My FBI

“ … and the Guy’s Bob Hanssen”

I’m surprised that April 19, 1996, is not a day that the nation pauses to remember and mourn. Pearl Harbor Day and D-Day—December 7 and June 6—are engraved on the national conscience. September 11, I’m sure, won’t pass in my lifetime without some public event marking the destruction of the World Trade Center towers or the attack on the Pentagon. But April 19—the date of the worst terrorist attack ever inflicted on the United States by its own citizenry—goes virtually unrecognized except in Oklahoma City.

For an amateur, Timothy McVeigh was an accomplished bomber. With maybe 80 percent of the explosives that terrorists used on Khobar Towers, McVeigh managed to rip apart the nine-story Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and kill 168 of his countrymen, nearly nine times the number who died in the Saudi attack.

For me, the Oklahoma City bombing was an eerie preview of what I would see fourteen months later in Dhahran: the same army of law-enforcement officers and rescue workers crawling all over the crime scene (some of them in fact the very same people), the same red paint outlining the human remains that had yet to be collected for fear of destroying vital evidence, the same random debris scattered far and wide. But there was one difference I’ll never forget. The Murrah Federal Building had housed a child-care center. So much of the litter that lay around seemed to have come from there: pieces of construction paper, broken toys, little backpacks. Seeing it was devastating. Watching little bodies being pulled from that wreckage was worse.

I arrived roughly twenty-four hours after the bombing. I wanted to give our people time to set up without having to worry about looking after the director. The Monday-morning quarterbacks and second-guessers must have arrived on the next plane because they started complaining not long afterward and haven’t quieted down completely yet.

In fact, the Oklahoma City bombing is probably as good a place as any to begin dealing with how I ran the FBI.

My view of the director’s role was to be in the field with the “street agents” whenever I could, especially when the stakes were high, but I didn’t rush off to Saudi Arabia or to Yemen, to East Africa or to Oklahoma City because I love airplanes or for the frequent-flyer miles—government servants don’t get them. And I certainly didn’t rush off because I wanted to be away from my family: that was the worst part of it. I made sure I was on location in those places because that’s what I understood, and still understand, the job to be.

As director, I could be significantly involved in a maximum of maybe twenty-five cases at any given time. That doesn’t mean I ignored the hundreds of others that were trying to bubble their way up to my office, but the simple reality of the position and of the limits of human attention is that no more than two dozen or so major cases could fit on the radar screen simultaneously: a major white-collar crime case; a big civil-rights case; an investigation of a high-ranking government figure, a terrorist attack involving loss of life, cases of a similar magnitude. Those are the ones I would be briefed on regularly, the ones about which I would request additional information, the ones sometimes I would get involved in more directly—requesting a better prosecutor, pushing through a search warrant or providing greater resources, doing liaison with a foreign power if that was called for, and occasionally also making sure I was on the ground at and around the crime scene because only there can you really see and sense what needs doing.

Oklahoma City is a case in point. Finding the immediate perpetrator was hardly a challenge at all because as good a bomb maker as Timothy McVeigh was, he was a lousy criminal when it came to avoiding arrest. Less than an hour and a half after he had laid waste to the Murrah Building, McVeigh was stopped for speeding in Perry, Oklahoma. If that wasn’t stupid enough, he had a gun jammed in his waistband. Guns aren’t rare in that part of the country, but the policeman who pulled McVeigh over had the good sense and training to smell something fishy about this one, and to detain McVeigh until he could check things out. Meanwhile, a very different type of policeman—Jim Norman, a bomb expert we had flown in from New York City—had uncovered an axle from the truck used in the bombing some two blocks from the explosion (and think of that: two blocks!) and was using the vehicle identification number stamped on it to trace the truck back to the Ryder agency that had rented it and from there to Timothy McVeigh. McVeigh was just about set for a bail hearing when the Bureau’s National Crime Information Center connected the dots and the police had their man. If McVeigh had walked from the bombing to the nearest precinct station and turned himself in, he couldn’t have made it much easier.

But as far as we were concerned in those first days and weeks, McVeigh was only the first part of the puzzle. Our assumption was, and had to be, that the bombing was possibly the handiwork of organized terrorists, possibly from the Middle East. The attack resembled too many others whose origins were well established: the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon in the early 1980s and the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York only a few years earlier, to cite the most obvious examples. What’s more, a federal building was a natural and symbolic target for a foreign force intent on harming the United States. In truth, too, I think it was simply hard for any of us to really fathom that an American citizen—a military veteran at that—could hold such hatred for his country that he would slaughter wholesale so many innocent people, children among them.

That’s the mind-set with which I arrived at Oklahoma City, the lens through which I was viewing the case, and by those terms, the legal effort on the ground simply wasn’t sufficient. The lawyers on hand at the local U.S. Attorney’s Office were undoubtedly competent people, but the office lacked a cadre of prosecutors experienced in crisis situations. The pace was too leisurely. Search warrants were dripping out; other court applications were being created and processed far too slowly. To pick up the pace, I detailed my chief counsel, Howard Shapiro, to sit out in Oklahoma City and hold people’s feet to the fire. Howard had been with me in Atlanta when we took over the investigation of the mail bombings that would eventually lead us to Walter Leroy Moody. He knew how to get things done on the fly.

I never thought for a moment that my decision to put Howard in charge would be popular, and it wasn’t. I was micromanaging, which nobody likes the boss to do. Inevitably, I was insulting the attorneys in place out there. I would have been sore myself had I been in their shoes. But I wasn’t running a popularity contest. I was overseeing the investigation of a probable conspiracy that resulted in horrific deaths, and the better a conspiracy is organized, the faster it breaks apart and disappears once the crime has been committed. Speed is everything—speed and pressure.

That’s also why I insisted we investigate Terry Nichols. McVeigh had been living on the Michigan farm owned by Nichols and his brother, James. The two of them—McVeigh and Terry Nichols—were close friends. James Nichols had bought fertilizer and fuel oil, critical components of the bomb that had destroyed the Murrah Building. None of it was perfect. Friendship isn’t a crime, and just about every farmer buys fuel oil and fertilizer at one time or another. I certainly took my hits for pressing law-enforcement officials to arrest and charge Nichols: hits from our own field-office people who didn’t want to charge him and who didn’t like being overruled any more than the U.S. attorneys liked having a baby-sitter assigned to them; hits from a federal judge, too, who thought the Bureau had gone over the line. But if the conspiracy was bigger than what we had found to date, I wanted maximum pressure put on the subject (or subjects) and their lawyers.

It was Timothy McVeigh himself, by the way, who persuaded me that the conspiracy didn’t go beyond what we had uncovered. The more he talked, the more we learned about him, the more it seemed evident that his was largely a self-conspiracy, abetted by Terry Nichols and to a lesser extent by McVeigh’s old army buddy Michael Fortier, who had foreknowledge of the bombing plot but failed to act on it. But that was six months out, just about the time we were ready to take McVeigh to trial. Until then, it was my duty and obligation to assume the opposite and to act based on that assumption. Any competent FBI director, I hope, would have done the same.

