Webster Era Winds Down at Changing FBI

Under the law that fixes his term of office, William H. Webster must step down as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation by early 1988, and he recently asked an assistant to come up with clever responses to the increasingly frequent questions about his career plans.

“I might take a clue from the heavens like Halley’s comet and depart in late 1986,” was one suggestion, “but if I do, don’t expect me back in 75 years.”

The subject is no laughing matter though, as Webster himself realizes. The director of the FBI occupies one of the most sensitive positions in American government. And Webster’s successor, whoever it is, will inevitably put his stamp on the nation’s premier law enforcement agency as it continues a major transformation that began after the death of J. Edgar Hoover 14 years ago.

Dramatic Changes

Under Webster and his immediate predecessors, the FBI has changed dramatically.

The bureau of Hoover’s day emphasized such relatively simple crimes as auto theft because they led to eye-popping conviction rates that avoided controversy and loosened congressional pursestrings. Now the FBI has moved into such sensitive areas as labor racketeering, political corruption, organized crime and drugs.

It also has worked to increase the number of women and blacks and other minorities serving as agents. The bureau at last count totaled 8,946 special agents, including 356 blacks--4% of the total--versus only nine blacks in 1960 and 144 when Webster took over in February, 1978. Women agents today number 653, versus only 94 when Webster took over and none under Hoover.

But some of the changes, while winning praise as shifts toward more important and higher quality work, have nonetheless exposed the bureau to pressures and problems virtually unknown before.

Lawmakers Prosecuted

The Abscam investigation, for instance, led to the successful prosecution of a United States senator, six congressmen and a number of local politicians and others in Pennsylvania. But it also exposed the FBI to charges of entrapment, charges that gave the bureau some uncomfortable days even though it was ultimately vindicated by the courts.

Similarly, its more open and forthright way of dealing with internal problems, while hailed as progress, has resulted in more than a dozen agents being publicly charged with crimes and improper conduct, including one case of espionage. In the past, bureau veterans note, errant agents were commonly forced out of the bureau with no public disclosure of their misdeeds.

And most experts now agree that the FBI has curbed the abuses that once made it feared by civil rights groups, leftists and others who challenged the political status quo.

Says one longtime bureau official: “In the old days, there was no due process for anyone inside the bureau or for the world outside” as far as the FBI’s operating procedures were concerned.

Valuable Alliances

It is this wide-ranging process of change that the next director of the FBI must guide and direct.

Webster, a moderate Republican who was serving on the federal circuit court of appeals when he was chosen by the Carter Administration, has played a key role. He has turned out to be an administrator who demands answers inside the organization and a highly effective advocate for the bureau with Congress and the executive branch. He has forged valuable alliances inside Washington’s power elite under Democratic and Republican administrations alike.

But some critics contend that Webster’s personal integrity and political savvy have given the bureau a Teflon shield that fended off even valid criticism. They maintain the FBI is suffering from trying to take on too much, and that this overreaching shows up in lapses in the bureau’s counterintelligence effort and in recent agent deaths.

Bureau defenders, including some top officials, reject such criticism as “sour grapes” and argue that the FBI is not seeking to expand its mission but only answering alarm bells rung by Congress and the executive branch.

10-Year Maximum Term

Some career officials inside the FBI and at the Justice Department lament the 1976 decision by Congress to establish a 10-year maximum term for the bureau’s director--the decision that is now requiring Webster to depart.

Key members of Congress do not. Although Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.), who led the drive to establish the limited term, said he regards Webster as “a good director,” he added that he would not make an exception for him.

“The purpose of the 10-year limit does not relate to any particular director,” Byrd said. “It involves the FBI as an institution of government and the position of director generally.”

The 10-year term was enacted in the wake of the nearly 48 years of increasingly autocratic command of the bureau by Hoover and the revelation that the man named to succeed him, L. Patrick Gray III, had burned potential Watergate-related evidence in the fireplace of his home.

Speculation on Successor

At the time the Senate approved the 10-year term, Byrd said it would thwart possible abuses of the FBI through “either political manipulation or autocratic control unchecked by either executive or legislative oversight.”

Although Webster must leave, White House and Justice Department officials insist that no one in authority has yet focused on likely candidates to succeed Webster. But that has not dulled speculation on the identity of the new director.

Among Webster’s subordinates at the FBI, speculation has inevitably centered on the three men at the level immediately below the director in the FBI hierarchy: Oliver D. (Buck) Revell, John E. Otto and John D. Glover, who all carry the title of executive assistant director. All three are 47 years old.

