“President Roosevelt directed Bonaparte to create an investigative service within the Department of Justice subject to no other department or bureau, which would report to no one except the Attorney General.” The president’s order “resulted in the formation of the Bureau of Investigation.”
By law, Bonaparte had to ask the House and the Senate to create this new bureau...
On May 27, 1908, the House emphatically said no. It feared the president intended to create an American secret police. The fear was well-founded. Presidents had used private detectives as political spies in the past.
...Congress banned the Justice Department from spending a penny on Bonaparte’s proposal. The attorney general evaded the order. The maneuver might have broken the letter of the law. But it was true to the spirit of the president.
Theodore Roosevelt was “ready to kick the Constitution into the back yard whenever it gets in the way,” as Mark Twain observed. The beginnings of the FBI rose from that bold defiance.
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.
And:
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.
Six months after the bombing, the FBI’s Lockerbie task force was disbanded. Marquise and a small group of terrorism analysts stayed on the case.
The Scots spent the summer and the fall piecing the hundreds of thousands of shards of evidence together. They got on-the-job training from FBI veterans like Richard Hahn—a man who had been combing through the wreckage of lethal bombings for fifteen years, ever since the unsolved FALN attack on the Fraunces Tavern in New York. They learned how the damage from a blast of Semtex looked different from the scorching from the heat of flame.
The Scots soon determined that bits of clothing with tags saying “Made in Malta” had been contained in a copper Samsonite Silhouette with the radio that held the bomb. But they did not tell the FBI. Then the Germans discovered a computer printout of baggage records from the Frankfurt airport; they showed a single suitcase from an Air Malta flight had been transferred to Pan Am 103 in Frankfurt. But they did not tell the Scots. The international teams of investigators reconvened in Scotland in January 1990. Once again, it was a dialogue of the deaf. Marquise had a terrible feeling that the case would never be solved.
“We’re having tons of problems with CIA. Lots of rivalry,” Marquise said. “Scots are off doing their thing. You’ve got the Germans who are giving the records when they feel like it to the Scots. The FBI’s still doing its thing.… Everybody’s still doing their own thing.”
Then, in June 1990, came small favors that paid big returns. Stuart Henderson, the new senior investigator in Scotland, shared one piece of evidence with Marquise: a photograph of a tiny piece of circuit board blasted into a ragged strip of the Maltese clothing. The Scots had been to fifty-five companies in seventeen countries without identifying the fragment. “They had no idea. No clue,” Marquise said. “So they said, probably tongue-in-cheek, ‘You guys try. Give it a shot.’ ”
The FBI crime laboratory gave the photo to the CIA. An Agency analyst had an image of a nearly identical circuit board, seized four years earlier from two Libyans in transit at the airport in Dakar, Senegal. On the back were four letters: MEBO. Nobody knew what MEBO meant.
And:
The Bureau’s working relationships with the rest of the government remained a constant struggle. The attorney general was appalled when the FBI failed to find a mad scientist sending letters filled with anthrax spores to television newsrooms, newspapers, and United States senators. The FBI focused for four years on the wrong man. The Bureau was drowning in false leads; its networks were crashing; its desktop computers still required twelve clicks to save a document.
The FBI had no connectivity with the rest of American intelligence. Headquarters could not receive reports from the NSA or the CIA classified at the top secret level—and almost everything was classified top secret. Fresh intelligence could not be integrated into the FBI’s databases.
And:
Mueller was caught again between the rule of law and the requisites of secrecy. He agreed with D’Amuro in principle. But he also kept his silence. He put nothing in writing. The argument about whether the FBI could countenance torture went on.
The CIA water-boarded Abu Zubaydah eighty-three times in August and kept him awake for a week or more on end. It did not work. A great deal of what the CIA reported from the black site turned out to be false. The prisoner was not bin Laden’s chief of operations. He was not a terrorist mastermind. He had told the FBI everything he knew. He told the CIA things he did not know.
“You said things to make them stop, and those things were actually untrue, is that correct?” he was asked five years later in a tribunal at Guantánamo.
