The Secrets of the FBI

by Ronald Kessler

  To be sure, stealing a nuclear weapon from a country would be easier than building one. Iran, for example, is “like a rabid dog, absolutely unpredictable,” Cummings says. “You just don’t know what they’re going to do, and they have capabilities.”

  Currently, Majidi is working on ways to detect development of new organisms that could be used in a biological attack. By definition, there would be no way to detect a new organism or to develop an antidote before it is unleashed.

  “We are not sitting on our hands waiting to predict what will happen based on what happened yesterday,” Majidi says. As an example, he says, “you can design an organism de novo that never existed before. While there is no known articulated threat, this is something that we feel is a technology or science that potentially can be misused, either accidentally or on purpose.”

  Among other methods, the FBI is working with the synthetic biology community to develop ways to zero in on any hint that someone could be developing such an organism.

  “We’re not there to stop the science but to integrate our activities within their portfolio so that when the threat does develop or may develop over a long arc of time, we are ahead of those issues,” Majidi explains.

  Another “huge” potential threat, says Cummings, is the explosion by an enemy of a nuclear weapon high in the atmosphere to unleash an electromagnetic pulse (EMP). The electromagnetic pulse generated by the blast would fry all electronics in North America. Because everything relies on microchips—computers, financial records, furnaces, refrigerators, police dispatchers, hospitals, telephones, cars, trains, and planes—such a blast would send America back to the 1300s.

  In the event of an EMP attack, either by terrorists or more likely by a foreign power, the electrical power grid would be destroyed because its computers would be inoperative. Transformers critical to it would take years to replace. Only a few countries build the transformers, which take more than a year to make.

  The vast majority of Americans would die from starvation or disease or would freeze to death, according to Dr. William Graham, who was chairman of the bipartisan congressional Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from EMP Attack. While the military is largely protected from an EMP attack with shielding, the government has done virtually nothing to address the effects of such an attack on the civilian sector, Graham says.

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  CSI

  ABOVE THE GRASSY HILLS AND WOODLANDS OF QUANTICO rises the new FBI Laboratory building. The long rectangular box with sparkling windows resembles an office building, but the ventilation towers on the roof make it look more like a processing plant. What they’re processing here is evidence: stains and human remains, codes and ciphers, paints and polymers, bullets and bombs.

  Witnesses are notoriously unreliable, and documents can lie. Skillful defense lawyers can twist videotapes of crimes to cast doubt on a defendant’s guilt. But physical evidence found at a crime scene—a spent bullet, a shard of glass, a drop of semen or blood—is the surest kind of proof, one that is least susceptible to differing interpretations. It can cut either way, sending a suspect to jail for life or exonerating an innocent person.

  The FBI lab started in 1932 with a microscope, some ultraviolet light equipment, a drawing board for firearms identification, and a Packard sedan that agents called “Old Beulah” for speeding to crime scenes. Hoover decided to create the lab after scientific crime analysis had been used successfully in several cases, including the kidnapping of Charles A. Lindbergh Jr. In the Lindbergh case, local police were able to show that a wooden ladder Bruno Richard Hauptmann used to climb into the Lindbergh baby’s bedroom had been fashioned from struts from Hauptmann’s attic.

  The main entrance to the FBI lab is very quiet. A pond with a trickling fountain and a silent-but-full parking garage break up the expansive lawn. A walkway, lined with manicured bushes, clumps of begonias, and crape myrtles in full bloom, leads from the garage to the entrance. Now and then someone walks into the building.

  By contrast, at the busy back entrance on Laboratory Road, a continuous fleet of FedEx trucks arrives throughout the day, delivering boxes of evidence. Every seam on every box is sealed with translucent yellow plastic tape. The Laboratory Division conducts more than a million forensic examinations a year for both the police and FBI.

  Inside the building, the beige corridors, a quarter mile in length, are empty. While the building has about eight hundred employees—10 percent of them special agents, and the rest laboratory technicians, scientists and chemists, forensic examiners, and support personnel—the hallways are silent. Windows into the labs show the technicians hard at work in white coats, in their warrens of beakers and vials, sinks and microscopes.

