Botching The Big Case

Sunday, May. 13, 2001 By NANCY GIBBS

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As for the mysterious missing McVeigh documents, this was the FBI's biggest case ever--an $82 million effort that at one time occupied half the agents in the entire bureau--and the bureau still couldn't get it right. It is easy to blame FBI officials for all this, but there are reasons that stretch well beyond their control. For years they have been chasing a moving target. First the mission was to catch bank robbers, kidnappers and Russian spies; then came the war on drugs, then on racketeers, then on Islamic terrorists. Then came campaign contributions from Chinese nationals, and meanwhile those Russian spies were back. The bureau lurched and lunged from task to task but had trouble keeping up, while open borders, open markets and open computer networks made the job ever harder.

So has our deep ambivalence, our awkward love for both order and liberty. We don't want people stockpiling weapons and holding children hostage in Texas religious sects, but we don't want tanks firing on church camps in Waco either. We want something done about hate groups, but we don't want FBI sharpshooters killing militants' wives on Idaho mountaintops. We don't want China stealing our nuclear secrets, but we don't want a racial-profiling witch hunt. We don't want organized crime to hide its computer files online, but we don't like the idea that the FBI has developed a way to read our e-mail. Much more than in Congress or the White House, the FBI--like the Justice Department of which it is part--is a place where our values are daily in collision.

And that leads to a third problem: the time-honored, nonsensical way we choose FBI directors. No self-respecting mayor would pick a police chief who had never been a cop. It would be counterintuitive for any large enterprise, but it is dangerous in an organization in which people wear guns to work and have the power to put other people in jail. But the habit, shared by Presidents and cheered by the press, is to select an FBI director who knows virtually nothing about managing a 28,000-strong institution like the FBI--that secretive, hidebound clerisy. The last three FBI directors have been federal judges, wisemen trained to balance law enforcement with civil liberties. Judges are good at that, but they also spend most of their days in the presence of a clerk or two, and have never run a complex bureaucracy with enormous power to trample individual liberties.

Keeping scattered agents in line is all the harder when each field office is its own fiefdom. Individual agents have tremendous autonomy; they depend so much on their secret informants that they resist sharing information up and down the food chain. That need-to-know mentality has suffused the whole bureau; agents investigating Wen Ho Lee didn't even know that he and his wife had been paid FBI informants a few years earlier. During Louis Freeh's eight-year tenure (he is stepping down next month), the bureau was often at war with the Clinton Justice Department, largely over Janet Reno's hands-off approach to the serial Clinton scandals. Congressional Republicans cheered Freeh on--and gave him little oversight. There was plenty of fresh young talent entering the ranks, but mid- and senior management was a huge problem, as veteran agents left for better-paying jobs or were driven out by the politics of the place. "This is not a guy who breeds healthy skepticism and dissent," says a Clinton White House official of Freeh. "He got rid of a lot of people. He surrounded himself with yes men, and he believes in his own righteousness. And therefore people don't stop to think and say, 'Hey Louie? Are we doing this right?' This is a pretty monumental screw-up, and it feels like no one was in charge."

"How did it happen?" aides said Bush asked Friday morning. "Why are we finding out now?" Which were trenchant questions, given the fact that this was the biggest investigation the FBI had ever pursued and that McVeigh was just six days away from execution. The discovery rules had been set at the start of the case: Turn over to McVeigh's defense everything you find, which ultimately amounted to 43,500 leads, 28,000 interviews, 7,000 lbs. of evidence and 15,661 leads on the phantom accomplice known as John Doe No. 2. It was an extraordinary deal between prosecutors and the defense, this total disclosure of even marginal material; but it was designed to instill the greatest possible public confidence in the outcome of a trial of homegrown terror--an act staged in supposed retaliation for questionable acts by federal officials, like Waco and the Ruby Ridge shootings.