On June 2, 1997, Timothy McVeigh was found guilty of murdering in cold blood 168 of his fellow citizens, then perhaps the most heinous crime on American soil in the twentieth century. Eleven days later, he was sentenced to death by lethal injection for his crimes. By year’s end, Terry Nichols had been convicted in a separate trial on manslaughter and conspiracy charges for which he would be sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole.

Unfortunately, though, that wasn’t the end of Timothy McVeigh. In early May 2001, a week before McVeigh was to be executed, we told his lawyers that the FBI had inadvertently withheld more than three thousand pages of documents. On May 11, Attorney General John Ashcroft delayed McVeigh’s execution for a month, and on May 15, we expanded our search for more documents. No one was happy about the mix-up, and if Ashcroft was upset with the FBI, I never saw or heard it. He was concerned about the delay, sure. I was, too. I was also disappointed by what had caused it, and in testimony before the House Appropriations Committee on May 16, I took full responsibility for the failure. I was in the driver’s seat. We should have done better. But a little perspective, please.

Investigations of the sort we undertook in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing are a massive effort, unimaginable to someone who has never been in the middle of one. This case alone generated some 3.5 tons of evidence, nearly a billion separate pieces of information. FBI agents conducted more than 28,000 interviews and examined 13.2 million hotel reservations, 3.1 million Ryder truck rental records, and 628,000 airline reservation records. Storing so much information, sorting it, reporting it—they were all Herculean tasks. We did not perform well on a very tiny portion of it this time. Our technology was not up to the challenge. Some of our field offices sent in summaries of the information without the underlying documentation. Some wrongly concluded that the information they held was so extraneous to the task at hand that they never submitted it at all. Other mistakes of judgment were made. Human error happens, and I deeply regretted it and still do, not because justice was compromised—it clearly wasn’t—but because the errors marred an otherwise exemplary investigation and because the delays at the end delayed the punishment of a horrendous act.

Timothy McVeigh’s lawyers naturally seized on the withheld records as a last chance to save their client, but both they and attorneys for Terry Nichols ultimately agreed that not a single one of those missing 3,135 pages of documents was relevant in the least. More important, judges so found.

As for me, I regarded our celebrated mix-up more as a sign of strength than of weakness. The missing material was discovered by manually, painstakingly inventorying our records—post conviction and post appeal—and comparing the results to discovery lists of exhibits that had been given over to the defense lawyers. No court compelled us to undertake that exercise, and no one intentionally kept back anything once it was under way and the discrepancies found. Had the finders kept quiet about the discovery, no one outside a tiny circle would have ever known. But that was what was so rewarding about how the matter was handled once the omissions were discovered. No one sat on the information. No one tried to push it off into a dark corner or sweep it under the rug. The FBI did exactly what the public should expect. It gave full disclosure.

Over the course of the eight years I was director, I had spent hundreds of hours at Quantico and in the field offices, telling our people that honesty was more important than the successful result of a case. For eight years I had been preaching accountability, assuring agents that it was okay to make mistakes so long as we acknowledged and learned from them. And this time we did it and took our lumps. The FBI was no longer an imperial culture. I’ll take some credit for that.

In the end, too, justice was done. On June 11, 2001, Timothy McVeigh was executed in Terre Haute, Indiana. Nichols later admitted his guilt and no other conspirators surfaced. The FBI was totally vindicated.

Washington is filled with lightning-rod jobs, from the presidency on down, but when it comes to taking heat, day in and day out from a multiplicity of directions, I’ll stack the job of FBI director up against any other position in town.

The pecking order that goes with the post almost guarantees you’ll remain in close combat. I reported to two judiciary committees, two appropriations committees, two intelligence committees, asas well as to the attorney general and the president. I happen to think that’s a good thing—a lot of people should be keeping an eye on the nation’s law-enforcement apparatus and on its top cop—but no other agency head in Washington has reporting obligations on that scale.

No other agency that I can think of operates with our degree of transparency either. Like the FBI, the CIA also has a raft of reporting responsibilities. Like us, it gathers intelligence, a messy business in the best of times. (The best sources are generally not the best citizens, no matter what country you’re talking about.) But the CIA gets to hide behind a veil of secrecy when needed. I testified so often before congressional committees that I wore a rut in the pavement between the Hoover Building and Capitol Hill, and with very few exceptions those were public appearances. But no one on the Hill or elsewhere expected George Tenet to sit down in an open committee session with the tape recorders humming and the cameras whirring, and defend every last detail of some action his agency had taken. Given that CIA activity can sometimes involve “lethal findings”—basically, licenses to kill signed by the president and approved by Congress—almost no one on the Hill even wanted transparency from the mother ship out in Langley, Virginia. Some things are best left unsaid in public.

Not so the FBI. We’re a law-enforcement agency. At the end of the day, we don’t get to appear before secret tribunals and explain away our actions. We have to go before a court and a jury, and judges and juries expect and should expect us to abide by both the spirit and letter of the law.

FBI directors in my view should be judicious but not so cautious they won’t take necessary risks. We took plenty of risks during my tenure, both domestically and abroad. We went after Archer Daniels Midland. We snatched Ramzi Yousef, who was under indictment for murder in the first World Trade Center attack, from a hotel in Pakistan and just missed nabbing Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in Qatar. We thought outside the box when it was appropriate, and we fought for the tools that would let us operate outside the box and redefine it to the advantage of all Americans—digital wiretap authority, for example.

But the FBI isn’t the KGB. We can’t just go barging in someplace because we have suspicions or even because we’re 99 percent certain of what we’ll find. We can be creative, sure, but we can’t take liberties and perform experiments on the basic laws of the land. Court warrants, chains of custody with regard to evidence, indictments, due process—these obligations trace back not just to our own enabling statutes but to the very legal foundations of the Constitution, of our nation. Beyond such enduring restraints, any number of congressional committees over the years have imposed very exacting conditions on what our agents can and cannot do. During my time as director, Janet Reno and I added our own further strictures consistent with what we thought the intent of Congress and the courts to be. All that circumscribed our actions, but it also guaranteed, to the extent that guidelines can govern human behavior, that the FBI under my guidance would behave judiciously. I make no apology for that. To my mind, people should demand nothing less.

Simply put, the FBI that I inherited in the late summer of 1993 needed to improve credibility and trustworthiness. Some of that was historical. Probably no government agency in history has ever been better served by television than the Bureau was by The F.B.I., which debuted in 1965 and ran for nine seasons, 234 episodes in all. With Efrem Zimbalist Jr. starring as the incorruptible inspector Lew Erskine, the show treated the Bureau so reverentially that J. Edgar Hoover allowed scenes to be shot on location in its old headquarters at DOJ. But even as the cameras were rolling, the wheels were coming loose.

Hoover’s obsessive pursuit of the American Communist party led him to embrace a broad array of covert measures known as the Counter Intelligence Program—the infamous COINTELPRO. Unable to distinguish legitimate social protest from communist agitation, Hoover ended up going after iconic American figures, including Martin Luther King Jr. In 1975, the COINTELPRO excesses were dragged to the surface by the Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, known as the Church Committee after its chairman, the late senator Frank Church of Idaho. Mark Felt and others were convicted and later pardoned for running illegal FBI operations. By then, everyone knew that the Bureau—now under Hoover’s successor, L. Patrick Gray—had also grossly failed to exercise its political independence in the wake of the Watergate break-in.