  In the Evidence Control Unit, lab techs remove the yellow plastic tape, which ensures the integrity of the evidence. Then they open the boxes. They triage the evidence, from a femur to a shirt to a car door, and assess it guided by the communications from the field that they read on computer. One of the evidence bays can accommodate an eighteen-wheeler.

  Behind the windows of an evidence bay marked “Inventory in Progress—Do Not Enter,” a lab tech wearing purple gloves and protective goggles places a piece of cloth carefully on brown paper spread on a table. There is a stain on the cloth. You begin to understand the silence.

  But if the FBI personnel here jumped up and down every time they solved a crime, “they’d be doing that all day, because they’re always discovering things,” says Dr. D. Christian Hassell, who is the FBI assistant director in charge of the Laboratory Division.

  The new building, which opened in 2003, occupies 463,000 square feet, doubling the space the lab previously took up at headquarters. Every office has sunlight—if your office doesn’t have a window, you can look out the window across the hall. No more working in a dark basement, as many technicians did when the lab at headquarters was divided between the third floor and the first basement level.

  To minimize cross contamination in an emergency or accident, the new building has two intake systems, one for either side of the building, the offices being on one side and the labs on the other. Along a wall in a corridor, there is another reminder that processing the evidence itself can be a dangerous business: where a drinking fountain would be, there is an eye-wash station and an overhead shower with a pull that delivers an emergency deluge of water.

  In September 2003, during his tour of the new lab facilities, President George W. Bush reached up and asked what the pull was for. The lab director frantically yanked back his arm. On hearing the explanation, Bush was reported to have said, “I guess that’s why the Secret Service makes me carry an extra suit.”

  Dr. Hassell, with his wire-rimmed glasses, buzz cut, and fireplug build, is a chemist, not an agent. The only thing he’s packing is a BlackBerry. Years back, agents headed the laboratory. But as Louis Freeh transferred personnel out of the laboratory, the case backlog stretched to a year, and the work suffered. Frederic Whitehurst, an FBI chemist and supervisor in the lab, alleged to the press in September 1995 that not only was the lab doing shoddy work, its examiners had committed perjury and fabricated evidence.

  After an investigation, Michael R. Bromwich, the Justice Department’s inspector general, determined that none of those charges involving perjury and fabricated evidence had any basis in fact. But he found instances of errors in court testimony, substandard analytical work, and problems with record management. As many as fifty cases going back years might have been mishandled. With six hundred thousand examinations being conducted each year, that was not a large number. Despite claims by defense lawyers that thousands of cases would be affected, no case was ever overturned as a result of the problems found at the lab. But procedures clearly needed tightening.

  Like the rest of the FBI, the lab had always resisted outside scrutiny. There was a need to bring the lab into line with procedures used by other forensic laboratories. The FBI lab is now accredited and inspected by the Laboratory Accreditation Boa
rd of the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors. Now a scientist, not an agent, is in charge of the lab. And while he is a scientist, Hassell is skilled at translating his difficult subject, the science of crime, into a layperson’s terms.

  One way or another, the lab becomes involved in every major tragedy that occurs in the United States and even abroad. Because of the possibility that criminality was involved, the lab worked on the investigation of a crash on Washington’s Metro that killed nine people. It examined evidence in the Fort Hood and Holocaust Museum shootings. For trials or incident reconstruction, it built models of the Twin Towers and Pentagon and of the trunk of the car used by the Washington snipers. FBI evidence response teams directed by the lab helped locate the engines from the U.S. Airways plane that ditched in the Hudson River.

  The lab doesn’t do everyday cause-of-death determinations. “We deal more with human remains, people who have been gone for a long time,” Hassell says. The remains of Caylee Anthony, a toddler who disappeared in Orlando and was found dead in 2008, were sent here. “We did the DNA extraction,” he says. The lab coordinates the evidence response teams at all fifty-six FBI offices. “You work for the Milwaukee office, but we provide the training here.”

