Freeh Reign : He’s Eliminated Red Tape and Senior Posts, Given Agents More Power and Fewer Desk Jobs, Promoted International Cooperation and His Friends--In Just 17 Months, Louis Freeh Has Made a Mark on the FBI as Indelible as J. Edgar Hoover’s.

Hands plunged deep into the pants pockets of his blue suit, Louis J. Freeh stands before the agents and support staff of the Indianapolis field office of the FBI, laying out his vision of their future. His accent is thick--”the law” rhymes with “the drawer”--and with his flat “Just the facts, ma’am” tone, he sounds astonishingly like Joe Friday of TV’s “Dragnet,” if Sgt. Friday had hailed from New Jersey.

Standing 5-foot-8, Freeh does not tower over the lectern like Wayne R. Alford, the special agent in charge of the Indianapolis office, who introduced him this day and exhorted his ranks to give the new director “a great big Hoosier welcome.” But almost immediately, the director has the attention of the 125 or so agents and clerks who fill the seats and crowd the ecru-colored walls of the white-collar crime squad’s work area.

Partly, it is the way that Freeh tries to personalize a time-worn ritual. He presents Bill Amos with a 40-year service award; Amos joined the bureau when its new director was 4 years old. As Freeh hands over the watch, he notes that his own was filched by his 2-year-old son, the youngest of four children. “I’ve used all the constitutionally approved interrogation methods,” he deadpans, but the culprit won’t talk.

But mostly it is the message that comes later that captivates his audience. As Freeh describes the things he plans to scrap or drastically reshape in what may be the most tradition-bound agency in all the Federal government, eyes widen. He speaks of overhauling the FBI’s inspections--the process feared most by field agents and their bosses--and decentralizing disciplinary power. And when Freeh declares that the bureau’s hallowed executive-development system, with its many required relocations, is “historically a very discouraging program,” the agents exchange sidelong glances. Obviously, this is a new kind of director.

Indeed. After his speech, Freeh holds a series of meetings with the agents, proceeding squad by squad, ending with the support staff. The agents’ bosses, Alford and his assistant, are not invited, another break with tradition, and the agents seem uncertain, visibly hesitant to break the silence.

“I didn’t come out here to be the FBI mascot and be petted,” Freeh assures them. “I really came out to listen to you. Tell me not just about your cases but what I need to know--your suggestions, criticisms.”

“I’d prefer you call me by my first name,” he says, trying to put them at ease, “but inevitably people have trouble with that.” Clearly they do, since it is an absolutely unprecedented request in this paramilitary organization. But though no one can muster the fortitude to call him Louie, the agents gradually loosen up. Freeh listens, nodding occasionally, and learns that limits on telephones set aside for receiving calls from confidential informants have pinched pennies but risked security of the phones. And that rigid personnel practices have sometimes cost the bureau talent.

Although the FBI director has always regularly visited the 56 field offices, this level of information exchange is unheard of. Flying home from Indianapolis, Freeh recalls a mid-1970s visit by the then-director of the New York field office, the bureau’s largest, where Freeh was assigned as a young agent. “The director came in, spoke to us as a group, posed for pictures and said goodby. Did he learn anything?” Freeh asks, diplomatically sidestepping the question of whether the director was Clarence M. Kelley or William H. Webster. “You just get a more basic level of information doing this--more unfiltered. There’s really no substitute for it.”

In the last 17 months, Freeh has changed the FBI more drastically and done it faster than any director who preceded him, including J. Edgar Hoover. Freeh has broken many time-honored Washington patterns--by responding directly and with little qualification to questions on Capitol Hill, by explaining his recommendations and actions respectfully, but firmly.

Certainly, Atty. Gen. Janet Reno relies on him heavily. When asked about the recent abortion clinic slayings in Massachusetts, she answered that she had talked with Freeh for much of the afternoon, as if that alone would signal her seriousness about combatting the violence. And no criticism is heard from the White House; Freeh is widely regarded as one of Clinton’s best appointments.

