by Tim Weiner
The only part of the commission’s report on the FBI that was written into law was an order commanding the creation of “an institutional culture with substantial expertise in, and commitment to, the intelligence mission.” Mueller had been trying to do that for years. His progress was slow and uneven, but he soon achieved his goal of doubling the number of intelligence analysts at the FBI. There were now two thousand of them, and they were no longer assigned to answer phones and empty the trash.
Mueller had confidently reported to the commission that he was making great strides, “turning to the next stage of transforming the Bureau into an intelligence agency.” But the FBI was at least five years away from that goal.
The president had been compelled to create his own intelligence commission after conceding that the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were a mirage. Federal appeals court judge Laurence Silberman led it. He was Cheney’s choice; the two were of one mind about the Bureau. They had been for thirty years, ever since Silberman was deputy attorney general and Cheney President Ford’s chief of staff. Back then, after Nixon fell, the White House had sent Silberman to search the secret files of J. Edgar Hoover. The judge had had a barb out for the Bureau ever since.
“It was the single worst experience of my long governmental service,” Judge Silberman told his fellow judges. “Hoover had indeed tasked his agents with reporting privately to him any bits of dirt on figures such as Martin Luther King, or their families. Hoover sometimes used that information for subtle blackmail to ensure his and the Bureau’s power … I think it would be appropriate to introduce all new recruits to the nature of the secret and confidential files of J. Edgar Hoover. And in that connection this country—and the Bureau—would be well served if his name were removed from the Bureau’s building.”
Silberman’s report on the FBI, in the works throughout the winter of 2004 and sent to the White House on March 31, 2005, was a steel-wire scrubbing. “It has now been three and a half years since the September 11 attacks,” the report’s chapter on the Bureau began. “Three and a half years after December 7, 1941, the United States had built and equipped an army and a navy that had crossed two oceans, the English Channel, and the Rhine; it had already won Germany’s surrender and was two months from vanquishing Japan. The FBI has spent the past three and a half years building the beginnings of an intelligence service.” The report warned that it would take until 2010 to accomplish that task.
The report bore down hard on the FBI’s intelligence directorate, created by Mueller two years before. It concluded that the directorate had great responsibility but no authority. It did not run intelligence investigations or operations. It performed no analysis. It had little sway over the fifty-six field groups it had created. No one but the director himself had power over any of these fiefs.
“We asked whether the Directorate of Intelligence can ensure that intelligence collection priorities are met,” the report said. “It cannot. We asked whether the directorate directly supervises most of the Bureau’s analysts. It does not.” It did not control the money or the people over whom it appeared to preside. “Can the FBI’s latest effort to build an intelligence capability overcome the resistance that has scuppered past reforms?” the report asked. “The outcome is still in doubt.” These were harsh judgments, all the more stinging because they were true.
If the FBI could not command and control its agents and its authorities, the report concluded, the United States should break up the Bureau and start anew, building a new domestic intelligence agency from the ground up.
With gritted teeth, Mueller began to institute the biggest changes in the command structure of the Bureau since Hoover’s death. A single National Security Service within the FBI would now rule over intelligence, counterintelligence, and counterterrorism. The change was imposed effective in September 2005. As the judge had predicted, it would take the better part of five years before it showed results.
“WHO IS CALLING SHOTS?”
The war in Iraq was throwing sand into the FBI’s gears. Hundreds of agents had rotated through Iraq, and hundreds more labored at the FBI’s crime lab in Quantico, Virginia, taking part in a battle that seemed to have no end. They analyzed tens of thousands of fingerprints and biometric data from prisoners, looking for leads on al-Qaeda. They worked to capture, analyze, and reverse-engineer tens of thousands of fragments of the improvised explosive devices that were killing American soldiers.
Members of the FBI’s vaunted hostage rescue team, trained in commando tactics, were in high demand in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Some had been through four tours of duty in battle, more than any soldier in the war, by the summer of 2005.
The team was now preparing a military assault on a terrorist who had been on the FBI’s Most Wanted list for more than twenty years.