The leading contenders outside the bureau are D. Lowell Jensen, former deputy attorney general, who was recently named a federal judge in San Francisco; Stephen S. Trott, former U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, who came to Washington to head the Justice Department’s criminal division and is being elevated to the department’s No. 3 post, and the dark horse of the group, Joseph E. diGenova, rated the District of Columbia’s most aggressive U.S. attorney in the last two decades.

sh Choosing Replacement

Whether Webster’s replacement should come from inside or outside the bureau will be one of the first questions the Administration will have to face. Webster, a federal appellate court and trial judge and U.S. attorney before he took command, was an outsider. Clarence M. Kelley, while an FBI agent for a number of years, was serving as Kansas City’s police chief when appointed director of the bureau.

Otto, despite his own status as second in command within the bureau, said he believes the new director should come from the outside. “Our experience with Judge Webster has worked so magnificently well that my own preference would be that the bench is a good place to start looking,” he said.

And another FBI official, who asked not to be named, said the excesses of the Hoover era are still too fresh. “We’re still one or two directors away from having a director from the inside,” he said.

Revell, on the other hand, insisted: “I don’t believe it’s necessary to go outside to find qualified people to head the FBI. My view is that there are qualified people within and without.”

Agency ‘Self-Policing’

He dismissed as “nonsense” the suggestion that someone from the outside would be better able to “keep an eye on the organization.” Not only is the FBI too big for any one person to accomplish that, he said, but it is “self-policing.”

Revell said no one inside the FBI is campaigning for Webster’s job. “There’s no factionalism in this organization--no jockeying for position. If anyone started a campaign, it would be totally counterproductive.”

Among the three FBI insiders, Revell is a hard-driving, ex-Marine aviator and veteran of 21 years in the FBI who serves as Webster’s principal deputy for investigative, counterterrorist and intelligence activities. His articulate manner of speech, wrapped in an Oklahoma twang and delivered with a near evangelical certainty, have caused him some difficulty over the years.

In January, 1981, after only seven months in the highly sensitive post of assistant director in charge of the criminal investigative division, Revell received a letter of censure for publicly confirming details of a sting operation and was shunted off to head the administrative services division, which is responsible for personnel, budget and financial operations.

Returned to Job

But a year and a half later he was back in charge of criminal investigations, and a year ago he was promoted to executive assistant director for investigations.

Otto has been designated by Webster to be in command of the FBI in the director’s absence. He has been executive assistant director in charge of law enforcement services--the identification, training and laboratory divisions--for five years.

Although Otto’s declared disinterest in moving to the No. 1 spot is no secret inside the FBI, his popularity among his colleagues and his broad base of bureau experience keep his name circulating as a possibility.

Glover taught in a Miami high school for five years before joining the FBI as a special agent in 1966 and was named to the third of the No. 2 posts last April. While outsiders often cite him as the highest-ranking black in an agency where few blacks have attained command authority, he is admired inside FBI headquarters for his work in charge of the inspection division, the FBI’s internal policing arm.

Defused Infighting

Glover is credited with defusing intense infighting among federal, state and local law enforcement agencies during the Atlanta child-slaying investigation, which occurred while he was in charge of the FBI’s field office there. More recently, he led the FBI investigation of alleged wrongdoing by one or more agents in the handling of Teamsters President Jackie Presser as a government informant.

Among the outside candidates for Webster’s job, Jensen, 58, was generally thought to have taken himself out of the running when he took the judgeship, a lifetime appointment. But he has confided to friends that a chance to run the FBI is probably the only thing that could draw him back to Washington.

A registered but nonpartisan Democrat, Jensen served alongside Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III in the Alameda County prosecutor’s office and later became district attorney there. After 12 years he came to Washington with the Reagan Administration as assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s criminal division office and later was elevated to the department’s No. 3 and 2 posts.

Unflinching Supporter

Trott, 46, served as U.S. attorney in Los Angeles before joining the Justice Department as assistant attorney general in charge of the criminal division. Now slated to become associate attorney general, the Justice Department’s No. 3 post, he has been an unflinching supporter of Reagan Administration policies and turns aside all criticism of the FBI, claiming that the agency has been peerless in its performance.

Trott’s chances could hinge on who takes control of the Senate in the November election. Of all the candidates, he has run into the most flak from Democrats in Congress as he has defended the Administration’s controversial initial decision to drop its investigation of Presser and its decision not to prosecute E. F. Hutton officials in the recent check-kiting scandal.

DiGenova, 41, is given only a small chance because of his relative youth. But his ability to oversee and administer sensitive operations, including the still-unfolding investigations of corruption in the District of Columbia government and of Israeli spying, has won him high regard in the Justice Department hierarchy.

DiGenova, once an aide to retiring Sen. Charles McC. Mathias Jr. (R-Md.), has managed to defend unpopular moves before congressional interrogators without emerging a “cheerleader,” as some critics have called Trott.