But it wasn’t just past history that was haunting the Bureau when I took it over in September 1993. Waco and the horrible images of that consuming fire were still fresh in the public’s memory. So was the FBI’s standoff at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, with Randy Weaver and his family. Thanks to the newly embraced Internet, the disaffected could commune on-line, trade wild accusations about the Bureau and its actions, link them to some alleged global network, and spawn a whole new generation of off-the-wall conspiracy theorists. (Timothy McVeigh was one of them.)

Inevitably, all this had an effect on the public at large and on the media. The FBI labored under a presumption of guilt, not innocence. For some Americans, we were the heavies, the government thugs. As director, I never knew where I was going to be pressed from next—the media, Congress, the public generally.

Sometimes it was the backside of a case that jumped up and bit us from behind. The Branch Davidian standoff didn’t happen on my watch. If it had, I probably would have given the attorney general different advice on how to proceed and would have followed the playbook I used with the Freemen in Montana. As I told Bill Clinton when we first talked about the director’s job, the government, not David Koresh, had time on its side. But the fact that I was a federal judge working out of a Manhattan courthouse on the day all hell broke loose in Waco, Texas, didn’t prevent the case from keeping my attention while in office.

The Freeman siege was resolved peacefully without a shot being fired. I applied a formula of patience and the first-time use by the FBI of third-party negotiators: non-government people with whom the fringe Freeman identified. I will always be grateful both to Senator John McCain and then Congressman Bill Richardson who generously offered to act as our negotiators. Both of these fine public servants never sought any credit or publicity for their offer—a testament to their character and integrity. They should be recognized here. Not surprisingly, the Freeman matter ended without bloodshed and so, of course, generated very little press as a result. No inquiries, hearings, bombast, or even a thank-you to our agents for a job well done. My only regret and deep sadness there was the accidental death by car accident of Kevin Kramer, one of our best young agents.

Of the many issues that lingered long after the smoke had cleared in Waco, the one that absolutely, positively wouldn’t die was whether military CS—or gas—canisters had been fired by government forces surrounding the Branch Davidian compound on the final morning of the standoff and, more specifically, whether the canisters had ignited the conflagration that killed Koresh and seventy-four of his followers. I admit that the matter was not high on my must-attend-to list. The canister story had been kept alive by the conspiracy-theory networks and given added legs by lawyers pushing a wrongful-death suit. To me, that sounded like the usual pack of suspects. The evidence we had available to us suggested that the canisters had never been used. As for the fire itself, I never thought there was the least chance that it had been ignited by anyone other than Koresh himself.

When documents did finally surface, six years after the fact, that indicated we had in fact used the gas canisters, I went to Janet Reno and told her that we needed an outside investigator to take a fresh look at the whole scenario of the final hours at Waco and see how the canisters might have fit into the story line. Janet agreed, and she was able to convince John Danforth, the distinguished former Republican senator from Missouri, to head up the investigation.

I wasn’t any happier about this last-minute discovery than I had been when the missing McVeigh documents were found. I was even less happy when Danforth took FBI agents detailed to him and sent them secretly into our own headquarters to secure a group of files for his investigation. To me, going through the back door not only added to the general hysteria surrounding the Waco aftermath, it also was utterly unnecessary. We didn’t have the files under lock and key. All they had to do was walk in and ask for them, but courtesy, if nothing else, might suggest they announce themselves first. I called Danforth and told him as much.

“Look,” I said as best I can remember, “if you think you need to act in this manner, unilaterally, without any notice to us, then we’re not going to stand in your way. But to get all the records you want, it might be more productive to call me and let us help you with that.”

That, at least, put a stop to the cat-and-mouse games. Far more important, Danforth determined in the end that, while the canisters had indeed been used, they had been fired several hours prior to the onset of the blaze at targets far removed from the fire’s origins. Bottom line: the deaths at the Branch Davidian compound had been caused by the messianic lunatic who had brought his followers there in the first place. That’s the point, not the wild speculation; but long months passed in the director’s office where the emphasis seemed to be exactly the other way around.

Other times, compelling evidence intersected with political correctness in ways that served, to my mind, to hamstring the entire judicial process. I’m thinking specifically of Wen Ho Lee.

The Bureau had no choice but to investigate him. We had information suggesting that, in 1982, Dr. Lee had contacted a suspected spy. Given that Lee was a mechanical engineer helping to develop nuclear bombs at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, that information alone was alarming, but it was only the beginning of the trail. Later, we learned that Lee, who was Chinese born, had failed to report a possible relationship with a key figure in China’s nuclear program. In 1998, he told us that he also had been approached by nuclear scientists from China. Furthermore, he had gone to extraordinary lengths to download, copy, and remove materials from a secure national laboratory: forty hours of work stretching over seventy days. Even after Lee’s security clearances were stripped at Los Alamos, he made attempts to reenter the weapons design area, including one try at 3:30 A.M. on Christmas Eve of 1998, not exactly a normal work hour.

Investigating people with profiles such as Dr. Lee’s—people with access to vital, extremely sensitive information—is a basic law-enforcement responsibility of the FBI. We would have been guilty of gross negligence had we ignored his actions. But we didn’t try and convict him in the court of public opinion before any criminal charges could be brought. To the extent that happened to Wen Ho Lee, it was the work of The New York Times, which took a leak from a congressional committee and blew it up into a four-thousand-word front-page story that ran March 6, 1999. That’s what launched things, not the FBI. The Times all but acknowledged as much in a grudging 1,680-word “Note from the Editors” that ran on page two of its September 26, 2000, edition.

Frankly, I was surprised at the Times: The reporting was unconscionable. But I was also fed up yet again with the way leaks drive the process in Washington, and this time I decided to act. I proposed to Janet Reno that we convene a grand jury and drag before it everyone who had been in a position to leak the Wen Ho Lee story to The New York Times. I would go first. The rest of the investigators and other officials could come behind me. I’d seen grand juries shake loose this kind of information before. Even if that didn’t happen, I thought we would be sending an important message: you leak at your peril.

Note that I wasn’t out to get the reporters involved. Journalists are supposed to go for the story, but we didn’t have to make it so damn easy for them to get it. Not surprisingly, of course, Janet and the administration behind her had no real stomach for any of what I proposed.

The simple fact, though, is that once the Wen Ho Lee genie was out of the bottle, nothing could get it back in. The fifty-nine-count indictment that was eventually returned against Lee—with my great support, I hasten to add—was viewed by some as further evidence that the FBI was piling it on. The fact that, after the indictment and at our urging, he was held nine months in solitary confinement added inhumanity to the charges against us, and never mind that the odds of Dr. Lee trying to flee to China at that point had he been free were, to my mind, astronomical.

Inevitably—and with the urging of Lee’s lawyers, who knew an opportunity when they saw it—several Asian-American groups got involved. The FBI was persecuting Lee based on his ethnicity. One of the judges we had appeared before got swept up in the hysteria and declared, entirely inappropriately, that the FBI was embarrassing the nation by pursuing Wen Ho Lee. As sometimes happens in high-profile circumstances like this, the suspect became the victim.