The Bureau had been after Filiberto Ojeda Ríos ever since the January 1975 bombing of the Fraunces Tavern in New York, one of the first murderous terrorist attacks of the modern age. The Puerto Rican independence movement’s armed forces, the FALN, had taken the credit. The FBI had run COINTELPRO operations against the independence movement throughout the sixties and early seventies; Hoover himself had cited “the increasing boldness” of their political programs and “the courage given to their cause by Castro’s Cuba.”
Ojeda was the FALN’s commander. He had been trained by the Cuban intelligence service from 1961 to 1967, and he had returned to Puerto Rico as a revolutionary. Arrested by an FBI agent in San Juan, he jumped bail and fled to New York, where he worked under the protection of Castro’s intelligence officers at the Cuban mission to the United Nations. By the start of 1974, Ojeda had organized the FALN in New York and Chicago.
The FBI blamed the group for more than 120 terrorist bombings over the next decade; the attacks had killed a total of six people and done millions of dollars of damage. The Bureau got a lucky break on November 1, 1976, when a heroin addict broke into the FALN’s secret hideout in the Westown section of Chicago, looking for something to steal. He found a cache of dynamite and he tried to sell it on the street. Two days later, on November 3, 1976, the Chicago police and the FBI heard about his offer and got a warrant to search the apartment he had burglarized. They found the first working bomb factory ever discovered in a terrorist investigation in the United States. The safe house held explosives, batteries, propane tanks, watches, and a treasure trove of documents. The investigation led to a series of indictments. The FBI had wounded the FALN, but it did not kill the group.
Ojeda fled again to Puerto Rico, from which he oversaw the assassination of a United States Navy sailor in San Juan in 1982 and directed a $7.1 million Wells Fargo bank robbery in Connecticut in 1983. The FBI believed that half the money went to Cuban intelligence.
A new FBI special agent in charge in San Juan, Luis Fraticelli, had created a fifteen-member terrorism squad. Tracking down Ojeda was its top priority. Thirty years had passed since the Fraunces Tavern bombing.
During the summer of 2005, the squad determined that the seventy-two-year-old fugitive was living in a small house up a dirt road outside an isolated hamlet on the western edge of Puerto Rico. Fraticelli asked for the hostage rescue team to hunt him down.
FBI headquarters approved the deployment. Ten snipers and a support team landed in Puerto Rico ten days later, on September 23, 2005. There was going to be no negotiation. No member of the team spoke Spanish.
But the plan went awry. A helicopter dropped the hostage rescue force in the wrong location. Their cover was blown quickly. By the time they found Ojeda’s house, a crowd had gathered down the road, chanting “FBI assassins.” Shots were fired—by the FBI and its target—at 4:28 P.M. A standoff ensued. The assault team hunkered down. Rain started falling as night drew near. The FBI’s leaders, monitoring events from headquarters, grew worried.
Willie Hulon—the FBI’s sixth counterterrorism director in four years under Mueller—called his superior, Gary Bald, the FBI’s new national security chief.
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sp; “Bald believed that there was confusion regarding who was in command,” an understated after-action report recounted. He wrote in his notes: “Who is calling shots?” The answer was three different FBI chieftains.
In San Juan, the highly stressed special agent in charge wanted an immediate attack. In Quantico, the commander of the hostage rescue team wanted to send in fresh troops. In Washington, Hulon wanted to see a written plan of attack. As midnight approached, Bald told the team to stand down. Its members strongly disagreed. Their commander dispatched a new team from Dulles International Airport at 1:00 A.M. on September 24. They entered the small white house, pierced with 111 bullet holes, shortly after noon. They found Ojeda’s body on the floor with a loaded and cocked Browning 9mm handgun by his side. He had been dead since the first exchange of gunfire. No one at headquarters faulted the team that took him down. Ojeda was a terrorist and an assassin, and he had fired on the FBI, wounding one agent, before he died.