Of course any shake-up, especially of an agency as volatile as the FBI, is never without its explosions. Freeh’s recent discipline of those involved in the shooting of a woman in Idaho drew charges of favoritism. And there was much grumbling in the ranks of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents recently over the credit given the FBI for the apprehension of the suspect in the abortion-clinic murders.

But these are minor criticisms, murmurs in the midst of the storm. The very idea of a compact, quiet 44-year-old former agent taking it upon himself to change what is probably the most complicated and prickly agency in Washington is unlikely enough. But Freeh has done more than make changes; he’s turned the bureau inside out, demanding that the FBI lose its image of aloofness and enter the modern age of integrated domestic and international crime fighting. And he’s done this without losing his street-agent mystique, which may explain the criticism from within his own ranks. Because Freeh’s career within the FBI is the most unlikely element of all. He didn’t follow the bureau’s clear-cut career track. He never made it to the middle-management stage. He was an agent. Now he runs the place.

*

By its nature, the FBI is not an agency easily understood, much less managed. And the bureau Freeh took over was fraught with turmoil. William Sessions, his predecessor and the first FBI director fired by a President, insisted on viewing the Justice Department ethics investigation of him as a politically motivated inquiry. This unprecedented internal dissension dominated the news for months, overshadowing genuine reforms that Sessions brought about.

Almost from the day Freeh took charge, the former FBI agent and federal prosecutor began making fundamental changes. (Many of the first steps reflected a management study ordered by Sessions.) Freeh stripped away layers of bureaucratic red tape. Special agents in charge were given the power to approve certain undercover operations, and the review of such operations now requires a two-page form, rather than the traditional 15 to 30. And the requirement that agents maintain at least a specified number of confidential informants, regardless of what the sources produce, has been replaced with a much broader measure.

After only six weeks on the job, Freeh overhauled the top management structure of the bureau, abolishing two senior posts and naming the first woman, the first Latino and the second black to serve as assistant directors. Then he moved 600 agents and supervisors from desks in Washington and other bureaus onto the streets.

He also disrupted time-honored pomp and protocol. Gone is the long-favored armored limousine; Freeh regularly climbs into the back seat of a minivan driven by an FBI employee. Gone, too, is the three- or four-man security team that invariably accompanied past directors whenever they left headquarters. For the flight to Indianapolis, Freeh walked through the National Airport terminal accompanied only by Jim Bucknam, his chief aide on trips to field offices. (Freeh is not just another business traveler, of course. As he boards the plane, he hands the gate agent a yellow slip of paper, notification that he’s armed, so that the flight crew knows who is carrying weapons and where they’re seated. Beneath his suit coat, Freeh wears a holstered 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol of the type that street agents carry.)

Revamping the way the bureau polices itself, Freeh has given his special agents expanded disciplinary authority and issued so-called “bright line” regulations, so clear that no one can fail to understand them. Under the new rules, “homosexual conduct is not per se misconduct”; and the blanket bar against anyone who has ever used drugs has been dropped. He also declared that anyone found leaking information “can expect the maximum punishment.”

If anybody saw this as showcasing, the discipline of two 30-year-plus veterans proved otherwise. James Fox, head of the New York office, had publicly denied that an informant in the World Trade Center bombing case had given the FBI advance word, despite admonishments from Freeh himself not to comment. And Jim Ahearn, Phoenix, Ariz., field-office chief, had been quoted as saying that Atty. Gen. Reno was behaving more like “a social worker” than like the nation’s top prosecutor. Both were suspended just before their respective retirements.

William P. Barr, who briefly headed the Justice Department under President George Bush, says he is not surprised at the extent of the changes being made by the first insider director since Clarence M. Kelley headed the bureau two decades ago. “Insiders make the best agents of change,” Barr contends. “They tend to see how the system really works.”

