The Burglary (89 page)

ANY ASSESSMENT
of the FBI's history should acknowledge that the bureau has endured unprecedented circumstances. No other government agency was shaped by and in the image of one individual. Workers in no other agency worked, willingly or unwillingly, in the rigid and secret world of a single leader for so long. Also, no other agency has been forced to reveal elements of its unsavory past and been forced to change after having been
told forever that it was a model law enforcement agency, the world's best. In the wake of the 1970s investigations of the FBI, many agents must have felt whiplashed, caught between the spirit of the reformers of the 1970s and the spirit of the past. Many retired as soon as they could, rather than deal with change. Many decided simply to hunker down and change as little as possible. Others thought the reforms made them better agents because the new rules set limits that led to stronger evidence for prosecutions and to more precision in intelligence gathering.

But whatever the bureau had become by September 11, 2001, it did not seem to matter. On September 12, the FBI was confronted and ordered to change. Drastically. Immediately. The turmoil that roiled the bureau, beginning then, may have surpassed even the tumult that took place when Hoover's loyal followers resisted the investigations and bureau reforms of the 1970s. Now, in the aftermath of 9/11, the changes were fast and furious and threatened the bureau in fundamental ways, including a push to remove one of its major missions.

Robert S. Mueller III, on the job as director only a week by 9/11, had spent most of his career as a prosecutor or supervisor of prosecutions. He assumed that would be his job now, leading the FBI in investigating what had happened and contributing to the Justice Department's future prosecution of the people who had planned these horrific crimes. Attorney General John Ashcroft had news for him: Forget prosecutions.
His order to the new FBI director was huge:

“This must not happen again.”

Describing a similar encounter at that time with President
George W. Bush, Mueller said in an April 2013 address at his alma mater, the University of Virginia School of Law, “
I felt like a high school kid who had done the wrong homework assignment. I got it wrong.”

Mueller said he realized then that the course of the bureau had to change. Shortly after those encounters with Bush and Ashcroft, Mueller sent this message to the special agents in charge of the fifty-six FBI field offices:

“The FBI has just one set of priorities:
Stop the next attack.
”

Overnight, the FBI's mandate was to transform itself from a law enforcement and domestic intelligence agency into primarily a domestic intelligence agency, just as the CIA had a new mandate to greatly expand its paramilitary capacity. There were threats from Congress to force the Bush administration to entirely remove intelligence gathering from the FBI and establish a new domestic intelligence agency.

While Americans assumed the FBI was going into high gear to do everything it could to save the country from the next attack, the bureau had a double focus. It was trying to guard against another attack while also fighting for its continued existence. Hoover's instant reaction to any circumstance that reflected badly on him or the bureau had been to find a person who could be scapegoated. In the aftermath of September 11, some bureau officials felt the bureau itself was the scapegoat.

Top bureau officials may have felt somewhat cynical when they became aware of Ashcroft's demand that their mission shift dramatically in order to prevent another attack. In the months immediately before 9/11, Ashcroft had blocked the bureau's efforts to increase its counterterrorism efforts.
It was later discovered that though the FBI may have failed to see crucial signs that pointed to terrorist attacks, some bureau officials, including
Thomas Pickard, who had become acting director when
Louis Freeh resigned as director in June 2001, were pressing the issue urgently in the months before 9/11. When Pickard submitted the bureau's annual budget to Ashcroft that summer, he asked for an increase in only one area, counterterrorism. On July 18, Ashcroft sent a letter to Pickard in which he not only rejected the increase but also reduced the bureau's existing counterterrorism budget. Determined to reverse that decision, Pickard immediately appealed it and made the case for the urgent need for an increase in the counterterrorism budget. In a letter dated September 10 that arrived on Pickard's desk the morning of September 12, the attorney general notified Pickard that his appeal had been rejected. The bureau's budget for counterterrorism would be cut, not increased.

