Amid FBI Woes, Freeh Is Urged to Delay His Retirement

Associates of FBI Director Louis J. Freeh are urging him to postpone his upcoming retirement for a few months to help the agency ride out the turmoil caused by its miscues involving Oklahoma City bomber Timothy J. McVeigh and accused spy Robert Philip Hanssen.

The White House has broached the issue gently with Freeh to test the waters, and other prominent associates have made the case more forcefully to him, arguing that it would badly disrupt the FBI if he were to leave office at the end of this month as planned, according to a law enforcement colleague who has spoken with Freeh.

“He might not be willing to stay forever, but he can stay for a while,” said the colleague, who asked not to be identified. “The advantage is that the bureau has been under tremendous scrutiny, and an acting director wouldn’t be in a position to take the bold steps that would be needed.”

Freeh has enjoyed strong support in Washington through most of his eight years on the job, but two major scandals have muddied his reputation.

The February arrest of Hanssen, a 25-year FBI veteran accused of spying for the Russians since 1985, has triggered questions about how the FBI overlooked his alleged espionage for so long. And last month’s discovery of more than 4,000 pages of undisclosed documents in the FBI’s Oklahoma City bombing investigation forced a postponement of McVeigh’s scheduled May 16 execution until next week at the earliest. At a hearing today in Denver, McVeigh’s lawyers will seek a second delay to give them more time to review the new documents.

“This is an awful time for him to leave with all this blowing up around him,” said a second close associate who also expects to lobby Freeh to stay on. “You don’t want him to leave when everyone is focused on the incompetence of the bureau. Leaving now, there would be a cloud over his legacy.”

Associates pushing for a delay say it would help the FBI if Freeh remained at the helm into the fall. That, they argue, would allow time for a successor to be nominated by the White House and perhaps confirmed by the Senate, and it might also allow time for a high-level Justice Department commission to complete its investigation of the Hanssen affair.

Under that scenario, Freeh could stay in office long enough to endorse the commission’s recommendations on how to shore up the FBI’s counterespionage security, then hand the reins over to his successor, who would implement the changes.

Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft has begun interviewing candidates, with former Justice Department official George Terwilliger and U.S. Atty. Robert Mueller of San Francisco mentioned most frequently.

In speaking with colleagues, Freeh appears to have left the door open to a delayed resignation. But publicly, he gave no hint Tuesday of his plans as he gave a rare public speech in Washington to accept a leadership award from the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

The former judge quipped that his father asks him every day “if I’ve found a job yet” and demands to know why his son would want to give up a comfortable government post with two years remaining in a 10-year term.

A major reason, friends say, is money. Freeh has six sons younger than 17, and after 27 years in government, he is anxious to find a high-paying job in the private sector to help finance the boys’ college tuition. He now earns about $145,000 a year.

His father has also had health problems, and Freeh is eager to spend more time with him and other family members.

Freeh says his decision to step down is unrelated to either scandal now engulfing the FBI.

Freeh says that when he told President Bush and the FBI that he was resigning in early May, he didn’t know his agents had been poring through thousands of documents in Oklahoma City to determine whether paperwork was improperly withheld from McVeigh’s lawyers. Freeh and Ashcroft weren’t informed of the foul-up until a week later, just a day before the story broke publicly on May 10, Justice Department officials say.

In his speech Tuesday, Freeh said he regrets the “enormous concern” and embarrassment that the McVeigh controversy has wrought on the FBI.

But he said the fact that the FBI admitted its mistake and turned over the documents belatedly, rather than simply filing them, speaks to “the caliber and character” of its agents. Freeh said he has tried to drive home the importance of such high ethical standards, partly by requiring agents to undergo ethics training at the Holocaust Museum in Washington on the dangers of tyranny. He hopes that training will be one of his legacies.

But the question at the moment is when Freeh will leave office.

Freeh said last month that he would leave “by the end of the school year in June.” But he has still not set a date, no lavish going-aways have been announced and the Justice Department has not even said definitively whether deputy director Thomas Pickard will be appointed acting director, as many expect.

“It’s strangely silent,” said John Sennett, head of the FBI agents’ association. “He hasn’t announced any drop-dead date, so some people are wondering if he may be delaying his departure.”

Sennett added that he thinks people at the FBI would just as soon see the director stay past June to help the bureau recover from the recent pounding to its reputation.

But it’s unclear if that idea would sit well with some Democrats in Congress, who charge that the Republicans have given Freeh too much latitude in the last few years.

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), who became chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, said he thinks the Senate should begin an in-depth look at the FBI and “find out why mistakes were made.”

An aide said FBI hearings could start at the end of June--with or without Freeh in charge.