Enemies: A History of the FBI (68 page)

As Trilogy was conceived during the spring and summer of 2000, an entire sector of the Bureau began collapsing. Freeh had created a new Investigative Services Division, once known as the Office of Intelligence, to work alongside the Counterterrorism Division at the FBI. It was supposed to be devoted to strategic analysis. An internal audit soon showed that two-thirds of its personnel were unqualified. The new division was rejected and shunned; it worked in isolation and silence. It would last two years before it was disbanded at the nearly unanimous demand of the FBI’s assistant directors.

The director’s power and authority were fading in Washington and around the world. He was proud of the fact that he had traveled to sixty-eight countries and met, by his account, with more than two thousand foreign leaders in the name of the FBI. But he saw that he was losing face among the world’s security ministers, princes, and secret-police chiefs, a fact that he figured was a consequence of the international ridicule over the president’s sexual peccadilloes.

On the evening of April 6, 2000, Freeh flew to Pakistan to meet its military dictator, General Pervez Musharraf. That morning, a man had walked into the FBI’s Newark office with a warning of an al-Qaeda plot to hijack a 747. He said he was supposed to meet half a dozen men who were part of the plan, launched in Pakistan, and that a trained pilot was on the hijacking team. Though he took a lie detector test, the FBI was never sure if he was telling the truth. The next day, in a Lahore military cantonment built by the British officers of the Raj, Freeh presented General Musharraf with an ultimatum. He had a warrant for the arrest of Osama bin Laden, and he wanted the general to execute it immediately.

“
Musharraf laughed,” Freeh reported. He refused to help.

That same week, about five hundred miles to the west in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda’s leaders were videotaping a highly threatening verbal assault on the United States. Bin Laden swore once again to take vengeance for the imprisonment of the Blind Sheikh and the embassy bombers. He wore a Yemeni dagger on his belt. That clue went unseen until the tape was broadcast five months later, when his plans were ripe.

In those months of silence from the world’s most wanted terrorist, some of the Bureau’s leaders thought the danger was subsiding. “
FBI investigation and analysis indicates that the threat of terrorism in the United States is low,” the deputy assistant director for counterterrorism, Terry Turchie, testified to a House national security panel on July 26. He talked about the arrests of fringe groups who had sabotaged veal-processing plants in the name of animal rights, right-wing militiamen who were stockpiling explosives, and a cigarette-smuggling gang that sent money to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Bin Laden went unmentioned.

The Bureau had opened close to two hundred terrorism cases since the East Africa attacks two years before, the majority aimed at suspected members of al-Qaeda and their allies. Dozens went awry after Justice Department attorneys saw a pattern of mistakes and misrepresentations in the cases. At least one hundred applications for national security wiretaps filed
by the FBI with the FISA court were legally defective. The cause, as the FBI’s inspector general later determined, was the Bureau’s continuing inability to grasp the rules of law that governed American intelligence. The judges issued new edicts intended to keep criminal cases against terrorists from being dismissed due to government misconduct.

Mary Jo White was doing everything in her power to keep those cases alive. She was the United States attorney in Manhattan, and she had worked on secret intelligence investigations with the FBI for two decades. White had overseen all of the nation’s major terrorism prosecutions for seven years, from the Blind Sheikh to the embassy bombings trial. She saw Nairobi as a harbinger.

She began her remarks in a public speech on September 27, 2000, by noting the previous night’s black-tie gala marking the twentieth anniversary of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, at the Windows on the World restaurant: “
The celebration was held, very appropriately, at the World Trade Center.”

She said it was imperative for the FBI and the Justice Department to preserve the rule of law in the investigations, indictments, and trials of terrorists. “Even the least of these defendants—in terms of role and evidence—is capable of walking out of a courtroom and committing new terrorist acts,” she said. “They would likely do so with enhanced zeal and ruthlessness, and they would enjoy greater status in the terrorist world for having beaten the American system of justice.”

The United States would have to depend on the work of the FBI, she said. But she feared that nothing might stop the next assault on America. She warned that “we must and we do expect similar attacks in the future.”

44

ALL OUR WEAPONS

A
STEADY ROAR OF
rage at the FBI reverberated after the shock of the September 11, 2001, attacks. The anger culminated in a debate at the highest levels of the government over dismantling the Bureau and building a new intelligence service in its place.

“
We can’t continue in this country with an intelligence agency with the record the FBI has,” said Thomas Kean, the Republican chairman of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, known as the 9/11 Commission. “You have a record of an agency that’s failed, and it’s failed again and again and again.”

The collapse of the counterterrorism and counterintelligence divisions of the FBI had been a long time coming. The anguish and frustration of the Bureau’s best agents had grown unbearable during Louis Freeh’s last months in office. Computers and information systems failed. Leadership in Washington failed. Communications between Freeh, two attorneys general, and two presidents failed almost completely. FBI agents who served the cause of national security had fought against their superiors and the system they served. They almost won.

“
Some connected the dots,” said the FBI’s Gabrielle Burger, who worked counterterrorism and counterintelligence for a decade. “Their voices were a whisper.”

One of those voices belonged to Catherine Kiser, a secret intelligence stalwart who had devoted a quarter of a century of her life to the FBI. She was one of its great successes, and she witnessed two of its greatest disasters. Born in 1950, raised in the Bronx, the daughter of a New York City police officer, she went to work teaching second-graders at a public school, only to be laid off when the city almost went bankrupt in 1975. Wondering what to do with her life, she met a second cousin at a family funeral. He was a federal
narcotics agent, and he told her that the FBI was hiring women. It took two years, but in 1978, she became the seventy-eighth female special agent in the history of the Bureau.