  One thing Hassell is quick to point out: television’s CSI version of forensics bears little resemblance to that of the FBI Laboratory Division. For instance, to identify hidden stains, the lab techs here “don’t use special glasses and a flashlight like on TV.”

  On the public tours that used to be conducted at headquarters, the Firearms and Toolmarks Unit was a big draw. Moved over to Quantico, the weapons collection now numbers six thousand items, from automatics to artillery to cane guns that were sold in the 1935 Sears, Roebuck catalog. The centerpieces are guns that belonged to Bonnie and Clyde, Ma Barker, Baby Face Nelson, and John Dillinger.

  The weapons are worth millions but are uninsured. “We have pretty good security,” Hassell says, deadpan.

  In this unit, bullets are analyzed to see if they were shot through a particular gun. Similarly, wire cutters are tested by cutting a wire to see if the striation patterns left are the same that appear on the evidence—a wire used in making a bomb, for example.

  The FBI’s unique collection of duct tape was moved from the downtown lab, as was its inventory of sample paint panels. Paint panels can be critical in solving a crime or accident. “That’s how they knew in France that Princess Di’s car was hit by a white Fiat,” Hassell says.

  Over at the Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit, Dan Olson, the unit chief, describes his work simply: “We break codes.” Not those generated by computers, but rather the old-fashioned kind, which can be just as challenging. Many of the codes are written by spies, gangs, and members of organized crime. Mail bomber Theodore Kaczynski kept encoded diaries referring to his exploits and thoughts about his crimes.

  The unit has twenty employees, running the gamut of expertise in intelligence, business, computers, and mathematics. There’s a vice cop and a former narcotics officer. “I want a real wide range,” Olson says. “Pool that knowledge, those experiences.”

  At any given time, the unit is trying to decipher fifty items. The typical cipher comes in by BlackBerry, Olson says. A typical question: “Just found this in a cell in a prison in California. Is he planning a murder or is it a love letter?”

  Nine out of ten messages are decoded the same day they are received. “We either figure it out very quickly, or it’s not a code. The rule of solving a cipher is it’s usually very quick or never,” Olson says.

  Some of the toughest nuts to crack are from criminals who know history. They may look back to a code that hasn’t been used since the Civil War, or employ a system developed during the Napoleonic Wars. “With the Internet,” Olson says, “all you have to do is Google ‘cipher hard to break.’ ”

  Just as the FBI has its list of the Ten Most Wanted, it has its Top Ten Unsolved Ciphers. Number one is a cipher used by the Zodiac killer, who operated in Northern California in the late 1960s and early 1970s and whose identity remains unknown.

  In the Explosives Unit demo room, Greg Carl, the unit chief, goes over how the bureau solved recent cases that have been in the news. He’s been with the bureau since 1987, and that includes having worked the Pam Am bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland.

  Carl says the Explosives Unit is unusual at the Quantico lab because it has “a good mix” of scientists and agents. In fact, he says, “now the scientists kind of think like an agent and the agents think like a scientist.”

  A sign of the times, explosives experts from the Russian SVR now meet with FBI experts from the lab to compare notes. They may be helping each other, but the FBI is still on guard. The meetings take place at the FBI Academy, not at the secure lab.

  In the display of fragments, fuses, replicas, and mockups in a demo room is a two-foot-long sole of a sneaker. It’s a cross section that shows the lining of shoe bomber Richard Reid’s footwear. A self-admitted member of al Qaeda, he tried to take down American Airlines Flight 63 flying from Paris to the United States on December 22, 2001.

  Reid placed his bombs in the waffled air pockets within the rubber soles in his shoes. Because the bombs were secreted in both shoes, no anomalies presented themselves to X-ray screeners.

  But Reid was so disheveled-looking that red flags went up at the airport in Paris. Security delayed his boarding for so long that he missed his flight to Miami and had to wait until the next day. Meanwhile, Reid kept his sneakers on too long. His feet sweated. In short, he didn’t keep his powder dry.