Finally, as political pressure built to free Lee, Janet Reno called a meeting over at the Department of Justice to say that she was prepared to abandon the indictment and let Dr. Lee plead guilty to a relatively minor charge of mishandling classified documents. The case, she felt, was just too weak to pursue. I disagreed, and I let my feelings be known. We ought to take this guy to trial, I argued. The case was much stronger than anyone at the meeting other than my fellow FBI agents realized. No, we didn’t have a confession. No, we didn’t have fingerprints. And, yes, we had made some mistakes of our own along the way, but our people had done an incredibly painstaking job of building a powerful computer forensics case against Lee.

They had shown that he had access to vital information kept on the computers at Los Alamos. They’d detailed his late-night downloads at the lab even after his clearance had been suspended. Lee contended through his lawyers that, yes, he had moved the information onto tapes, but had subsequently destroyed the tapes, so our agents spent days pawing through the sites where his home garbage would have been dumped and found no evidence whatsoever of what he alleged had happened.

“There’s no jury in the world that would believe his explanation of why he had downloaded that information and then destroyed it,” I told Janet and her assistants. “And even if they did, he was still technically admitting to all the elements he had been charged with.”

It was all to no avail. Janet had clearly made up her mind prior to the meeting. In addition to the felony guilty plea, Lee agreed to submit to interviews as to where the classified information he had improperly accessed had disappeared to, and that’s where the case ended. The gods of political correctness were satisfied. The firestorm died down, but in the end I didn’t feel that justice was served.

Occasionally, also, justice—at least as we conceived it—was forced to take a backseat to larger geopolitical interests. I was in my office at the Hoover Building one day in mid-August 1998 when Sandy Berger and George Tenet came to see me. It was the only time that the two of them had shown up together at my door. They didn’t have to tell me something big was up.

The CIA director and national security adviser had come to apprise me of an operation then in its final planning stages. Targets were to be struck simultaneously in Afghanistan and Sudan in retaliation for the bombing a week earlier, on August 7, of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Afghanistan, I understood. The embassy bombings were the work of al Qaeda forces loyal to Osama bin Laden, who had taken refuge with the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and the bombings had been lethal in the extreme, leaving 260 dead and thousands injured. I was becoming increasingly frustrated by the Clinton administration’s unwillingness to confront Iran on the Khobar Towers bombing. Here, finally, we seemed ready to take a stand consistent with what had become obvious to me. We were already involved in a global terrorist war.

Better still, the CIA had come into possession of intelligence that seemed to indicate bin Laden would be meeting with his senior staff on August 20 to assess the damage from the embassy attacks and begin planning new assaults. We were set to use U.S. Navy destroyers stationed in the northern Arabian Sea to rain seventy-five Tomahawk missiles down on the al Qaeda camp where the meeting was supposed to take place and hope for the best. I couldn’t have agreed more.

A simultaneous attack planned on a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory suspected of turning out lethal gas troubled me far more. For starters, I wasn’t much convinced by the evidence that Sandy and George laid out. The U.S. had basically been blind in Sudan for several years, ever since our embassy and the CIA station in Khartoum had been closed down for fear of terrorist attacks. George’s people had managed to entice an agent to collect some soil samples some distance away from the main entrance to the factory, and the soil had shown traces of a chemical substance used by the Iraqis in the production of nerve gas. But apart from that and some vague intimations of a financial connection between bin Laden and the factory, there wasn’t much else to go on.

I thought it was a slim dossier to launch an attack over, but I had more immediate concerns. The Bureau had a huge contingent of agents, laboratory experts, forensic experts, and other specialists on the ground in Africa at the two embassy sites, 471 people in all at the height of the investigation. Only about one in ten Kenyans is Muslim, but about a third of all Tanzanians are, and in Zanzibar—part of the United Republic of Tanzania—virtually everyone is a Muslim. I was worried about retaliation against our people if we went ahead with an attack on an African Muslim state, and I insisted that if we did go after the pharmaceutical plant, I be given notice far enough in advance of the exact timing of the missile launches so that we could put protective measures in place.

There was a third element, too. Sudan had detained two people we suspected of being part of the embassy bombings. Even as the U.S. was planning to level the factory, John O’Neill was negotiating on the Bureau’s behalf in New York City with the Sudanese ambassador to the United Nations, and the ambassador had opened talks with his own people back in Khartoum about turning the two individuals in question over to the Kenyans, so that they could ultimately be turned over to us for trial back in the United States. Was it really necessary to do this strike, I asked, given that it would in all likelihood spell the end of that effort?

The answer, of course, was yes. Tomahawks got launched in both directions—at the al Qaeda camp and, from the Red Sea, at Sudan. Whether the intelligence was wrong or the missiles less accurate than expected, Osama bin Laden lived to attack another day. In Sudan, the factory was obliterated, but little evidence has ever been found to suggest it was manufacturing the lethal gas in question or any other weapons-grade chemical compounds. As feared, the attack drove a stake into John O’Neill’s effort to broker a deal with the ambassador.

On the positive side, the FBI was given the heads-up we asked for. I was on the ground in Dar es Salaam on August 20, 1998, taking a meal break with some of the agents who had been working there, when my old friend and able deputy, Bill Esposito, called from Washington. He’d just heard from the White House and the CIA that missiles would be striking their targets in Aghanistan and Sudan within the hour. I had my senior people pull the rest of our contingent together.

“Look,” I said, “I’ve got some news for you.” Then I told them about the missile strikes. Except for me, the room was absolutely silent. By then, the attacks were imminent. We took extra precautions of our own in the hours and days ahead to keep our people safe, but the crime scenes in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi were already being protected by heavily armed, company-strength U.S. Marine FAST teams. To my great relief, there were no attempts at retaliation against either site.

The Centennial Park bombing that marred the 1996 Summer Olympics was another case where I directly intervened to prevent what would have been a legal catastrophe.

Richard Jewell had originally been one of the heroes of the Centennial Park bombing. A security guard hired to protect a light and sound tower at the popular late-night meeting site, Jewell had been the first person to alert police to a suspicious knapsack shortly before the bomb inside it exploded. After the blast, Jewell had helped police clear the park. So far, so good, but Jewell also had gone out of his way to tell television reporters about his efforts. More than one “hero” has been known to create the circumstances of his own heroism, and Jewell was beginning to fit that profile. Statements by some of his co-workers raised further suspicions. I wasn’t in Atlanta, but when a draft application for a search warrant to be served on Richard Jewell crossed my desk back in Washington, I responded that the evidence seemed sufficient for probable cause.

It wasn’t that I was convinced Jewell was the man. If anything, I was unconvinced, then and later. To me, he never quite seemed to fit the facts. But a search warrant isn’t an accusation. It’s a judicial order to acquire evidence and other information that will help decide whether to move forward toward an indictment or to move on to other suspects and other lines of inquiry. That’s where we were with Richard Jewell when the Atlanta Journal-Constitution got wind of the search warrant, added two and two and came up with five, and named Jewell as our prime suspect. Thus, just as with Wen Ho Lee, a choreographed media circus ensued that would take two long months to die out.