Six years into her career, in 1984, after struggles with skeptical and sexist superiors, she started working spy cases. The FBI had been a man’s world—usually men of Irish or Italian heritage schooled by Jesuits and raised in a closed culture of police and priests. Kiser had the background but more foresight; her mind was open. She would become one of the more influential women at the FBI.

She was among the first FBI agents stationed at the new National Counterintelligence Center at the CIA in 1996. Over the next four years, she led scores of seminars about spying; she was in high demand at the FBI’s Training Academy, where she schooled new agents on the laws governing counterintelligence and counterterrorism.

Kiser was the sole FBI liaison agent stationed at the National Security Agency from 1999 to 2002. The NSA’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, was the center of America’s electronic-eavesdropping and data-mining powers, tapping into the world’s telephones and computers, circling the earth with spy satellites, and monitoring secret portals at telecommunications companies. Kiser knew the rules when agents wanted national security warrants from the FISA court to spy on foreign enemies. She served as a human switchboard, one of the only people in America who could connect FBI agents with Fort Meade. On her desk sat an array of computers, including her kludge of an FBI laptop, a frail connection to headquarters, and telephones that never seemed to stop ringing.

After working counterintelligence for sixteen years, she had developed a finely honed sixth sense: suspicion. It served her well one morning in January 2001 when she received a call from FBI headquarters. The man on the phone was a stranger to her.

He said: “
Hello, Cathy. This is Bob Hanssen. How are you?”

She replied: “Fine. And who are you?”

Hanssen curtly introduced himself as a newly appointed member of the FBI’s senior executive service. He was brusque, bordering on rude; Hanssen did not like women in authority. He instructed Kiser to set up some meetings with “high-profile people at NSA who can tell me about NSA’s computer infrastructure.” Kiser turned him down on instinct, first on the telephone, then face-to-face at headquarters a few days later.

After twenty-two years of spying for Moscow, Hanssen had finally become
the target of an espionage investigation that dated back to the Cold War. The FBI had suspected the wrong man: a CIA officer who had bitterly protested his innocence. The confrontation had become a running battle between the Bureau and the Agency. In a last-ditch effort to resolve the investigation, the FBI had paid a retired Russian spy a multimillion-dollar finder’s fee for stealing a file on the case from the KGB’s intelligence archives. It came wrapped in the same garbage bag that Hanssen had used to seal the FBI documents he smuggled to the Russians. It held not only his fingerprints but a fourteen-year-old tape of him talking with his KGB contact.

The voice, with its Chicago accent, was unmistakable:
it was Hanssen.

Two days before the incriminating tape arrived, he had delivered to the Russians close to one thousand pages of documents. They included the names of FBI counterintelligence sources throughout the United States, Canada, and England; they held data the Bureau had delivered to the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the National Security Agency. He had downloaded all of it from the Bureau’s Automated Case Support system; it was child’s play for him. “
Any clerk in the Bureau could come up with stuff on that system,” Hanssen said during the debriefings after his arrest on February 18, 2001. “What I did is criminal, but it’s criminal negligence … what they’ve done on that system.”

Kiser had to help assess the damage Hanssen had done to the NSA; it was a harrowing task. “People lined up outside my office with frightened, shocked looks on their faces,” she said. “NSA employees had been in meetings with this man during the normal course of business. They had known him for years. The FBI and the intelligence community were in a state of shock and disbelief … It was out of control.”

The Hanssen case broke four weeks into the presidency of George W. Bush. It was, at the time, the worst embarrassment in the recent history of the FBI. The case sapped what was left of Louis Freeh’s spirit. He decided to resign, effective June 1, 2001, with more than two years left in his decade-long appointment. He gave no advance notice to the new attorney general, John Ashcroft, who had been mortified by the news of the Hanssen affair on his first day in office.

Freeh left while the FBI was fighting to resolve the facts behind the latest attack by al-Qaeda. Two suicide bombers had piloted a small boat filled with five hundred pounds of high explosive alongside the USS
Cole
, which was refueling in Yemen en route to the Persian Gulf. The blast blew a
forty-five-foot hole in the $800 million navy destroyer, killing seventeen navy personnel and wounding more than forty. The best among the FBI agents on the case had been schooled and steeled in Nairobi. But the investigation in Yemen was far harder: the government, the army, and the police were closer in their sympathies to al-Qaeda than America. Six suspects were in custody in Yemen, but the FBI could not confirm their links to al-Qaeda. The FBI needed the CIA to make the case. But their confrontation over Hanssen had escalated the tensions between them to the highest levels since the end of the Cold War.

Kiser was still trying to sort through her damage report in the Hanssen case when she took another urgent call on August 17, 2001. FBI special agent Harry Samit was on the line from Minneapolis. She recognized his name; she had taught him in a counterterrorism training course. Samit, a former navy aviator based at the FBI’s Minneapolis field office, was in a high state of tension. The day before, he had confronted an Algerian with a French passport and an expired visa named Zacarias Moussaoui. Samit had been acting on a tip from a fellow navy pilot who ran a flight school: Moussaoui was studying how to handle a 747, but he did not care about takeoffs or landings. The Algerian had $3,000 in his money belt, a three-inch folding dagger in his pocket, and an aggressive attitude when Samit and an immigration agent arrested him on a visa charge. He angrily insisted that he had to get back to flight school.

“He’s a bad dude,” Samit said to Kiser. “I have a very bad feeling about him.”