The Men Who Knew Too Little

Ronald Kessler opens “The Bureau,” his comprehensive history of the FBI, with Sept. 11 imagery: Barry Mawn, chief of the New York FBI office, races to the World Trade Center as the twin towers flame. He sees a female leg on the street severed at the knee, a pink sock and white sneaker still on. The image haunts Mawn months later.

Kessler’s book could not be more timely. Sept. 11 was a monumental counterintelligence failure, and Kessler wonders if the bureau can be counted upon to disrupt terrorist cells before they again wreak havoc. It’s a life-and-death issue for the agency that is charged with averting domestic terrorist attacks, an issue that perforce looms over every page of this volume.

Kessler, a Washington Post reporter during the Watergate era who gained unprecedented access to a normally cloistered agency, deftly lays out its checkered history. The bureau’s problem dates from the days of J. Edgar Hoover when the FBI’s mystique sheltered it from congressional oversight, allowing for a fit of jurisdictional expansion that took it into fields unsuited for its gangbuster mentality.

How badly has the bureau stumbled in counterintelligence?

The news last week that President Bush was given a CIA warning, more than a month before Sept. 11, that Al Qaeda was plotting to hijack airliners was shocking, in that the president failed to order a special FBI investigation. It suggests a tragic, blind trust in the bureau, which one month before had learned from its agents in Phoenix that Islamic militants were taking lessons on how to fly commercial jets and, from another source, that terrorists were planning to fly planes into office buildings. Headquarters bureaucrats sat on their hands with these two pieces of information.

Or take the case of FBI agent Robert Hanssen, who spied for the Russians for two decades after a Soviet diplomat tipped off an unheeding FBI that he had offered his services. When sentenced to life in prison earlier this month, the prosecutor said that Hanssen had done incalculable damage to U.S. security.

Hoover died in 1972 after nearly 48 years as director, but his legacy remains.”Even though none of the current agents served under Hoover,” Kessler writes, “they absorbed by osmosis his instruction about not embarrassing the Bureau.” A succession of directors, confounded by an inflexible bureaucracy, avoided a shakeup. “The Bureau” demonstrates that the past is prologue. Following a 1919 wave of bombings attributed to anarchists, Hoover, then an ambitious Justice Department aide, compiled 450,000 index cards on putative radicals, profiling them through a mix of rumor, gossip and fact. He then orchestrated dragnet detentions and deportations based on the cards. But, as Kessler puts it, “No one was ever apprehended for the bombings.”

Last year, there was an eerie echo of those Red Raids, when the FBI rounded up thousands of Middle Eastern males and conducted mass interrogations that proved fruitless. Kessler writes that, after becoming FBI director in 1924, Hoover, consumed by image, insisted that his minions dress like Wall Streeters. Applicants who looked like foreigners were rejected. To this day the bureau is hardly a model of diversity. On Sept. 11, there were only a dozen Arabic-speaking agents.

Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft has said that he intends to use secret military tribunals to try accused Al Qaeda terrorists, citing as precedent the World War II convictions of eight German saboteurs who landed by submarine. Morale on the home front was buoyed by the FBI’s tale of how it tracked down the saboteurs. But Kessler tells the real story: Two of the Germans, George Dasch and Ernst Burger, tried to turn themselves and their comrades in to the FBI, but no one believed their story. The purpose of the secret tribunal was to seal the truth. Ashcroft couldn’t have chosen a worse precedent.

Kessler has a unique take on the wedge issue of Waco, Texas, where in 1993 an FBI assault on the Branch Davidian cult compound killed close to 80, many of them children. The bureau’s paramilitary unit, the Hostage Rescue Team, became impatient with the lengthy holdout and wanted to move in. Kessler explains: “Because the various FBI elements at the scene--the HRT, the negotiators, and the profilers--did not come under one commander, the HRT won out.”