Unfortunately, at just about the same time, we compounded the difficulty by getting too cute by half. Agents had originally asked Jewell if they could interview him at a local restaurant. Since Jewell agreed to come along voluntarily and since a restaurant hardly constitutes “custody”—he could walk out whenever he wanted to—there would have been no need to apprise him of his Miranda rights to have a lawyer present.

Then the plan changed. Rather than use a restaurant, agents asked Jewell to come down to the Atlanta FBI office and take part in a bogus training film about how to interview a “first responder.” Jewell once again said yes, came of his own free will, and of his own free will began to answer the questions that interviewers had been planning to ask over sandwiches and coffee.

Technically, I suppose, that still let us off the hook in terms of his Miranda rights, but when I found out what was going on, halfway through the ruse, I didn’t like the misleading way it had been orchestrated. The arrangements for the interview, the setting it was taking place in, the fact we were tricking the guy—the whole production began to suggest a nonvoluntary situation. This was an FBI office. Guys sit around with guns strapped to them. On top of that, if Jewell was the guy, we were risking tainting the case right at the outset. What’s more, we had an incipient media blowout on our hands, and I wanted to make sure things were done more than right. Not only had people been killed and injured—one dead from the bomb, another by heart attack seemingly as a result of the explosion, and 120 wounded—they had been killed and maimed in the public eye, on a hallowed stage. The world press corps was camped out within walking distance of Centennial Park, desperate to fill column inches and broadcast minutes. (The heart attack victim was a Turkish cameraman racing to film the event.)

For me, the situation had reached critical mass. Read him his rights, I said, not to any great hosannas of praise either in my office or down in Atlanta. Why, people asked? But I was through explaining. Because that’s my directive, I answered. It was only when they asked him to acknowledge in writing that he had been read them, as required by the statute, that he glommed onto what was happening and shut up tight.

I’ve read in the years since that if we had continued the ruse, Richard Jewell would have told FBI investigators enough that they could have cleared him then and there. Maybe so. I don’t have a crystal ball. But given the choice between deceit and transparency, I’ll take transparency every time.

I was galled by what had happened, and I agreed when three FBI supervisors were reprimanded by Justice Department investigators for their role in the questioning of Richard Jewell. As I wrote in an internal FBI memo on the reprimands, “No prosecutor could go into court, and no director of the FBI could go before Congress, and claim that necessary constitutional warnings are adequately conveyed by telling a suspect that he is an actor in a training video and that he is being presented Miranda warnings ‘just like it’s (a) real official interview.’” Inevitably, the memo was leaked to the press almost before the ink was dry.

But as happened with the flap over the McVeigh records and Wen Ho Lee, I was mostly galled by the fact that the controversy drew attention away from what the FBI does best: exhausting tens of thousands of work hours on solving crimes that no other agency has the training or resources or resolve or corporate culture to take on. Led by John Behnke, Tracey North, and Todd Letcher—all veterans of the Moody case—agents ultimately conducted more than twenty thousand interviews in the Centennial Park bombing. They studied and cross-referenced and matched up innumerable photos and video camera stills and individual frames from TV and newspaper coverage. (Everyone was recording the Olympics in one way or another.) And in the end, after two years of the most minute examination and cross-comparison, all those dedicated and unbending agents had made their case against their man, Eric Robert Rudolph.

By then, Rudolph was already on the FBI Most Wanted List for a 1998 bombing at a Birmingham, Alabama, abortion clinic that had killed an off-duty policeman helping to guard the facility and seriously wounded a nurse at the clinic. Soon, additional charges relating to other Atlanta area bombings, at a lesbian nightclub and a women’s clinic, would be added to the list.

Another half decade would be needed to hunt Eric Rudolph down and finally close the books on the Centennial Park bombing, almost two years after I had left the director’s post, and for that, too, the FBI has taken flak. But Rudolph was willing and able to live virtually like a wild animal in the rugged mountains of western North Carolina. The area had been a stronghold of a hate group that called itself the Army of God, to which Rudolph belonged. He grew up there. As Osama bin Laden has proven, even the most committed manhunts in the world can fail to flush a prey when it’s hunkered down in a harsh terrain, protected by its own kind. And Rudolph clearly had the genes of the maniacally committed. Back in 1998, his brother sawed off his own hand, on videotape, to protest the FBI’s pursuit of his sibling.

Had a local police officer in Murphy, North Carolina, not spotted Eric Rudolph one evening eating out of a Dumpster behind a supermarket, he might still be at large. But the point to be made is that, as with Khobar Towers and so many other cases, the FBI never gave up. We never stopped looking for Eric Robert Rudolph, and because we didn’t, we created the conditions that led to the lucky break that finally brought a crazed murderer to ground. That tale might begin with Richard Jewell and a foolish trick in the Bureau’s Atlanta office, but that’s the background static, not the story itself. Rudolph has now admitted to his crimes, but the FBI’s overwhelming evidence would have gotten him in the end even if he hadn’t.

The Unabomber was a case study for me in how the media can not only drive events but sometimes precipitate them, which is why I will forever associate the names Ted Kaczynski and Dan Rather.

I was working my first big case as an agent when Kaczynski mailed his initial bomb back in 1978, a package device supposedly being returned to Northwestern University professor Buckley Crist. Suspicious—he’d never mailed the package in the first place—Crist turned the package over to campus police, who opened it, causing minor injuries to one officer. Other bombs followed. Some went to airline officials; others were meant to explode in flight. Fortunately, Kaczynski wasn’t much of a bomb maker, at least in the early days. Then in 1985, he did his first serious harm. A graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley lost four fingers and the use of one eye. Later that year, a California computer store owner was killed by a bomb loaded with nails and other shrapnel. Two years later, in 1987, Kaczynski struck again. A similar bomb was sent to a computer store in Salt Lake City. Then he went to ground for seven years. His first victim when he surfaced again was Yale computer scientist David Gelernter. Gelernter survived but lost part of his right hand. Kaczynski followed that up by maiming geneticist Charles Epstein. In 1994, he killed an advertising executive; in 1995, the president of a forestry association.

Clearly, the attacks were increasing in frequency and in accuracy. Whoever the Unabomber was, he had learned how to make an effective bomb, and his list of enemies was growing. But that was about all we had to go on. Most bombers are driven by some obvious if demented cause. Kaczynski, it turned out, had one, too. He had declared war on modern society and particularly those who were by his malicious lights abusing technology. But until Kaczynski sent his first anonymous letter to the press in 1993, we had not the remotest clue who was behind the attacks, and the letter provided little help. The writer credited the attacks to an anarchist group he called FC. Indeed, “FC” had been inscribed on the bombs regularly since 1985, but we had no idea what that stood for. (The answer, once we got it, was simple in the extreme: “Freedom Club.”)

We’d dubbed the case Unabomb—an amalgamation of “university” and “airlines,” his favorite targets—and we had a special task force dedicated to finding the Unabomber, but that, too, was going nowhere. Using every kind of matrix and analytic tool they could think of, the agents had assembled a massive computerized list of anyone and everyone who might have some kind of lethal grudge against the specific people attacked, against computers, against universities, against the airline industry, and on and on. Just assembling the list was the work of thousands of agent hours; checking it increased the workload exponentially. Every time I look back on the case, I’m amazed by the perseverance our people showed, the sheer dedication in the face of so little positive feedback. The FBI task force was led by agents like Terry Turchie who didn’t know the meaning of giving up, yet Ted Kaczynski’s name wasn’t even on the list. He was below everyone’s radar.

