Enemies: A History of the FBI (71 page)

By the time the United States started the war against Iraq on March 19, 2003, Mueller and his new counterterrorism director, Larry Medford, the third man to hold the post in fourteen months, were being battered with hundreds of daily threat reports flowing out of the Middle East. They were blindsided by breakdowns in Mueller’s carefully cultivated arrangements with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court over the FBI’s role in the secret Stellar Wind program. The White House had just ordered the Bureau to investigate the threat posed by tens of thousands of Iraqis living in the United States. The congressional 9/11 Commission was about to hold its first public hearings, and it seemed certain that the director would be called to account for the FBI’s failures, past and present. The pressures of the endlessly ringing telephones and the demands to stop the next attack and the wartime mentality commanded by the president were shattering for some agents. On April 29, after being awakened by a call at 4:30
A.M.
, the chief of the Counterterrorism Division’s Iran unit took his life with his own gun.

On May 1, President Bush declared that major combat operations in Iraq were over and America’s mission had been accomplished. Mueller thought he might have a moment to breathe and think. He made a decision intended, in his words, at “transforming the Bureau into an intelligence agency.”

Mueller created an Office of Intelligence at the FBI out of thin air and hired the chief of signals intelligence at the National Security Agency as its director. She was the most powerful woman in the American intelligence community. Almost no one at the FBI had ever heard of her.

Maureen Baginski was a career NSA officer who had started out as a Russian analyst and risen to command authority. At the turn of the century, when the NSA found itself unable to keep pace with the explosion of encrypted information on the Internet, and the agency’s supercomputers sputtered and crashed, General Hayden had put Baginski in charge of fixing things. Her SIGINT directorate was the biggest single component of the United States espionage establishment; she commanded a budget that rivaled the FBI’s $4 billion and a workforce bigger than the FBI’s nearly eleven thousand agents. She also had run Stellar Wind since its inception.

Mueller made her his right hand. She would be by his side at every crucial meeting. He gave her an office down the hall from his and told her to go to work. But at the start she had no staff and no money; it took her a year to assemble a staff of fifty, the size of a large marine platoon. And in that time she won little support from the field. She pushed her message out to the special agents in charge across America: they were now part of a twenty-first-century intelligence service. Every field office was to create and run its own intelligence group and report to headquarters on the threats they faced. They were dubious.

Baginski almost instantly became known to the men of the FBI as the Vision Lady. She reported back to Mueller that it would take years to realize the transformation. They were in a marathon, she said, not a race for the swift or the short-winded.

Mueller also moved to create a full-scale FBI field office in Baghdad. Before the war began, he had signed an order establishing the FBI’s role in Iraq as an intelligence mission intended to capture enemy leaders, exploit secret documents, and to uncover potential threats to the United States. The original plan was to send seventy agents at a time. More than 1,500 FBI agents, analysts, and evidence technicians would wind up working in Iraq.

At first, life was good. The city was secure in May and June. Thousands of Iraqi intelligence files were stacked in American command posts. The FBI’s special agent in charge, serving on a three-month rotation, held rank equivalent to that of a three-star general. He had a desk in the bath house by the swimming pool at Saddam Hussein’s presidential palace, in the Green Zone held by American forces.

Within weeks, the mission took a bad turn. The FBI was ordered to work with the interim interior minister of Iraq to rebuild law enforcement in the nation. The minister was Bernard Kerik, the New York police commissioner at the time of the 9/11 attacks and a long-standing friend to the Bureau. Money was no object for him. Bricks of shrink-wrapped hundred-dollar bills were available for everything from informant networks to computer systems.

But Kerik left Baghdad after ninety days, on September 2, 2003, mission unaccomplished. The only things he left behind were 50,000 Glock pistols in a warehouse. Bush named him the new leader of the Department of Homeland Security; an FBI investigation derailed the nomination and led to Kerik’s indictment and imprisonment for fraud.

The FBI’s training of the Iraqi police was interrupted by a series of immediate emergencies. Car bombs were going off everywhere. The FBI combed through the wreckage of the Jordanian embassy and the United Nations headquarters and the Red Cross in Baghdad. The American military had to call on the Bureau to collect evidence from a growing number of crime scenes—suicide attacks, roadside bombs, and sniper assaults on military checkpoints and police stations—as its control of the occupied city began to slip.

Days after Kerik departed, the FBI’s agents were assigned to interrogate prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the biggest prison in Baghdad. They took thousands of fingerprints and conducted hundreds of interviews in the last three months of 2003. Agents were eager to find detainees who had served as Iraqi intelligence officers or had traveled to the United States. But they were loath to work inside the chaotic main building at Abu Ghraib, preferring to talk to detainees in tents or trailers. Nor did they work at night, when the compound was mortared by insurgents. So they started to hear the rumors of the torture and the deaths inside the prison only in November and December 2003. Not until January 21, 2004, did they learn firsthand from an army captain that there were videotapes of beatings and rapes. A senior FBI agent in Baghdad, Edward Lueckenhoff, relayed the news to headquarters. It was the first time anyone in Washington had heard about the evidence that would surface more than three months later, tarnishing the honor of the United States around the world.

Three of Mueller’s senior counterterrorism aides weighed the report and decided to do nothing. It was out of their jurisdiction and above their pay grades. They did not want to wreck the FBI’s relationships with the military
and the CIA in Iraq. Something more important was about to happen. The FBI was about to get the first crack at High Value Detainee Number One.

Saddam Hussein and George Piro sat down for the first of their twenty-five conversations inside the razor-wired walls of Camp Cropper, the American military’s brightly lit prison at the edge of Baghdad International Airport, shortly after 7:00
A.M.
on February 7, 2004.