Kessler scolds media colleagues who taunted the FBI for its inability to crack the Unabomber case. Between 1978 and 1995, a terrorist mailed 16 package bombs that killed three people and maimed others. Working off a profiler’s depiction of a blue-collar type, possibly an electrician or plumber, a task force chased its tail until 1996, after newspapers published his manifesto and David Kaczynski recognized the hand of his brother, Theodore, a former UC Berkeley mathematics professor living as a recluse in Montana. But Kessler is tolerant, offering that when a “killer drops a bomb in a mailbox, it is very difficult to trace him.” That may be why it is taking so long to nab the anthrax killer.

The tendency of the FBI to focus on a handy suspect to the exclusion of all others was illustrated in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics pipe bombing, which took two lives and injured scores of people. For months, agents hounded the security guard who found the bomb, Richard Jewell, whom they viewed as a false hero. In the meantime a survivalist named Eric Rudolph was implicated in the bombings of two women’s clinics and a gay bar. Forensic evidence linked him to the Atlanta crime, and he remains on the FBI’s most-wanted list (along with Osama bin Laden).

Kessler blames the bureau’s then-director Louis Freeh for dragging out Jewell’s ordeal. Freeh was a Mafia-busting street agent turned federal judge when tapped by President Clinton in 1993. The field agents welcomed him as one of their own, but they soon soured as he proved arbitrary, full of hubris and dictatorial. He became known among agents as “Hoover with children.”

It was on Freeh’s watch that the 1999 Wen Ho Lee fiasco broke: The case of the Los Alamos nuclear scientist accused of passing nuclear secrets to Beijing who was held in solitary confinement for nine months until the case fell apart. It was a burlesque of how to handle a counterintelligence investigation. “The problem was the FBI’s sheer ineptitude,” Kessler says of the Lee fiasco. It was not an anomaly.

But the mother of all debacles was Sept. 11. It might have been averted had the FBI capitalized on a huge break. As Kessler tells it, in mid-August 2001 a Minnesota flight academy official called the local FBI to report that a student “wanted to concentrate on navigational skills and midair turns, not landings and takeoffs.” The official was sure that the student, Zacarias Moussaoui, intended to turn a jumbo jet into a flying bomb.

Instead of clamping Moussaoui under surveillance, which is standard procedure to identify others in a terrorist cell, the bureau hauled him in on an immigration violation. So on Sept. 11, Moussaoui sat in jail while Mohamed Atta and 18 comrades slammed hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, while another crashed into a Pennsylvania field. That the FBI hadn’t rolled up Atta’s cell by then spotlights its difficulty in processing the information it collects.

According to ABC News, FBI headquarters decided there was “no proof” to trigger the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which has long authorized taps, bugs and break-ins when there is a showing of terrorist intent by a suspect with foreign connections. But I think it was an unduly restrictive interpretation of federal law, which permits such surveillance for up to a year.

Though Kessler goes along with the FBI’s excuse that it was handcuffed by the intelligence act, he acknowledges that the bureau’s National Security Division, responsible for disrupting terrorist cells, borders on the dysfunctional. And he puts his finger squarely on the cause. “Typically, the more aggressive agents who enjoyed tracking the Mafia or other violent criminals did not take to counterintelligence, which was more cerebral.” Nor were they suited for it, because the subtleties of the counterintelligence trade call for a more sophisticated type who might not flourish in the bureau’s anti-intellectual climate.

But radical change is not on the agenda of the FBI’s new director, Robert Mueller, who has confined himself to tinkering. Nor does Kessler lobby for a badly needed restructuring, though the evidence for it leaps from these pages. “After Sept. 11, the FBI performed flawlessly, helping to restore confidence in the agency,” he perorates.

“The Bureau” has its soft spots. One is the spotty coverage of the 1950s “Red Menace,” which was artificially hyperinflated. Kessler doesn’t report, as one bureau agent recently told me, that Hoover’s archvillain, Communist Party leader Gus Hall, was on the FBI’s informant payroll. Another is Kessler’s naive conclusion that anyone knowing about a conspiracy in the John F. Kennedy assassination “would most likely have come forth.”

Nevertheless, the book stands as a compelling and timely exposition of the real FBI. Kessler’s fresh information and command of the facts, even if his analysis is not always impeccable, rings with authority. He should be the first witness before any congressional body dedicated, in the interest of public safety, to overhauling the FBI.