Botching The Big Case

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That, of course, was McVeigh's goal all along, the one he and his fellows in arms were never going to achieve on the battlefields that stretched from Ruby Ridge to Waco to Oklahoma City: the crusade to turn citizens against a tyrannous government. Through mistakes, misjudgment and misconduct, the feds have, over time, done damage to themselves worse than any McVeigh could have inflicted in his poisonous revolutionary dreams. "This clearly nudges [the FBI] off its pedestal," says Oklahoma Governor Frank Keating.

The McVeigh fiasco comes just as the FBI is having to defend itself against charges that it is capable of brutal indifference to individual rights if it feels justified by some larger goal. It's hard even to say which was the worst of the recent crop of federal offenses, though the McVeigh blunder probably doesn't make the top five. Two weeks ago, officials from the Boston FBI field office were hauled before the House Committee on Government Reform to explain why they had allowed Joseph Salvati to spend 30 years in prison for a murder they knew he didn't commit, just to protect one of their informants. "The Federal Government determined that Joe Salvati's life was expendable," said his lawyer Victor Garo. Asked if he felt any remorse for what they had done to Salvati and his family, retired Boston agent H. Paul Rico said: "What do you want, tears?"

That same week, prosecutors in Alabama finally convicted the Klansman who bombed the black church in Birmingham back in 1963, killing four little girls. We could have done this years ago, they said, if the FBI had just handed over their secret tapes that proved his guilt. That conviction came after months of criticism that the FBI had dismissed warnings of a mole in its ranks right up until they tripped over Russian spy Robert Hanssen, an agent for 25 years. Last month the bureau announced a mediation agreement with African-American agents in a long-running class action charging bias in promotions. Last year there was the relentless pursuit of Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamos scientist who spent nine months in jail after an immense FBI mole hunt, only to be released by a judge who said his imprisonment had "embarrassed our entire nation and each of us who is a citizen of it." To say nothing of Richard Jewell.

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.