Botching The Big Case

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"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.

Last December FBI headquarters, for the fifth time, ordered that all the Oklahoma-bombing documents be permanently archived. As material flowed in from the field offices, the archivist realized some of it had never been put in the main case file and shared with defense lawyers. Not until Tuesday were McVeigh's lawyers notified--and even then FBI officials waited two more days to analyze the documents before telling Freeh; they were ashen as they left his office. He was, says one insider, "absolutely tear-ass." Bush and Ashcroft learned Thursday as well, and immediately after Ashcroft's Friday press conference, officials from the Justice Department Inspector General's office descended on the bureau to investigate what had gone wrong.

FBI officials blamed an antiquated computer-database system: "Our technology is so old and unreliable, we don't know what we know," said one. Yet a former senior Justice official called it "beyond amazing" that the FBI would commit such a blunder in its most high-profile case in years--especially after similar charges of mishandling evidence were leveled during the investigation of Clinton's campaign-finance scandals and led to a sweeping internal probe. "It's a problem the bureau has had for a long time," the official noted. "Agents are great at acquiring information; they're not great at cataloging it or knowing what they have." What was especially troubling was that the mistakes were so widespread. Fully 46 of 56 FBI field offices, from Houston to Honolulu and Atlanta to Anchorage, failed to turn over everything they had on the case--in some instances it appears that the Special Agents in Charge decided on their own that some dutiful reports were unimportant. "The thing that flabbergasts me--and makes me think that more inquiry is required here--is that this was not just one office," says a Justice veteran. "This was the whole damn bureau. I can't figure out how so many people ignored the rules."

No one suggests that the retrieved documents would have changed the outcome of the case. But the confusion still had its costs because the public, even in its angriest moments, wanted this all handled fairly. "It's heartbreaking," says the Justice veteran. "The country needs for this to be over. We tried to put the very best people on this case, the best prosecutors. We really tried hard. The main thing we wanted was an error-free environment."