When Kaczynski had a new bomb to send, he would bicycle down from his cabin to town, then hop a bus to someplace like San Francisco, where he would mail his lethal devices before scurrying back to his hidey-hole in Montana. Like Walter Leroy Moody, he left no forensic trail, and like Eric Rudolph he seemed able to live on air and bark and beetles. And then Theodore Kaczynski made his pivotal mistake, without which we never would have caught him. He mailed to The Washington Post and The New York Times a 35,000-word “manifesto” and claimed he would cease his bombings if the document was published verbatim by one of the newspapers or by a major national magazine such as Time or Newsweek.

The manifesto was rambling, the reasoning tortured, but the minute I started reading it, I felt certain someone, somewhere would recognize its author. The syntax, the diction, the logic—they were all so singular, as full of idiosyncratic quirks as any fingerprint. The problem was how to get it published.

Newspapers don’t like to be bossed around, and they don’t like setting onerous precedents. I can remember sitting in the office of Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher of The New York Times, with Donald Graham, who had succeeded his mother, Katharine, as publisher of The Washington Post, hashing matters over with the fourth estate. Publish this and we’ll be hostage to every nut with a cause, the two of them argued. Fail to publish it, I countered, and people might die, perhaps your own employees, or their families and loved ones. The Unabomber has shown an affinity for airplanes in the past. He might really bring one down this time. More practical issues intervened, as well. Publishing a 35,000-word document would require a special section. Paper, ink, typesetting time—none of it’s free, and no advertisers were going to be rushing to fill this insert with quarter pagers. Publishers have to answer to their stockholders, too, and Sulzberger and Graham were both conscious of that, as they had to be. Graham said that in the end it came down to a matter of “public safety.”

It was obvious to me, too, that neither publisher wanted to be in the position of aiding and abetting the FBI, but I couldn’t help but note the irony involved. A quarter of a century earlier, the government had unsuccessfully moved heaven and earth to keep these same two newspapers from publishing the “Pentagon Papers.” Now I was trying to move heaven and earth to get them to publish a document they would have just as soon left alone.

“This might be the only time in history the FBI has begged you to leak something for us,” I told them.

I don’t know if it was true, but I suspect so, and ultimately my argument carried the day. Against the economic self-interest of both papers, against the widespread opposition of some of their top editors, and, to be honest, to my great surprise, Sulzberger and Graham struck a deal. The Post would publish the manifesto, and the Times would share the cost, maybe $40,000 in all.

On September 19, 1995, right at the tail end of a three-month deadline imposed by the Unabomber, the manifesto finally saw the light of day, in an eight-page supplement to the Post amended three days later by an additional two paragraphs, seventy-two words in all, that had been inadvertently dropped by a typist. Media critics, by and large, were appalled. The Post and Times had caved. Their pages were going to be Crackpot City from now on. Armchair criminologists climbed on board, too. The Unabomber, whoever he was, was chortling over his success.

Maybe my stomach should have been churning, too. I’d gone way out on a limb to talk America’s two most influential daily newspapers into this. If the manifesto didn’t flush out someone who could identify its author, the FBI was going to have plenty of crow to eat and could have made powerful enemies in the process. But from the moment I opened my Washington Post that morning, I knew we’d done the right thing. Some professor or student was sure to recognize the quirky style of a former mentor or mentee, and it wouldn’t take long. It didn’t, but what almost floored me was that it was Ted Kaczynski’s brother who dropped the dime.

I’ve got two brothers I dearly love. I can only imagine how wrenching it must have been for David Kaczynski to see his brother’s tortured style and psyche spread all over those pages, and then to decide to turn him in. But I like to think that, under similar circumstances, I would have had the courage to do much as David did. First, he contacted a lawyer, and the lawyer contacted us. His anonymous client, he said, was prepared to identify the Unabomber, but he wanted concessions, the chief of which was that the government would not ask for the death penalty. We didn’t agree entirely, but we did say we would take the request into strong consideration, and ultimately we did. With that, we had the Unabomber’s name, corroborating evidence such as it was, and an address: a backwoods cabin outside Lincoln, Montana. But the weirdness was not done, not by a long shot.

I was sitting in the FBI’s operations center on April 2, 1996, the day before agents armed with search and arrest warrants were to descend on Ted Kaczynski in Montana, when one of my chief lieutenants shouted over to say that Dan Rather was on the line.

“Here we go,” I said.

So I got on the phone, and Dan, whom I had met a couple of times, came right to the point.

“Listen,” he said, “we know all about Kaczynski, where he is, all that, and were going to have some people go out there and film the search.”

“You can’t film the search!”

“Well,” he said, “that’s what we’d like to do.”

“You’re going to get someone killed,” I told him. “First of all, and I know you’re not going to answer this, I’d like to know how you found out about this.”

We’d been mobilizing people to move out to western Montana for days, but not on the scale that would attract media attention. Now I was enraged, not at Dan—I’d been in Washington long enough to know that the place leaks like a water mattress at a porcupine convention—but at his source. The operation had been relatively tightly held; whoever had talked was clearly intimately involved in the operation. Dan Rather, though, wasn’t about to hand over CBS’s stoolie.

“Well,” he said, “you know, we have good sources.”

Right.

“Don’t worry,” he went on. “We’re just sending one truck. It’ll be low profile.”

“Dan, this is western Montana. You can’t do that! There’s no way for a news truck to be unobtrusive.”

And so we went on, the CBS news anchor and global media figure assuring us that his reporters and soundmen and camera crews would be quiet as church mice, and me assuring him that this wasn’t going to happen. Finally, we struck a deal. CBS would give us a couple hours to do the search before it set up, and we would give the network some exclusive interviews in return. Dan Rather couldn’t have been more honorable on his end once the deal was struck. For our part, we burst into Kaczynski’s cabin unannounced by satellite dish trucks and found a wealth of evidence awaiting us, everything from fabricated explosive devices to the original of the manifesto and the typewriter used to produce it. And with that, one of the most frustrating cases the FBI had ever worked on—an eighteen-year wild-goose chase that had spanned the tenures of five directors and acting directors—was ended. Today, Ted Kaczynski, who murdered three people with his bombs and injured twenty-three others, is behind bars for the rest of his life.

Once in a rare while, too, a case went so deep to the bone that I couldn’t help but feel raw anger.

I’d been FBI director for only a few months when some of my top people dropped by to brief me on one of the most highly classified operations the Bureau had ever undertaken—so restricted that, even though I ran the place, no one could tell me the code word. Fine, I said, talk on, and the story was almost too incredible.

For years, it turned out, the Bureau had had two agents living in a small Georgetown row house and posing as just another set of urban upwardly mobile DINKs (double income no kids, for those who forget the shorthand of the ’90s). These two, though, were more in the mining business than in anything normally associated with Washington. Out of their basement ran a tunnel that had been dug at huge effort and public expense with an eye to penetrating the then new Soviet embassy built on one of the city’s highest points, a place known locally as Mount Alto. (I should point out that this was in stark contrast to Moscow, where the new U.S. embassy had been built in a hollow surrounded by KGB listening stations. Beware, in other words, of democracies bearing gifts.) Naturally, my staff, or that part of it that was allowed in on the secret, was enormously proud of this fact.

