The Secrets of the FBI

by Ronald Kessler

  “The SEALs don’t have much time on the objective,” Louis Grever says. “They’re in hostile territory, typically. So we will try to make things that they can take in pretty quickly, covertly, with less risk.”

  In Afghanistan, FBI agents trained SEAL Team 6, which had been selected for the assault, on what to look for when the commandos went in and how to handle the material they seized. By now, the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division knew the identity of the target.

  “They would quick grab an item, bag it, tag it, drop it into a bin, zip it up, put it on the aircraft,” an intelligence official says. By the time the SEALs hit the target, “They’d already practiced and done this literally hundreds of times,” he says. “They could do it in their sleep. They knew to pick up those things they thought were really important.” However, “They did not have time to dig into every drawer and look for hidden crevices,” he says.

  Sending in a ground team to capture or kill bin Laden was considered, but the CIA and SEALs decided that going in by helicopter was the safest course.

  “They flew in by helicopter because they wanted to get a lot of forces on the objective very quickly, and they had to have a very quick evacuation capability,” a counterterrorism official says. “They could very easily have snuck in, but arguably, we probably couldn’t get that number of forces all the way that deep in Pakistan clandestinely to execute an assault like that.”

  If the American assault was from the ground, bin Laden’s people could have repelled the SEALs by flooding the entryways with gasoline and igniting it. “So the decision was, it was better to come in overhead by fast ropes, and then also have the ability to evacuate everybody very quickly,” the official says.

  The raid took place at 1 a.m. Pakistan time on May 2, 2011. During the raid, one of the Black Hawk helicopters stalled, forcing a hard landing that disabled the helicopter. The two dozen SEALs had to abandon their plan to rappel down into the main building. Instead, they assaulted the compound from the ground after all, blowing up walls to enter. The burst of light and sound helped to stun and disorient the occupants.

  Under a covert action finding signed by President Obama, the SEALs were to kill bin Laden “unless he was completely in a surrendering posture,” the official says. “He was going to look for any crack at all to escape, and I’m sure he had no reservations about taking SEAL team members with him. The outcome was in the hands of UBL [the intelligence community designation for Usama bin Laden], and he did not surrender himself to capture.”

  After a SEAL shot bin Laden in his left eye and in the chest, the team notified the White House that Geronimo—the code name for bin Laden—had been killed. Four others were also killed, and one of bin Laden’s wives, who rushed to protect him in his third-floor bedroom, was shot in the leg.

  During the thirty-eight-minute raid, SEALs took fingerprints of bin Laden with scanners that transmitted the data back to the FBI. They also took fingerprints the old-fashioned way, rolling his fingertips onto an ink pad. The FBI thought it might have bin Laden’s fingerprints on documents it had obtained, but it turned out they were not his. Therefore, the identification of bin Laden was accomplished solely by matching his DNA profile with that of his relatives and by identifying his face with facial recognition software. After he was shot, his wife who was with him identified him at the compound as well. Al Qaeda later issued a statement vowing revenge for the loss of its leader.

  After 9/11, the FBI took on the role of safeguarding any material seized in U.S. counterterrorism actions around the globe. That preserves the chain of custody if a prosecution is brought in the United States or in other countries. In addition, the FBI is the premier agency for analyzing fingerprints, DNA traces, and handwriting.

  The FBI Laboratory took custody of more than one hundred items seized in the raid of bin Laden’s compound. They included documents such as letters and handwritten notes from bin Laden, shoulder weapons and handguns, digital thumb drives, laptops, computer hard drives, CDs, DVDs, and cell phones. In pages the material would constitute a small college library. On the DVDs were videos of bin Laden watching clips of news coverage of himself on television.

  Among the seized DVDs, the outtakes of his propaganda videos showed them to be heavily scripted affairs. He dyed and trimmed his beard for the cameras, then shot and reshot his remarks until the timing and lighting were to his liking. At the CIA’s direction, the FBI distributed copies or photographs of the material to the CIA Counterterrorism Center and to other agencies poring over the treasure trove of leads.

  “The documents could have fingerprints on them,” a counterterrorism official says. “The loose media can have fingerprints, they can have DNA on them. Many people actually transfer DNA when they handle something.”

  “At the end of the day, it was the CIA’s operation,” the intelligence official noted days after the raid. “It was their opportunity, and they’re going to make the judgments about how you action things. For the most part, anything that has a domestic nexus or U.S. interest nexus is going to get optioned into the FBI or Department of Homeland Security (DHS) if it’s threat-related. If it’s going to be an overseas or ‘get’ action, it will be handled by the CIA or by the State Department for disclosure to a friendly service: We don’t want something bad to happen in Norway or the Philippines or whatever. Anything that happens in the theaters of operation where the combined commands have an interest or an active role, you get action to the military.”

  Sewn into his clothes, bin Laden had five hundred euros, the equivalent of $715, along with two telephone numbers. When the discovery of the phone numbers leaked to the press, intelligence officials became more cautious about parceling out the material to different agencies.