“Yes,” he replied. “They told me, ‘Sorry, we discover that you are not Number Three, not a partner, not even a fighter.’ ”
In March 1979, Hanssen started a two-year tour at the FBI’s Soviet Counterintelligence Division in New York...
...Hanssen’s supervisors had discovered his one outstanding talent a few weeks after he arrived on duty: he was one of the very few people in the FBI who understood how computers worked. They assigned him to create an automated database about the Soviet contingent of diplomats and suspected spies in New York.
...In November 1979, Hanssen walked undetected into the midtown Manhattan offices of Amtorg, the Soviet trade mission that had served as an espionage front for six decades. The office was run by senior officers of the GRU. Hanssen knew where to go and who to see at Amtorg. That day, he volunteered his services as a spy. He turned over a sheaf of documents on the FBI’s electronic surveillance of the Soviet residential compound in New York, and he set up a system for delivering new secrets every six months through encoded radio communications. Hanssen’s next package contained an up-to-date list of all the Soviets in New York who the FBI suspected were spies. He delivered another revelation that shook the Soviet services to their roots: a GRU major general named Dmitri Polyakov had been working for America since 1961. He had been posted at the United Nations for most of those years. The Soviets recalled Polyakov to Moscow in May 1980. It is likely—though the question is still debated at the FBI—that Polyakov served thereafter as a channel of disinformation intended to mislead and mystify American intelligence.
Hanssen’s responsibilities grew. He was given the task of preparing the budget requests for the Bureau’s intelligence operations in New York. The flow of money showed the FBI’s targets for the next five years—and its plans for projects in collaboration with the CIA and the National Security Agency. His third delivery to the Soviets detailed those plans. And then he decided to lie low.
If Hanssen had stopped spying then and there, the damage he wrought still would have been unequaled in the history of the FBI. William Webster himself would conduct a postmortem after the case came to light in 2001. He called it “an incredible assault,” an epochal disaster, “a five-hundred-year flood” that destroyed everything in its path.
Hanssen suspended his contacts with the Soviets in New York as a major case against an American spy was about to come to light. The investigation had reached across the United States into France, Mexico, and Canada before the FBI began to focus on a retired army code clerk named Joe Helmich in the summer of 1980. He was arrested a year later and sentenced to life in prison after he was convicted of selling the Soviets the codes and operating manual to the KL-7 system, the basic tool of encrypting communications developed by the NSA. He was a lowly army warrant officer with a top secret clearance; his treason had taken place in covert meetings with Soviet intelligence officers in Paris and Mexico City from 1963 to 1966; he was paid $131,000. He had sold the Soviets the equivalent of a skeleton key that let them decode the most highly classified messages of American military and intelligence officers during the Vietnam War.
Hanssen understood one of the most important aspects of the investigation: it had lasted for seventeen years. The FBI could keep a case of counterintelligence alive for a generation. There was no statute of limitations for espionage.
And:
The Miller case was an unsavory affair. He was a twenty-year FBI counterintelligence veteran whose life was falling apart in the months before he became a spy. The father of eight children, he had been excommunicated by the Mormon Church for adultery. He had been suspended by the FBI for two weeks without pay because he was obese. Shortly after that disciplinary action, he had willingly been recruited by a woman he knew to be a KGB agent. Svetlana Ogorodnikov enticed Miller into trading a copy of the FBI’s twenty-five-page manual on foreign counterintelligence investigations in exchange for $15,000 in cash and her sexual favors. Miller was convicted and received a twenty-year sentence.
And:
The secrets spilled because the covert operations of the United States were so badly conceived, and so poorly executed, that they began to break down in public. First the crash of a cargo plane maintained by Southern Air Transport exposed the role of the White House in arming the contras in defiance of the law. Then a newspaper in Beirut revealed that the White House was smuggling weapons into Iran.
The president denied it in public. But Revell knew it was true.
On the afternoon of November 13, 1986, the White House asked Revell to review a speech that President Reagan would deliver to the American people that evening. As he pored over the draft of the speech in North’s office, he pointed out five evident falsehoods.