The general consensus in Washington and in law enforcement across the country is that Freeh, with his take-no-prisoners attitude, was exactly what the Bureau needed; halfway measures would have only added to the chaos. But many of the changes, some insiders say, reflect a disturbing pattern. Critics accuse Freeh of having created a Friends of Louis corps by favoring individuals he had worked with previously and bringing an unusual number of outsiders into key staff positions. The FBI would not supply a precise count of how many of Freeh’s nearly 200 appointments were individuals he knew from earlier service, but Freeh acknowledges the charge and has made joking references to “FOLs.”

His recent disciplining of the 12 FBI officials, supervisors and agents involved the 1992 slaying of Vicky Weaver in Idaho has made the criticism a little more pointed. Although Freeh found “no intentional misconduct,” he said that those disciplined “demonstrated inadequate performance, improper judgment, neglect of duty and failure to exert proper managerial oversight.” The recommended punishment ranged from letters of censure to demotion and extended to a Freeh favorite, Acting Deputy Director Larry A. Potts, for whom Freeh recommended a letter of censure. Yet Freeh told reporters that he has “complete confidence” in Potts, and that he wanted Atty. Gen. Reno to appoint Potts to the No. 2 post on a permanent basis. Many were left open-mouthed, especially in light of the much stricter punishment meted out to Fox and Ahearn for misspeaking.

“The new Career Development Program is that if you’re a friend of Louis, you’re promoted, and if you’re not, you’re dogs - - -,” says a former mid-level official at bureau headquarters, insisting that his decision to retire in 1993 was not related to Freeh’s arrival.

Some of the controversy emanates from Freeh’s appointment of a triumvirate of federal prosecutors he knew when he served in the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan. He named Robert B. Bucknam, 43, chief of staff; Howard M. Shapiro, 34, is the FBI’s first general counsel, and Bucknam’s brother, James R., 32, heads up the new office for ending interagency turf fights. “He may be relying too heavily on the views of a certain group of friends, including their estimates of other people in the organization, creating a clique,” worries a former senior Justice Department official.

A former senior FBI official familiar with how Freeh works with the Bucknam brothers and Shapiro scoffs at the suggestion that they shape the FBI director’s policy-making, saying that idea “short-changes his own level of self-confidence and ability. He’s a bright guy who knows the bureau. He’s not going to blindly accept advice from anybody.”

But the criticism is not confined to grumblings about cronyism. The disciplinary crackdown has also prompted some bureau veterans to simply quip “He’s back,” a reference to Hoover and his highly arbitrary punishments. One unhappy official describes Freeh as “Hoover with kids.”

Some longtime special agents who otherwise support Freeh worry about the downsizing at headquarters and the national academy in Quantico, Va.

Oliver B. (Buck) Revell, recently retired head of the FBI’s Dallas office, has held virtually every key post at the bureau except for director and deputy director. While supporting the reduction of headquarters’ staff and delegating authority to the field, Revell says: “I do have concerns with the pace and hope it doesn’t impair the ability of the laboratory and training divisions to carry out their missions.”

Part of Freeh’s downsizing at headquarters replaced agents with non-agents. The blow to the morale of middle managers has been so devastating, one former headquarters official claims, that he’s been flooded with calls from former colleagues searching for positions in the private sector.

One agent who retired in 1993 belittles Freeh’s hands-on attitude, specifically the squad meetings, likening them to agents sitting around field offices “having coffee and playing ‘If I were king of the castle.’ ”

*

Even when he was a kid growing up in North Bergen, N.J., the middle son of a modestly successful real estate broker and appraiser, Louis Freeh was more disciplined and purposeful than most. Family and church mattered. And, despite a safely middle-class background, he somewhere acquired an instinct for the streets.

He went on to Rutgers: four years as an undergraduate, three years of law school. He worked hard: Phi Beta Kappa, summer jobs loading trucks, earning his state real estate license while a law student. He was too busy to be a school politician, but he was the natural leader among his colleagues. “We never knew we were following Louis,” says Ed Henrichsen, a childhood friend who attended St. Joseph of the Palisades with Freeh. “He just seemed to have the good ideas.”