  “The disclosure of the two telephone numbers potentially undermined an opportunity for us to exploit,” the official says. “You want time to track and follow the people who have those numbers. The one thing about phone numbers; they’re usually easy to get rid of and cut all your ties to them.”

  Besides the FBI and CIA, the NSA and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) had copies of the materials and ran down leads.

  “These agencies are scrubbing the data against their databases,” an intelligence official says. “Are there indicators; has this number shown up before? Has this name shown up before? And then they come back together and coordinate every day. They found this, this is what we found, and the CIA is taking a lead role in this and making sure what is then disseminated in the form of IRs—intelligence reports—is coordinated, is controlled, and is disseminated so that the appropriate agency, such as the FBI, could properly take action.”

  Al Qaeda’s Achilles’ heel turned out to be its need to communicate. Analysts poring over the cache of material found that to avoid detection, bin Laden would download his instructions to al Qaeda operatives to tiny flash memory computer drives. Couriers delivered the electronic material to others, whose job it was to transmit the messages by email or by other electronic means to the intended recipients.

  “As effective as it was to bar any electronic communications from his compound, it still proved to be their vulnerability,” an intelligence official says. “If you want to be an organized group, you have to communicate. Bin Laden would draft an instruction in his compound, and couriers took it out on electronic media and then transmitted it in the form of an email or some other communication.”

  While some recipients would question whether they had received a legitimate message from their leader, “They had no choice but to act on it,” an official says.

  Now, with the seized material, analysts from a range of intelligence agencies are able to trace messages back to specific individuals who will be placed under surveillance.

  “We have real leads, telephone numbers, and digital data that we can link up to where we had some small piece of information from an intercept or human intelligence,” a counterterrorism official says. “Now we can link it back to bin Laden, and we are seeing the connections
come together. We did not appreciate how effective the couriers were. They took out the information electronically and then put it online.”

  Almost immediately, DHS alerted law-enforcement agencies to a plot being considered by bin Laden against the rail sector on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

  “We will develop more sources, and they will develop more intel on targets, and they will develop new targets of opportunity, and it might take months or potentially years before we realize that what we refer to as this Sensitive Site Exploitation (SSE) resulted in this action two years down the road,” the counterterrorism official predicts.

  The process is similar to the one that led to bin Laden.

  “Much like the information that came out from some of the interrogations early on, maybe the information doesn’t thread together initially,” the official says. “But over time, it builds a picture. In this case, by identifying couriers, it led to our objective.”

  Two days after the raid, CIA director Leon Panetta confirmed to NBC’s Brian Williams that the CIA obtained some of the intelligence that led to bin Laden from enhanced interrogation, including waterboarding.

  The raid left al Qaeda with no unifying leader, jeopardizing its future.

  “I don’t think there is any charismatic leader to replace Osama bin Laden,” says Art Cummings. “In the long term, this could really degrade the future of the organization.” Now, he says, “You end up with a much more distributed system than a centralized system all around the world for planning for a big operation. Al Qaeda has pulled back, and their ambitions are much more modest.”

  32

  THE BIGGEST THREAT

  LOOKING BACK ON HIS TEN YEARS AS FBI DIRECTOR, ROBERT Mueller remembers the concerns he had when first taking the job. As head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, he often had difficulty getting the information he needed from the bureau because the FBI’s computer systems were such a disaster. The shortcomings evidenced at Ruby Ridge and Waco troubled him. And, upon becoming director, he was told that none of the popular software such as Microsoft Word could be used at the FBI.

  Yet that was nothing compared to what he encountered on September 11, 2001, when he found the FBI knew little about possible terrorists and had an information system that was still largely paper-based.

  “Whatever I anticipated was sort of set aside by September 11,” Mueller tells me in a rare interview. “So what I thought I would be doing was not necessarily what I ended up doing. I knew coming in that we had information technology issues that had to be addressed. I had concerns about how we handled issues like Ruby Ridge or Waco, in terms of having a clear chain of command. I had some concern that we had not always put the best players in the playing field on cases of major national significance. I knew that terrorism was an issue but not the issue it would become several days later.”

  In the conference room adjoining his seventh-floor office at FBI headquarters, Mueller conducts an interview in his shirtsleeves, a G-man-white oxford cloth with a subdued Brooks Brothers tie. While he is handsome, what impresses most is his commanding presence. He has the demeanor of an FBI agent combined with a prosecutor, which he once was.

  After 9/11, the priority became changing the FBI’s mind-set to prevent attacks first and worry about prosecution later.

  “While the American public believed we were good at investigating terrorist attacks after they occurred and had prevented some attacks, the only metric now was preventing terrorist attacks,” Mueller says. “Instead of reacting, we had to know where the threats are, identify the gaps, and then fill those gaps with sources or intercepts in anticipation of a possible attack.”

  In doing so, the FBI needed to have better liaison with the CIA and NSA. Today, Mueller notes, the FBI has more than a hundred agents detailed to the CIA. In turn, the CIA has attached officers to every FBI field office and Joint Terrorism Task Force.