“We did not—repeat, did not—trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we,” the president’s draft said. The United States would never “strengthen those who support terrorism”; it had only sold “defensive armaments and spare parts” to Iran. It had not violated its stance of neutrality in the scorched-earth war between Iran and Iraq; it had never chartered arms shipments out of Miami.
Revell knew none of this was true. He warned Judge Webster, who alerted Attorney General Meese. He was ignored.
...The president delivered the speech almost precisely as drafted, word for dissembling word.
Colonel North and his superior, the president’s national security adviser, Admiral John Poindexter, began shredding their records and deleting their computer files as fast as they could. But within the White House, one crucial fact emerged: they had skimmed millions of dollars in profits from the weapons sales to Iran and siphoned off the money to support the contras.
Reflecting on the past lives of the British spies at Cambridge in the 1930s, Hoover conflated their communism with their homosexuality.
The connection seemed self-evident to him. Homosexuality and communism were causes for instant dismissal from American government service—and most other categories of employment. Communists and homosexuals both had clandestine and compartmented lives. They inhabited secret underground communities. They used coded language. Hoover believed, as did his peers, that both were uniquely susceptible to sexual entrapment and blackmail by foreign intelligence services.
The FBI’s agents became newly vigilant to this threat. “The Soviets knew, in those days, a government worker, if he was a homosexual, he’d lose his job,” said John T. Conway, who worked on the Soviet espionage squad in the FBI’s Washington field office. Conway investigated a State Department official suspected of meeting a young, blond, handsome KGB officer in a gay bar. “It was a hell of an assignment,” he said. “One night we had him under surveillance and he picked up a young kid, took him up to his apartment, kept him all night. Next day we were able to get the kid and get a statement from him and this guy in the State Department lost his job.”
On June 20, 1951, less than four weeks after the Homer case broke, Hoover escalated the FBI’s Sex Deviates Program. The FBI alerted universities and state and local police to the subversive threat, seeking to drive homosexuals from every institution of government, higher learning, and law enforcement in the nation. The FBI’s files on American homosexuals grew to 300,000 pages over the next twenty-five years before they were destroyed. It took six decades, until 2011, before homosexuals could openly serve in the United States military.
And:
[The weathermen] carried out thirty-eight bombings. The FBI solved none.
...Dyson had questions about the rule of law: “Can I put an informant in a college classroom? Or even on the campus? Can I penetrate any college organization? What can I do? And nobody had any rules or regulations. There was nothing...”
“This was going to come and destroy us,” he said. “We were going to end up with FBI agents arrested. Not because what they did was wrong. But because nobody knew what was right or wrong.” Not knowing that difference is a legal definition of insanity. Dyson’s premonitions of disaster would prove prophetic. In time, the top commanders of the FBI in Washington and New York would face the prospect of prison time for their work against the threat from the left. So would the president’s closest confidants.
And:
An impassioned diatribe from Sullivan arrived at Hoover’s home on the day that the debate over the director’s future started at the White House. It read like a cross between a Dear John letter and a suicide note. “This complete break with you has been a truly agonizing one for me,” he wrote. But he felt duty-bound to say that “the damage you are doing to the Bureau and its work has brought all this on.”
He laid out his accusations in twenty-seven numbered paragraphs, like the counts of a criminal indictment. Some dealt with Hoover’s racial prejudices; the ranks of FBI agents remained 99.4 percent white (and 100 percent male). Some dealt with Hoover’s use of Bureau funds to dress up his home and decorate his life. Some dealt with the damage he had done to American intelligence by cutting off liaisons with the CIA. Some came close to a charge of treason.
“You abolished our main programs designed to identify and neutralize the enemy,” he wrote, referring to COINTELPRO and the FBI’s black-bag jobs on foreign embassies. “You know the high number of illegal agents operating on the east coast alone. As of this week, the week I am leaving the FBI for good, we have not identified even one of them. These illegal agents, as you know, are engaged, among other things, in securing the secrets of our defense in the event of a military attack so that our defense will amount to nothing. Mr. Hoover, are you thinking? Are you really capable of thinking this through? Don’t you realize we are betraying our government and people?”