But “Who is calling shots?” was a resounding question. Given the continuing inability of the commanders of the FBI and their agents in the field to communicate, it was hard to see who could put them on the same wavelength. The ever-changing leadership of the FBI’s counterterrorism and intelligence chiefs made it harder. Most had cashed out for more rewarding jobs as security directors at credit-card companies, casinos, and cruise lines.
Every morning, Mueller read through the daily threat reports that came out of the new National Counterterrorism Center, up to twenty pages a day of captured e-mails, tips from foreign intelligence services, interviews with informants, and reports about suspicious characters from state and local police. On an average day, the FBI’s in-house threat-tracking system, called Guardian, recorded as many as one hundred alerts. The great majority turned out to be false alarms.
The FBI had to find a way to analyze it all, choose targets for investigations, and turn those investigations into arrests and indictments that would stand up in court and be counted as victories against the enemy. Mueller still needed to make intelligence into a tool for law enforcement.
There was a way. Mueller needed a new general and a new strategy.
“THIS IS ON OUR WATCH”
He found the commander he had been looking for in Philip Mudd, the prematurely gray and deceptively mild-mannered deputy director of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center. They had testified together for years in classified briefings; Mueller liked the way his new recruit thought and spoke. Mudd was a professional intelligence analyst, a twenty-year veteran of the CIA who had served as the National Security Council’s director for Persian Gulf and Middle East issues and worked in Kabul with the American ambassador in Afghanistan.
Mudd became the chief of the FBI’s National Security Division on April 27, 2006. Though he had been unraveling secrets all his life, he confessed that the FBI mystified him.
“It took me maybe six to twelve months to understand,” he said. “We’re not about collecting intelligence. We’re about looking at a problem and using our combined intelligence and law-enforcement skills to do something about that problem in a way that provides security for Los Angeles or Chicago or Tuscaloosa. This is a profound difference, in my judgment, between the other intelligence challenges I’ve seen over time.
“This is bigger, harder, and it has, in some ways, greater implications for the security of this country,” he said. “This is on our watch. If we don’t get it right, it’s our bad.”
Mueller and Mudd took a hard look at the correlation of forces in the war on terror in the spring and summer of 2006. The Bush administration was flagging. The attempts by the administration to use spies and soldiers to capture and interrogate suspected terrorists were starting to collapse. Torture tainted testimony against the suspects, making their conviction by American juries next to impossible. And the Supreme Court ruled that the president did not have the authority to create war crimes tribunals at Guantánamo.
Bush had fired his CIA director, and he was about to jettison his defense secretary. His attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, the former White House counsel, was widely regarded as a weak reed. Vice President Cheney’s top national security aide, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, had been convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice for lying about a CIA leak investigation; he was the highest-ranking White House official convicted of a felony since the Iran-contra imbroglio. The war in Iraq was going badly. Al-Qaeda was still rampant; its methods were metastasizing; the images from Abu Ghraib became a recruiting poster across the world. After the embarrassing exposure of the extralegal aspects of the Stellar Wind eavesdropping program, Congress worked to expand the warrantless wiretapping powers of the government. It eventually legalized parts of the president’s secret surveillance; it made eavesdropping inside America easier. Since much of the world’s telecommunications traffic is routed through the United States, regardless of its origins, the NSA and the FBI could trap an international e-mail stored on a Microsoft server or trace a call switched through an AT&T office without a warrant. Nonetheless, five years of hot pursuit had failed to find a single al-Qaeda suspect in America. Yet the FBI had an ominous sense that they were out there somewhere.
There was another way to smoke them out. What had worked for Hoover against the Ku Klux Klan and the Communist Party of the United States could work for Mueller against the threat of Islamic terrorism. The FBI would seek and arrest potential terrorists with undercover stings. It was a time-honored strategy that criminal investigators understood and intelligence agents savored. It combined secret investigations with the satisfaction of big arrests and blazing headlines. It required two essential elements: a convincing con man as the informant and a credulous suspect as the target. No jury in Los Angeles, Chicago, or Tuscaloosa would accept an argument of entrapment by an accused terrorist handcuffed and shackled by the FBI.