Ashcroft's striking lack of interest in fighting terrorism was made astonishingly clear to Pickard in other ways in the months before 9/11. In an early-summer conversation with the attorney general, Pickard told Ashcroft that chatter picked up by the CIA about possible attacks was very strong. Ashcroft told him then he was not interested in hearing about terrorism. On July 12, Pickard met with Ashcroft with the goal of convincing him that terrorism was a serious threat that needed his attention, not to mention the critical attention of the bureau. “We're at a very high level of chatter that something big is about to happen,” Pickard later recalled telling the attorney general that day. “The CIA is very alarmed.” At that point, Ashcroft interrupted him: “I don't want to hear about that anymore. There's nothing I can do about that.”

Feeling a desperate need to convince Ashcroft of the urgency posed by terrorism, Pickard continued to try to press his case. As he did, Ashcroft
jumped to his feet and angrily told him, “I don't want you to ever talk to me about al-Qaeda, about these threats. I don't want to hear about al-Qaeda anymore.”

After 9/11, Ashcroft sang a different tune. What he had insisted Pickard not discuss, he now demanded the FBI turn its full attention to: “This must not happen again.”

BY THE TIME
the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, known as the 9/11 Commission, issued its final report in July 2004, Mueller had saved the FBI. He succeeded in convincing the commission that the bureau should remain intact and continue to be responsible for domestic intelligence gathering. Congress also stopped demanding that the bureau should forfeit that major function. The commission, in fact, had harsh words for Congress.
In the years before 9/11, the commissioners concluded, congressional oversight of intelligence and counterterrorism issues had become “dysfunctional” and divided among too many congressional committees. The legislators were urged to take their oversight responsibility more seriously, to conduct “robust oversight.”

Though Mueller had saved the bureau from being gutted, it was unclear if he was succeeding in transforming it in ways that would make it possible for the FBI to meet the demand that it prevent another attack. Even under the best of internal circumstances, the bureau could not, of course, guarantee that it meet that demand. The pressure to do so was enormous. Every tip that streamed in was supposed to be followed, no matter how insignificant some of them seemed. The fear of missing a big one was agonizing.
One FBI official at headquarters shot himself to death at home after receiving an alarming call in the middle of the night from an agent in New York.

In the midst of Mueller's efforts to transform the bureau, evidence emerged that the bureau had indeed missed clues that, if followed, might have prevented the 9/11 attacks. Information that the average person, let alone a counterterrorism agent, might regard as a blinking red light had not led to investigations. Crucial information had not been communicated from one intelligence agency to another, despite, in at least one instance, an FBI agent assigned to the CIA formally requesting CIA permission to provide crucial information to counterterrorism specialists at the FBI. Inexplicably, he was denied permission. Even more unexplainable, counterterrorism officials at the FBI failed to communicate some crucial information about potential terrorist threats to one another, and sometimes did not
communicate it to the acting director, Pickard, despite his known priority regarding such threats.

The bureau's pre-9/11 failures came to public attention most forcefully in June 2002, when
Coleen Rowley, a longtime FBI agent and a lawyer in the bureau's Minneapolis office, testified in Congress about the refusal of officials at FBI headquarters in August 2001 to seek the judicial emergency search warrant Minneapolis agents formally requested in order to search the laptop and other possessions of
Zacarias Moussaoui, a French-born man who had been arrested in Minnesota for overstaying his visa after he finished a course in flying commercial jetliners at a local flight school. From discussions with European intelligence agencies,
Harry Samit, an agent in the Minneapolis office, learned that Moussaoui was a recruiter for a Muslim extremist allied with
Osama bin Laden. That information, combined with knowing that Moussaoui recently had paid $8,600 in cash for his flight training, alarmed Samit about the threat Moussaoui might pose. He thought it was imperative to review the files on Moussaoui's computer as soon as possible. With a sense of growing urgency, he and Rowley made repeated attempts to get the necessary warrant. Each time counterterrorism officials at headquarters refused their request, seeming not to take Samit and Rowley's concerns seriously. They were turned down again early the morning of September 11. After the fourth plane crashed in Pennsylvania on 9/11, counterterrorism officials at headquarters relented and obtained the warrant that made it possible for Minneapolis agents to inspect Moussaoui's belongings.