  Going back to 9/11, Mueller cites the CIA’s success at rolling up Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and Abu Zubaydah as making a “huge difference in terms of the security of the United States.” Intelligence from the CIA has led to FBI arrests in the United States, he notes.

  Today Mueller says the greatest threat is an attack with weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

  “The possibility of a nuclear attack is relatively remote, but you can never dismiss it, because of the devastation that would occur,” Mueller says. “A radiological attack is not so remote, because it’s relatively easy to get radiological materials and have some sort of radiological improvised explosive device. Although the damage would be far less than from a nuclear detonation, the threat is still there today.”

  In fact, Dr. Vahid Majidi, the chief of the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate, says the probability that the United States will be hit with a WMD attack at some point is 100 percent. Such an attack could be launched by foreign terrorists, lone wolves who are terrorists, or even criminal elements, Majidi says. As Mueller suggests, it would most likely employ chemical, biological, or radiological weapons rather than a nuclear device.

  As it is, Majidi says, American intelligence picks up hundreds of reports each year of foreign terrorists obtaining WMD. When American forces invaded Afghanistan, they found that al Qaeda was working on what Majidi calls a “nascent” WMD effort involving chemical and biological weapons.

  In every other case so far, the reports of foreign terrorists obtaining WMD have turned out to be unfounded. However, Majidi’s directorate within the FBI investigates more than a dozen cases in the United States each year where criminals intend to use WMD. For example, in 2008, the FBI arrested Roger Bergendorff, who was found to have ricin and anarchist literature. Ricin kills cells by inhibiting protein synthesis. Within several days, the liver, spleen, and kidneys of a person who inhales or ingests ricin stop working, resulting in death.

  “The notion of probability of a WMD attack being low or high is a moot point because we know the probability is 100 percent,” Majidi says. “We’ve seen this in the past, and we will see it in the future. There is going to be an attack using chemical, biological, or radiological material.”

  Even a WMD attack that does not kill a great number of people would have a crushing psychological impact. “A singular lone wolf individual can do things in the dark of the night with access to a laboratory with low quantities of material and could hurt a few people but create a devastating effect on the American psyche,” Majidi says.

  That possibility is what Mueller says keeps him up at night. “The biggest threat comes from individuals who have had some association with the United States, understand the United States, can move either individually or with others relatively freely into the United States and within the United States,” Mueller says.

  A major cyberattack that could take down America’s infrastructure is another concern.

  “Sooner or later, I think probably somebody will get through and take down an electrical grid by attacking power company computers,” Mueller says. At the same time, “The exfiltration of information from U.S. government entities and nongovernment entities by a number of countries, including China, Russia, Iran, and others out there, is the wave of the future.”

  In his ten years in office, Mueller says the FBI has “come a long way toward understanding and becoming a part of the intelligence community, both in terms of learning about it and bettering ourselves, developing intelligence and analyzing it and disseminating it.”

  The bureau still needs to do more to develop its leaders by exposing them to the rest of the intelligence community.

  “It’s important for persons who are doing terrorism throughout the United States to understand how the CIA works, what kind of information they have, how you get that information,” Mueller says. “Same with NSA, same with the Defense Intelligence Agency.”

  High-ranking FBI officials were amazed that for this book, Louis Grever opened a window on how the FBI conducts covert entries. In fact, during one interview with Grev
er, who is on a level just below the deputy director, an FBI agent assigned to public affairs interjected and asked whether he should be revealing these secrets.

  Grever responded by saying the capabilities of some bugging devices may not be as sensitive as they seem. He later said that besides Mueller, he consulted with other high-ranking FBI officials before deciding to reveal the TacOps story.

  “It would be hard, if not impossible, for our targets to counter our attempts to penetrate their space based solely on the information revealed in the book,” Grever said. “The American public has a right to know what their government services are doing—where they’re investing money, why it’s important that you have this kind of capability.”

  Asked why he approved Grever’s proposal to reveal these most closely guarded secrets, Mueller said jokingly, “Already he’s told you too much, that’s what my thinking is.” But then he added, “I’ll go along with whatever he told you.… He has a wide degree of discretion.”

  Within the FBI, Mueller was known to think highly of President Obama’s intelligence and commitment to counterterrorism. At the same time, he wondered whether he should go along with Obama’s directive that he fly to Tucson to take charge of the investigation into the shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords in January 2011. Not since the Hoover days has a president injected himself that directly into FBI operations, risking a perception that the bureau is subject to White House influence that could be political in nature.

  Mueller himself had no experience or interest in directing FBI investigations. His presence meant FBI agents who were conducting the investigation had to divert their attention to briefing him. While Mueller did not object to Obama’s order, he and other top FBI officials did keep their distance from Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, whom Mueller considered too political.

  Two problems arose during Mueller’s tenure. One was poor supervision of the process for issuing national security letters, which are used in international terrorism and espionage investigations to obtain data on where and when telephone calls and emails are sent and received. Contrary to reports in the press, national security letters do not authorize the FBI to wiretap calls or to see the contents of emails.