“We’re right under the code room!” they told me, practically bursting out of their suits.

“Oh yeah?” I said, wondering where this was headed.

“And all we have to do is go up a little farther and we’ll be in the code room!”

“So why don’t you do it?”

“Well,” came the answer, “we think their instrumentation will detect us if we do that.”

“How much money did we spend on this?”

“Millions of dollars.”

“How long?”

“Years.”

“And you’re to the point where you’re almost there but can’t get there?”

“That’s right—we can’t get there. We think it would be best if we filled in the tunnel.”

“How much?”

“Millions.”

“How long?”

“Years. Do you want to see the tunnel before we begin?”

I told them no. I was already having a vision of a string of D.C. streets collapsing on top of our tunnel, creating an urban chasm that would point right from the Russian Embassy to our little row house—and from there, a second furrowed line of responsibility that would point directly to my seventh-floor office. Indeed, one evening I had dinner at the embassy and realized that I was treading softly on the floor.

I had no way of knowing it at the time, but that was my first introduction to FBI agent Robert Hanssen and his treasonous sideline. Hanssen had already told the Russians about our tunnel, long before we determined we would never be able to use it. As for Bob Hanssen himself, we had already met once, briefly: he and I and our families attended the same Roman Catholic church, St. Catherine’s in Great Falls, Virginia. On one of the first Sundays after I had become director, he made a point of stopping me after mass and introducing himself. Over the next eight years, I would have virtually no direct contact with him, but his shadow hung heavily over my tenure.

Oddly, given that the Soviet Union basically went out of business in 1989, the 1990s were the Decade of the Turncoat Soviet Spy. Aldrich Ames, a thirty-one-year veteran of the CIA, and his wife, Rosario, were arrested by the FBI in 1994 and charged with conspiracy to commit espionage. Ames had offered his services to the Soviets in 1985 while serving as chief of the Soviet branch of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. In the eight-plus years that followed, he had done untold damage to the Agency and his nation, and in the end he was sentenced to life in prison without parole for his crimes. (Rosario Ames drew sixty-three months in prison for abetting his espionage.)

A year later, in 1996, we arrested Harold Nicholson, a veteran CIA operations officer and former chief of station in Bucharest, as he was attempting to leave the U.S. to meet with agents of the Russian intelligence service. Eventually sentenced to twenty-three years in prison, Nicholson was the highest-ranking CIA official ever convicted of espionage. In both the Ames and Nicholson cases, the arrests were the fruit of significantly improved ties between the CIA and FBI, across the ranks and especially at the top. From day one, I had a great working relationship with John Deutsch, who was heading the CIA when these espionage cases popped, and with George Tenet, who succeeded him.

The FBI came in for its own black eye in 1996 when Special Agent Earl Pitts, a counterintelligence officer and a thirteen-year veteran of the Bureau, was charged with espionage, attempted espionage, and communication of classified information, all of it over a five-year period beginning in 1987. On more than one occasion during the covert phase of our investigation, I walked past Pitts while traversing the corridors at Quantico and did a good rendition of hello as we passed each other. Pitts drew a twenty-seven-year sentence for his activities.

Other arrests came down, as well. Late in 1998, we nabbed ten people who had been conducting espionage for the government of Cuba. About the same time, David Sheldon Boone, an army sergeant assigned to the National Security Agency, pled guilty in Alexandria’s U.S. district court to conspiracy to commit espionage for the KGB. We caught a husband-and-wife team that had been spying for the East Germans; both were convicted in 1998 of four counts of espionage. By then, the cold war had been in cessation for almost a decade, but you wouldn’t have known it from our National Security Division.

The irony of breaking a spy case is simple. Finding a spy is terrible news. Not finding a spy is worse but not news.

Try as we did, though, it was clear by 1997 that one mole was eluding us. We knew he was highly placed within the American intelligence community, probably in Washington, D.C. We knew he had been compromising important operations to the KGB over a long period of time, perhaps since the mid-1970s. We even had a code name for him: Graysuit. But we had no clue who Graysuit was.

We had set up a huge team of CIA and FBI officers and agents, and located them off-site from both facilities, mainly at the old Washington Navy Yard. To make sure we weren’t inviting the fox inside the henhouse, we polygraphed and otherwise individually screened everyone who went into that team, and we kept the operation quiet enough, despite its size, that only an incredibly well-placed mole—someone extremely close to George Tenet or me—could have known of its existence.

The arrests and subsequent interrogations of Ames, Nicholson, and Pitts had filled in many of the blank spots in our espionage files: cases where someone recruited by either the Agency or the Bureau had been compromised, killed, or arrested by the Russians, or ones where we had opened an investigation only to have the subject tipped off and skip town. But plenty of unexplained cases still remained, and those are the ones the team concentrated on. Still, by the end of the decade Graysuit was as big a mystery as he had been two years earlier.

It was just about that time, late in 1999, that George Tenet and I held one of our regular meetings on the matter with our respective espionage and national security chiefs. We have news, they said. Our staffs have determined that the mole in all likelihood is somewhere inside the CIA. All the pieces, all the signs pointed that way.

“Too bad,” I told George, half in jest. “Three strikes and you’re out.” But, of course, it was my strike, not his. I just didn’t know it yet.

Frustrated and determined finally to stop the bleeding, George and I came up with a plan, something that hadn’t been tried before. We would pool our financial resources, come up with a reward large enough to garner attention among the new capitalists of the old People’s Paradise, and basically buy the mole’s identity. The sum we finally settled on was a seven-figure payment. That, we figured, should be enough to turn up some KGB equivalent of Aldrich Ames, especially if we supplemented the cash reward with additional incentives such as residency, protection, whatever was necessary.

Once we had the money set aside, we had task-force analysts pore over their files and identify five senior KGB officers, all retired, who were likely to have had access to Graysuit’s identity in the normal course of their operations. Then we sent task force members overseas to approach each of the targets individually. The pitch was as simple as the plan: we are from the FBI and the CIA. We think you have information that would be very valuable to us, and we are willing to pay for it.

One ex-KGB officer we contacted responded just as directly: go screw yourselves. Officer two wasn’t a lot more gracious. He might have information, he said, but he never returned any calls after that—and not surprisingly, either. The Soviet Union might have been gone by then, but selling out an asset as valuable as Graysuit was an almost certain death sentence if you were caught.

Officer three took the bait: I can help, he said. His price was pretty much what we expected: the cash reward, U.S. citizenship for himself, and relocation to the U.S. for his mother. Fine, we said. Give us Graysuit, and it’s all yours. He couldn’t, the officer said. He knew him only by his Soviet code name, Ramon, but he had plenty of records and other information that related to Graysuit, all of it lifted from Lubyanka, the infamous KGB headquarters. That’s what he was proposing to sell us for several million dollars plus other considerations: not our mole but the path to his door.