Their suspicions had been justified. On his computer they found, among other information of interest, the German phone number for the roommate of
Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of the 9/11 plot. They also learned that Moussaoui was the paymaster for the 9/11 hijackers. Moussaoui later pled guilty to conspiring in the 9/11 plot and was sentenced to life in prison. He is the only person who has been tried in a U.S. court on charges of involvement in the September 11 attacks.

In that instance, it was not simply a matter of the bureau not connecting the dots, a criticism that has been leveled against it many times since 9/11. It was a matter of officials at bureau headquarters not listening to the warnings of agents who did connect dots and who repeatedly tried to push through the inertia at Washington headquarters to avert the tragedy they feared might happen. Years later, the Minneapolis agents continued to think of the failure to get permission to investigate Moussaoui earlier as what former
New York Times
reporter
Philip Shenon later called “the terrible missed chance.”

In her testimony before a Senate committee in June 2002, and in an earlier letter to Mueller, Rowley criticized his public claim after September 11 that the bureau had known nothing before September 11 that could have prevented the attacks that day. He stopped making that claim.

That extreme example from the Minneapolis field office, as well as other pre-9/11 missed opportunities, illustrate Mueller's challenge as he set out to reinvent the FBI. The challenge was complicated not only by continuing emergency circumstances that put the bureau under great pressure, but also by haunting mistakes during the recent past and by ingrained habits from the more distant past. As Shenon concluded in his 2008 book
The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation
,

“
The problem was mostly with the agency's sclerotic, hierarchical bureaucracy in Washington—at its core, unchanged since the days of J. Edgar Hoover—as well as the FBI's unmatched arrogance in dealing with other government agencies.”

That analysis was reflected in an investigation of the bureau's pre-9/11 failures by
Glenn Fine, the Department of Justice inspector general. He found “significant deficiencies in the way the FBI handled these issues.” The FBI, he reported, was stymied by bureaucratic obstacles, communication breakdowns, and a lack of urgency. His investigation confirmed that before 9/11 crucial warnings related to possible future terrorist attacks were not acted on. When his report was released, Fine told a reporter he did not “believe it was misconduct on the part of the individuals so much as systemic problems” at the bureau.

While part of the bureau struggled to adapt to the new mandate, the part of the bureau that relies on street agents and informers easily slipped into old Hoover-era habits that were first exposed by the Media burglars, habits that may never have been lost. Unproductive and invasive investigative methods from the Hoover era, such as closely monitoring nonviolent antiwar protesters, were dusted off. An inspector general's investigation found that FBI officials had made false and misleading statements to Congress in 2002 about the fact that it had placed under investigation several organizations because they opposed the war in Iraq. The groups included pacifist organizations—the
Catholic Worker movement, the
Thomas Merton Center, and the
American Friends Service Committee. In the aftermath of 9/11, such protesters were classified as terrorists.

In some parts of the country, mosques were infiltrated by a greatly expanded army of FBI informers, many with the misunderstanding—one actually taught in FBI workshops for a while after 9/11—that most Muslims
should be regarded with suspicion and therefore as investigative targets in the effort to prevent another 9/11. Instead of focusing on developing truly knowledgeable sources in Muslim communities, some bureau officials followed what had proven in the past to be an easy but usually time-absorbing, unproductive, and invasive investigative method—blanket surveillance. Muslim communities, including the congregations of some mosques, were saturated with surveillance without regard for whether a given mosque was known as a place where radical jihadists gathered to plot future attacks. The use of such methods also is evidence that the FBI's historic difficulty in understanding other cultures has persisted at a time when such understanding has been perhaps more important than at any time in the bureau's history.