Piro had started his career at the FBI looking for al-Qaeda in Phoenix, Arizona, five years before. He was now one among a dozen native Arabic-speakers at the Bureau, and on his second tour in Baghdad. He had been born and raised in Beirut, and his voice had a distinctive Lebanese lilt that Saddam liked. They were soon on a first-name basis.

Piro was born around the time that Saddam first took power in Iraq. He was thirty-four years old, a tall, thin man with a bright-eyed intensity. He had been a police officer in Turlock, California, a town one hundred miles east of San Francisco, a home for decades to a community of Assyrian Christians from the Middle East. His parents had moved there in 1982, when he was twelve, to escape the war tearing through Beirut.

Piro had been preparing for six weeks to question Saddam. His interview reports show that the rapport he established and the rigor of his inquiries produced revelations that riveted the White House. Saddam said he had used the telephone only twice and rarely slept in the same bed two nights running since the first American war against Iraq began in 1991. He despised Osama bin Laden as a Sunni Muslim zealot. He was now prepared to die at the hands of his captors.

Six days into the debriefing, Piro questioned Saddam intensely and repeatedly about the elusive Iraqi chemical and biological arsenal that was President Bush’s justification for the American invasion.

Where were the weapons of mass destruction? he asked. Did they exist at all? They did not, Saddam said. It had been a long-running bluff, a deception intended to keep the Iranians, the Israelis, and the Americans at bay.

“We destroyed them. We told you,” he told Piro on February 13, 2004. “By God, if I had such weapons, I would have used them in the fight against the United States.” He was telling the truth.

The FBI—not for the first time—had produced evidence that undermined a presidency. “No one was more shocked and angry than I,” Bush wrote in his memoirs. “I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it. I still do.”

45

“IF WE DON’T DO
THIS
, PEOPLE WILL DIE”

O
N THE DAY
after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt gave J. Edgar Hoover the power to monitor all telecommunications traffic in and out of the United States. Three weeks after 9/11, President Bush handed Robert Mueller an authority almost as strong.

For twenty-nine months following Bush’s order, the FBI had tracked thousands of telephones and Internet addresses in the United States under the aegis of the National Security Agency. “
Every day,” as Mueller said, the Bureau investigated “e-mail threats from all around the world saying that this particular terrorist activity is going to occur in the United States.”

The task of “
neutralizing al Qaeda operatives that have already entered the U.S. and have established themselves in American society is one of our most serious intelligence and law enforcement challenges,” Mueller told a closed-door meeting of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on February 24, 2004. Now the director faced a task as daunting. He had to defy the president and the vice president of the United States, confront them in a showdown over secrecy and democracy, and challenge them in the name of the law.

At least three separate global eavesdropping programs had been mining and assaying the electronic ether under the rubric of Stellar Wind. At least two of them violated the Constitution’s protections against warrantless searches and seizures. Mueller saw no evidence that the surveillances had saved a life, stopped an imminent attack, or discovered an al-Qaeda member in the United States.

Stellar Wind had to be reauthorized by the signatures of President Bush and Attorney General Ashcroft every forty-five days. They acted on the basis of reports from the CIA—intelligence officers called them “the scary memos”—justifying the continuing surveillance. The number of people
who knew the facts was exceedingly small, but it was growing. A handful of Justice Department lawyers and intelligence court judges thought the programs were unconstitutional and their power had to be controlled. They convinced James Comey, the newly appointed number-two man at the Justice Department. And Comey soon won a convert in Robert Mueller.

On March 4, Mueller and Comey agreed that the FBI could not continue to go along with the surveillance programs. The scope of the searches had to be altered to protect the rights of Americans. They thought Attorney General Ashcroft could not re-endorse Stellar Wind as it stood. Comey made his case to his boss in an hour-long argument at the Justice Department that day, and Ashcroft concurred. Comey was a persuasive advocate. One of the FBI’s favorite prosecutors, the grandson of an Irish police commissioner, he had worked with skill and intensity on terrorism cases as the United States attorney in Manhattan for two years after the al-Qaeda attacks. The trust vested in him that day showed that the awe-inspiring force of American national security rested on personal relationships as well as statutory powers.

That night, hours after Comey won him over, Ashcroft suffered a wave of excruciating nausea and pain. Doctors diagnosed a potentially fatal case of gallstone pancreatitis. He was sedated and scheduled for surgery. With Ashcroft incapacitated, Comey was the acting attorney general and chief law enforcement officer of the United States.

Stellar Wind had to be reauthorized on March 11. Seven days of struggle lay ahead, a tug-of-war between security and liberty. Mueller was “a great help to me over that week,” Comey said.

The FBI director met Vice President Cheney at the White House at noon on March 9. They stared at one another across the table in the corner office of the president’s chief of staff, Andrew Card. Cheney was adamant: no one had the right to challenge the president’s power. The spying would continue at his command. It would go on with or without the Justice Department’s approval.

“
I could have a problem with that,” Mueller replied. His notes of the meeting say that he told the vice president that the FBI had to “review legality of continued participation in the program.”

On March 10, President Bush ordered Card and the White House counsel Alberto Gonzales to go to the intensive care unit at George Washington University Hospital, one mile northwest of the White House, and to get Ashcroft’s signature. An FBI security detail guarded Ashcroft’s room. He
had come out of surgery the day before. He was in no condition to receive guests, much less sign secret presidential orders. The president called the hospital at 6:45
P.M.
and insisted on talking to Ashcroft. His wife took the call.