“No way,” George Tenet and I both said when word got back to us. After all, we were kids from Queens and Jersey City—not easily fooled. First, we weren’t about to hand over any reward based on this guy’s representation that he had the goods that might get us what we were after. Second, no one walks out of Lubyanka with anything without at best getting his hands chopped off. Third, it just smelled too much like a scam. In truth, though, we had nothing better to go on, so we told the agents who were in contact with officer three to string him along until we saw what he could produce. A good thing we did, too, because when agents met with him in October 2000, on neutral ground in a European country, he turned over a remarkable amount of material: dates and times of meetings, amounts of payments, other detailed records and files, all of it smuggled out of what had supposedly been one of the most secure locations on earth.

I’ll never forget being in my seventh-floor office at FBI headquarters a week or so later when Neil Gallagher, my longtime colleague and able national security chief, popped in.

“What are you finding?” I asked him. The material had just arrived at our laboratory on the third floor, where it was being evaluated forensically.

“You’ve got to come down and see,” he said. And so I did.

The documents, Neil told me, appeared to be authentic. As advertised, they did everything but name Graysuit, but that wasn’t what he had dragged me down to the third floor to show me.

“There’s a tape recording,” Neil said.

The Russians, it turned out, wanted to find out who this guy was just as much as we did. They had been doing business with him for two decades and paid a bundle of money along the way. Even though the information he provided was very good, it offended their professional pride not to know who they were dealing with. Not only did Graysuit never meet with his handlers or contact them; they were never able to even get a photo of him, despite plenty of efforts on their part, but finally they got him to talk on the telephone, and that’s what our source had handed over to us: a casette of that conversation.

“And?” I asked Neil.

“And the guy’s Bob Hanssen.”

As I mentioned, I’d had almost no professional contact with Hanssen during my then seven-plus years as director. He’d spent the last five years detailed to the Office of Foreign Missions and the Department of State. But I had that earlier contact with him through my church, and by the fall of 2000 I had a second personal connection to him as well. We each had a son attending the same Catholic school, The Heights School, in Potomac, Maryland.

We couldn’t just go out and arrest Bob Hanssen. We wanted to catch him in the act of espionage. To that end, we started surveillance on his computer, his car, his phone, anywhere and everything that he might use to contact the Russians and transport himself to them. (We didn’t yet know that he never even told his handlers when he made drops or what he was dropping. He would simply stash the documents in one of several predesignated spots, and the Russians would leave the money in the same place for later retrieval.)

Meanwhile, the headmaster of The Heights School had asked me to give a talk at the annual father-son night in December 2000. Not surprisingly, Hanssen was part of the official committee waiting to welcome me when I arrived that evening. Just to overwhelm the event with irony, the headmaster had also asked me to talk about a particular topic: ethics and integrity in government. There I was on the small stage, waiting to speak and knowing that the man sitting in front of me had sold his nation down the river; and there Bob Hanssen was, sitting by his son in the front row, not having the least idea that we had finally cracked his cover. I don’t think I ever showed it that evening—I certainly hope I didn’t—but the longer I sat, the angrier I got, not just at the fact that the man had betrayed his country for money (as much as $600,000 in the aggregate) and smeared the agency I led but also that he had betrayed his family. His crimes were going to come crashing down not just on his own very deserving head but also on the head of the unsuspecting boy sitting next to him as well as his wife and the rest of his family. To me, that was almost as unforgivable as the espionage itself.

As we had with the Clinton administration, we briefed the incoming Bush team on the pending arrest. Andy Card, George W. Bush’s chief of staff in waiting, was particularly concerned that we not haul Hanssen in on Inauguration Day. But he needn’t have worried. We waited for Graysuit to make a drop so we could catch him in the act. When he finally did—on Sunday night, February 18, 2001, in the woods near a bridge at a local park in Vienna, Virginia—we arrested him on the site. Then we waited another day and a half before announcing the arrest, in the hope that we could nab one of his Russian masters picking up the goods. They didn’t, but at least we had cut the cancer out from inside us. Right after we arrested Hanssen, President Bush called me in our operations center and asked that I convey his thanks to the FBI personnel involved. It was the first time since I became director that a president—and Bush had been in office less than thirty days—had ever thanked the FBI for protecting the country.

In announcing the arrest February 20, I also announced that Judge William Webster—not only one of my predecessors but also a former CIA director—had agreed to lead an inquiry into the Bureau’s internal security functions. There’s probably no way to foolproof any organization against a determined traitor, but we have to make it as hard as possible for any such person to get in a position to sell out his country. In that announcement, I also let my own feelings show. Bob Hanssen and I had been in different training classes, but we’d joined the Bureau within a year of each other. What he had done was personal with me.

Since becoming director over seven years ago, I have administered the FBI oath to each graduating class of special agents at the FBI Academy. Each time, I share the pride and sanctity of those words when new agents swear to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic” and to “bear true faith and allegiance to the same.”

Regrettably, I stand here today both saddened and outraged. An FBI agent who raised his right hand and spoke those words over twenty-five years ago has been charged today with violating that oath in the most egregious and reprehensible manner imaginable. The FBI entrusted him with some of the most sensitive secrets of the United States government and instead of being humbled by this honor, Hanssen has allegedly abused and betrayed that trust. The crimes alleged are an affront not only to his fellow FBI employees but to the American people, not to mention the pain and suffering he has brought upon his family. Our hearts go out to them. I take solace and satisfaction, however, that the FBI succeeded in this investigation. As an agency, we lived up to our responsibility, regardless of how painful it might be.

One more thing Bob Hanssen did to my tenure as FBI director: he was mostly responsible for extending it another six or so months longer than I had intended.

I had expected to announce my retirement after the November 2000 election. That would have been seven years plus a few months in office, and that seemed enough to me. The new president would appoint the next director for a ten-year term, and I would stay on briefly for the transition. Besides, the oldest boys were just about to reach college age. Once again, I was pressed by family circumstances to earn something beyond a government wage.

Then, of course, the November election didn’t end, and didn’t end, and didn’t end. We had identified Hanssen by mid-November. By December, when the Supreme Court found itself inserted into the middle of the election process, Hanssen was very much on my mind. No matter where we brought him down or how, his arrest was going to be a large black mark on a Bureau I had devoted a sizable chunk of my adult life to. I couldn’t let my successor bear that burden. I’d have to do it myself. By then, too, a light was at long last beginning to shine at the end of the long Khobar Towers tunnel. I had briefed President Bush on the case and Iran’s involvement. His response was immediate and fearless: “Go make the case.” Appropriately, he followed up on his father’s earlier and critical efforts to get FBI access to Saudi witnesses. The Khobar families and I will always be thankful to him for his leadership. If there was a chance of seeing that resolved on my watch, of seeing the families come to closure, I had to stick around, especially if my presence might help to make the difference. We were also still in the middle of a long, hard-fought campaign to gain the funding so that we could begin to upgrade our technology, and we were making significant improvements in our counterterrorism capabilities.

All those factors weighed in my decision making, but there was a final reason, too, for staying on past the end of the Clinton administration. The president’s and my relationship was toxic by that time. Not only was he actively hostile toward me, he was hostile to the FBI generally. My departure might be one last opportunity for retaliation. Quite frankly, I was worried about whom he might appoint as my successor, even on a temporary basis.