cleared by all-white juries, or the evidence was just too thin. Even with a fresh murder case, developing evidence is difficult. But Deitle managed to refer six cases to state authorities for possible prosecution, and she expects to refer another six eventually.