Over the next three years—until the FBI found its first actual al-Qaeda operative in America—the undercover sting became a central strategy of counterterrorism in America. Mueller made it official in a speech on June 23, 2006, announcing the arrests of seven men in a Miami slum who were accused of plotting to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago, the tallest building in America. Mueller called the men members of a “homegrown terrorist cell … self-recruited, self-trained, and self-executing. They may not have any connection to al-Qaeda or to other terrorist groups. They share ideas and information in the shadows of the Internet. They gain inspiration from radical websites that call for violence. They raise money by committing low-level crimes that do not generate much attention. They answer not to a particular leader, but to an ideology. In short, they operate under the radar.”
The Liberty City Seven, as they were called, were half-bright thugs without the apparent means or the skills to carry out an attack on anything bigger than a liquor store. Their plotting was more aspirational than operational, as the FBI’s deputy director, John Pistole, put it—a phrase that would often be repeated. It took three trials to convict five of the men. But case after case against the homegrown threat followed across the country. An undercover FBI agent in Illinois trailed a twenty-two-year-old thug who traded his stereo speakers for four fake hand grenades; he said he intended to kill shoppers in a mall outside Chicago during Christmas week of 2006. In another investigation, Mueller singled out the work of a former Green Beret in Ohio who had tracked two naturalized Americans from Jordan as they lifted weights, slugged down steroids, and talked about murdering American soldiers in Iraq.
More than half the major cases the FBI brought against accused terrorists from 2007 to 2009 were stings. The Bureau unveiled a spectacular-sounding indictment on May 8, 2007, charging a plot to attack the military base at Fort Dix, New Jersey, with heavy weapons. The ringleaders were three pot-smoking petty criminals in their twenties, all illegal immigrants from Albania, and their brother-in-law, a Palestinian cabdriver. They had taped themselves at a shooting range, shouting “God is great,” and they brought the tape to a video clerk to convert it
to a DVD. He called the FBI, which infiltrated the group with an informant, who offered to provide assault rifles and grenades. An even more frightening case emerged on June 3, 2007, when the FBI arrested a sixty-three-year-old suspect, who had once worked at Kennedy Airport in New York, and charged him with leading a plot to blow up aviation fuel tanks and pipelines surrounding the passenger terminals. The informant, a convicted cocaine dealer, recorded his target on tape: “To hit John F. Kennedy, wow,” he said. “They love JFK—like the man. If you hit that, the whole country will be in mourning. It’s like you can kill the man twice.”
A thirty-one-year-old former navy signalman was convicted on March 5, 2008, in a case based in large part upon an e-mail he had sent seven years before. The defendant, born Paul Hall, had changed his name to Hassan Abu-Jihad, a choice that had raised no eyebrows when he joined the navy. While aboard the USS Benfold in the Persian Gulf in April 2001, five months after the bombing of the Cole, he had sent messages to an online jihad forum in London embracing al-Qaeda and disclosing the deployment of ten navy ships to the Gulf. He received a twenty-five-year sentence.
These cases made good stories. The FBI represented them as real-time threats from real-life radicals in the United States. As long as the nation did not suffer an actual attack, most Americans cared little that some of the cases were concoctions, that the FBI sometimes supplied the guns and missiles, that not every e-mail was a fuse for an explosive, or that the plotters might not be homegrown terrorists but garden-variety lunatics.
The FBI had more than seven hundred million terrorism-related records in its files. The list of suspected terrorists it oversaw held more than 1.1 million names. Finding real threats in the deluge of secret intelligence remained a nightmarish task. The Bureau’s third attempt to create a computer network for its agents was floundering, costing far more and taking far longer than anyone had feared. It remained a work in progress for years to come; only one-third of the FBI’s agents and analysts were connected to the Internet. Mueller had the authority to hire two dozen senior intelligence officers at headquarters. By 2008, he had found only two. Congress continued to flog the FBI’s counterterrorism managers for their failures of foresight and stamina; Mueller had now seen eight of them come and go.