He also “was sort of an urban Indian,” recalls Greg Gaze, a retired Air Force pilot living in San Diego. He and Freeh were college roommates, sharing an apartment in a rough section of New Brunswick, N.J. When they went out for pizza, Freeh would point out a drug house here, a numbers parlor there. “He could read that stuff,” Gaze says Freeh joined the FBI right out of law school. Later, he would say he had never wanted to do anything else from the time he was a boy, but some friends and family members don’t remember it quite that way. According to his mother, Bernice Freeh, 1975 “was a year that the FBI needed lawyers, and he just took it.”

Only a year after joining the bureau, Freeh played an important role in a landmark investigation of union racketeering known as UNIRAC. The young agent went undercover, joined a health club frequented by the mob and spent hours in the sauna, chatting with the suspect and watching envelopes stuffed with payoff money change hands. The investigation, according to students of the bureau, offered the first concrete evidence that the FBI was becoming serious about attacking organized crime and led to the conviction of 125 union and New York waterfront figures. Freeh won a special commendation from Director Webster and was promoted to a supervisor’s job in Washington.

In 1981, Freeh left the FBI to become a prosecutor in the southern district of New York, then generally recognized as the most prestigious of the 93 U.S. attorney offices in the country. His rate of climb there matched his record at the bureau: head of the organized crime unit, deputy U.S. Attorney and finally associate U.S. Attorney.

The investigation in the Pizza Connection heroin case, which Freeh ran, ranks among the longest, most expensive and most successful criminal investigations ever conducted. His success in the massive effort led to what may have been an even more difficult assignment: rescuing a disintegrating federal effort to solve the 1989 mail-bomb killings of a federal appellate judge in Birmingham, Ala., and a civil rights attorney in Savannah, Ga.

For months the investigation had been an embarrassing failure. Agents thought they knew the perpetrator, a career criminal named Walter Leroy Moody Jr., but they had been unable to assemble conclusive proof. Freeh learned that Moody frequently talked to himself, so he bugged Moody’s cell and picked up such musings as “Kill those damn judges” and “you can’t pull another bombin’.” The evidence gathered contributed significantly to a 71-count criminal conviction.

Shortly after that, then-President Bush named Freeh to a federal judgeship in New York City, the job Freeh had to give up to become FBI director.

One of Freeh’s first considerations as he pondered whether to accept President Clinton’s offer was his family. Freeh’s wife, Marilyn, is no stranger to the FBI. She met him in 1980 during his brief stint as a labor-racketeering supervisor at FBI headquarters. At the time, she was a paralegal in the bureau’s Civil Rights section. She says she probably would have taken the test to become an agent herself if she hadn’t gotten married. Louis Freeh, discussing the job offer with the President, asked for just two assurances: that he would be independent, and that he could use his own judgment in deciding when he needed to be at home. Clinton guaranteed both points.

Freeh schedules his job around his family, something few do in the nation’s capital. He seldom attends embassy parties, glittery dinners or other Washington events at which his predecessor was a fixture, and he manages to avoid overnight trips.

“I try to get home at 7 p.m. on weekdays--one, ‘cause it’s my job to give (my boys) their baths,” he says. “Mom refuses to give four boys a bath, which you can certainly sympathize with. I also get a chance to do a little bit of homework with them. Then we try to have a reading. We pick a newspaper article or a magazine article and sit around for about 10 minutes, which is about the span of the lower end of attention for the four of them.”

Freeh is opposed to an overdose of television. When one of his sons was asked in a school assignment to describe his father, the youngster wrote: “My Father. He doesn’t like to watch TV.”

*

In the courtyard at FBI headquarters is a curving wall that serves as a backdrop for outdoor ceremonies. The ugly, fortress-like headquarters structure is named for J. Edgar Hoover, director for 48 years until his death in 1972. Hoover also is memorialized in a quotation printed on that wall in raised gold letters: “The most effective weapon against crime is cooperation . . . the efforts of all law enforcement agencies with the support and understanding of the American people.”

But Hoover’s words did not match his actions. Under his command, the FBI made law enforcement cooperation a one-way street, taking both information and credit from others and giving little in return. When Freeh took his oath of office in the FBI courtyard on Sept. 1, 1993, he decried turf wars, saying, “We should try to follow the advice that we often give our children: Play with your friends, be fair and honest with them, and share your toys.”