  “The time fuse he used is Pakistani,” Carl says, “not that it’s not any good, but it uses cotton fibers inside the fuse.” Because cotton absorbs moisture, a lot of explosives manufacturers use synthetic fiber instead. The fuse was inside the shoe, coming out of it was a piece of time fuse, and Reid’s sock was on top of that. The result: the explosive black powder for the bomb became damp.

  On the flight Reid also tried to use matches, instead of the lighter he had carried the previous day, which made it harder to light the now-damp fuse and black powder. A flight attendant smelled the burning match, accused him of trying to smoke a cigarette, and soon Reid was in custody.

  The bomb secreted by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Christmas Day bomber, also did not go off, but he wasn’t as dumb as he might appear. By stitching the bomb into the crotch of his underpants, he avoided detection.

  Carl wonders aloud “why you might choose to hide a bomb on your person, in your crotch, knowing you could very well be searched.” He answers his own question. “Security people feeling uncomfortable grabbing in that area.”

  One of the things the Explosives Unit does is to test how bad things might have been had a terrorist attempt been successful. For the Shoe Bomber, the unit first detonated a mockup of the shoe. It vanished. But that wasn’t the same thing as a plane at thirty-seven thousand feet depressurizing with a hole blown into its side.

  The unit discovered that if Reid’s shoe had been against the wall of the cabin when the bomb went off, it would have taken a smaller quantity of explosives to damage the aircraft’s aluminum skin. When it starts to rip, the aluminum continues to peel back, or “petal.” The hole just gets bigger and bigger, as happened with the Pan Am plane that exploded over Lockerbie.

  Ahmed Ressam, the Millennium Bomber, might have slipped into the United States successfully and detonated explosives in Seattle, but he was nervous. When his rental car came off a ferry on the evening of December 14, 1999, he presented his Costco card as identification to Customs at Port Angeles. That triggered questioning, and he tried to flee.

  In the spare-tire well of his car were 110 pounds of urea, four black boxes that contained time-delay fusing systems, and bottles labeled as olives, Tylenol, and zinc tablets. Whenever agents would move the olive bottle, the thirty-three year-old Algerian would duck.

  Says Carl: “That’s what we call in law enforcement a clue.”

  Whe
n investigators searched Ressam’s apartment in Montreal, they found a pair of pants with acid burns in them. They called the prison where Ressam was being held and asked them to check the suspect’s legs for burn marks. The answer came back positive. The information was presented as part of the evidence against him in court.

  What was in the bottles? Surely not olives, Tylenol, and zinc tablets. Instead, the FBI lab found HMTD, a primary explosive that can be initiated by a heat source; RDX, not quite as sensitive, but it causes the next explosive to detonate; and EGDN, ethylene glycol dinitrate, or dynamite.

  In the demo room is a backpack similar to one used by Eric Rudolf, the Centennial Bomber, at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. Inside the base of the pack, Rudolf assembled the equivalent of a timed military Claymore mine, which is designed to propel shrapnel when it goes off. He positioned the backpack so that when the bomb exploded, it would shoot at least five hundred nails into the crowd at Centennial Park. But kids discovered the pack and tried to steal it. When they decided it was too heavy and put it down, they reoriented the bomb so that it didn’t fragment into Rudolf’s planned kill zone. Instead of the dozens who might have been victims, one person died.

  Like Art Cummings, Carl talks about trip wires. In making bombs, hydrogen peroxide is used in higher concentrations than found in the medicine cabinet. Beauty supply outlets sell an 18 percent solution; and pool supply outlets, a 30 percent solution, compared with 3 percent at your local drugstore. Suspicious or large purchases of such chemicals should be reported to the FBI or the local Joint Terrorism Task Force.

  “It’s important to get trip wires in place,” Carl says. “It’s not your father’s FBI,” he adds. “It’s not reacting. A lot of it is preventing.”