Sullivan struck hardest at Hoover’s cult of personality: “As you know you have become a legend in your lifetime with a surrounding mythology linked to incredible power,” he wrote. “We did all possible to build up your legend. We kept away from anything which would disturb you and kept flowing into your office what you wanted to hear … This was all part of the game but it got to be a deadly game that has accomplished no good. All we did was to help put you out of touch with the real world and this could not help but have a bearing on your decisions as the years went by.” He concluded with a plea: “I gently suggest you retire for your own good, that of the Bureau, the intelligence community, and law enforcement.” Sullivan leaked the gist of his letter to his friends at the White House and a handful of reporters and syndicated columnists. The rumors went out across the salons and newsrooms of Washington: the palace revolt was rising at the FBI. The scepter was slipping from Hoover’s grasp.
The biggest slacker raid by far was a three-day roundup set for September 3, the most ambitious operation in the decade-long history of the Bureau of Investigation. Thirty-five agents gathered under the direction of Charles de Woody, the head of the Bureau’s New York office. The Bureau’s men were backed by roughly 2,000 American Protective League members, 2,350 army and navy men, and at least 200 police officers. They hit the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn at dawn, crossed the Hudson River in ferries, and fanned out across Newark and Jersey City. They arrested somewhere between 50,000 and 65,000 suspects, seizing them off sidewalks, hauling them out of restaurants and bars and hotels, marching them into local jails and national armories. Some 1,500 draft dodgers and deserters were among the accused. But tens of thousands of innocent men had been arrested and imprisoned without cause.
Attorney General Gregory tried to disavow the raids, but the Bureau would not let him. “No one can make a goat of me,” de Woody said defiantly. “Everything I have done in connection with this roundup has been done under the direction of the Attorney General and the chief of the Bureau of Investigation.”
The political storm over the false arrest and imprisonment of the multitudes was brief. But both Attorney General Gregory and the Bureau’s Bielaski soon resigned. Their names and reputations have faded into thin air. Their legacy remains only because it was Hoover’s inheritance.
And:
Venona was one of America’s most secret weapons in the Cold War—so secret that neither President Truman nor the CIA knew about it. On the occasions that Hoover sent intelligence derived from Venona to his superiors, it was scrubbed, sanitized, and attributed only to “a highly sensitive source.” Hoover decreed: “In view of loose methods of CIA & some of its questionable personnel we must be most circumspect. H.”
And:
Coplon was a spy, without question. But the FBI had broken the law trying to convict her. The Bureau illegally wiretapped her telephone conversations with her lawyer. At the first trial, an FBI special agent on the witness stand denied that Coplon’s phone had been tapped, a lie that was later detected.
Then, to Hoover’s dismay, the judge admitted into evidence FBI reports alluding to the search for information on the Soviet atomic spy ring—a threat to the secrecy of Venona.
To protect the intelligence secrets of the FBI from exposure by the court, Hoover instituted a new internal security procedure on July 29, 1949. It was known as June Mail—a new hiding place for records about wiretaps, bugs, break-ins, black-bag jobs, and potentially explosive reports from the most secret sources. June Mail was not stored or indexed in the FBI’s central records but kept in a secret file room, far from the prying eyes of outsiders.
FBI headquarters issued a written order to destroy “all administrative records in the New York field office”—referring to the Coplon wiretaps—“in view of the immediacy of her trial.” The written order contained a note in blue ink: “O.K.—H.”
Despite Hoover’s efforts, the existence of the wiretaps was disclosed at the second trial—another layer of the FBI’s secrecy penetrated. Then the same FBI special agent who had lied at the first trial admitted that he had burned the wiretap records.
...The FBI had been caught breaking the law again. For the first time since the raids of 1920, lawyers, scholars, and journalists openly questioned the powers that Hoover exercised. Almost everyone agreed that the FBI should have the ability to wiretap while investigating treason, espionage, and sabotage. Of course taps would help to catch spies. But so did opening the mails, searching homes and offices, stealing documents, and planting bugs without judicial warrants—all standard conduct for the FBI, and all of it illegal. Even at the height of the Cold War, a free society still looked askance on a secret police.
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