Practically speaking, the lack of intelligence-sharing, and the failure of FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration offices in the same cities to keep each other informed, made it all too easy for them to stumble over each other’s informants, blow an electronic surveillance or, worst of all, buy or sell drugs from each other through informants and witnesses. Two months after Freeh was sworn in as FBI director, the Attorney General appointed him to a second post: director of Investigative Agency Policies. “The American people don’t want to hear about two bureaucrats fighting over jurisdiction, who gets credit for a case or who was there first,” Freeh says, “and I don’t want to hear it.”

Several who took part in the first meeting Freeh held with the the DEA, FBI, Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Marshals Service remember it as a fists-clenched session, especially when Freeh ordered the DEA and FBI to come up with plans to integrate their drug intelligence bases in six weeks, not the one-to-two years estimated in advance.

At the DEA, senior officials bristled at what they considered a ineptly camouflaged transference of power: Fighting drugs was to become an FBI show. But as Freeh ruled against the preferences of top officials of the bureau--for example, when he dispatched five FBI agents to work at the El Paso Intelligence Center, a tactical drug intelligence unit that the FBI had shunned for years--many became less defensive.

The problem of fragmented federal law enforcement, as Freeh sees it, grew out of America’s aversion toward a national police force. But he’s convinced that the competing agencies can be integrated short of a merger. He sees the need, down the road, of going beyond Justice Department entities to such Treasury Department units as the Customs Service, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the Secret Service. Historically, those organizations are no less leery of FBI credit-grabbing than the DEA, but Freeh has held “preliminary discussions” with Ronald K. Noble, undersecretary of the Treasury for enforcement.

At the same time, Freeh has pushed his agency further into the global arena, pledging to collaborate with foreign police, prosecutors and judges in battling “terrorism, drug trafficking and organized crime in our global village.”

Three months after he took office, he stood in the 12th-Century Palatine Chapel of the Palace of the Normans in Palermo, Sicily, participating in a memorial mass for two Mafia prosecutors and more than a score of their colleagues and families who had been slain in recent years by the underworld organization. Some of those prosecutors had worked with him when he was an obscure federal lawyer grappling with major drug cases. “No more should the Mafia hang as a millstone around the neck of freedom,” Freeh declared in an emotion-charged speech. “Turn them out from your towns and churches where they can be exposed to the light of the law which will sear and destroy them.”

On that same trip, he met with German police officials to discuss joint efforts against violent extremist organizations and the threat of stolen nuclear materials. In late June and early July, he led a delegation of U.S. law-enforcement officials through Eastern Europe and Russia for meetings with their counterparts there and to open the FBI’s first office in Moscow. These ventures were unusual, especially during a time of budget cuts, but they were important, Freeh says, for two reasons. First, he says, the rapid growth of organized crime there represents a direct threat to the United States. And second, he is convinced that instilling democratic values and policing practices in their newly reformed security agencies is critical to the survival of democracy.

And he isn’t confining himself to democratic nations. Sometime this year, he hopes to open an office in Bejing; this marks the first time the FBI has ever had a presence in China, which, with the Soviet Union had for so long been considered the bureau’s primary foreign intelligence threat. These moves toward international cooperation reflect a concern he has always felt, a concern which deepened during his trip to Europe last summer when he took a walking tour of Auschwitz.

At the heart of the Holocaust was “the corruption and usurpation of the regular, civilian police forces sworn to uphold the civil and human rights of people in a free society,” he told an audience at Jagiellonian University in Krakow. “Those trusted to protect the people became the instruments of terror . . . . For the police, more than any other segment of society or government, the rule of law must always remain sacrosanct.”

Later, he recalled: “Of all the things I’ve done in my life--agent, prosecutor, judge--walking through that camp and appreciating that history really defined for me what we do, what we do here as policemen. The lesson was simple but so powerful. We protect people, No. 1, and we need somebody to protect the people from the police.”