Enemies: A History of the FBI (74 page)

And the FBI’s relentless focus on fighting terrorism had an unforeseen consequence. The investigation and prosecution of white-collar crime plummeted, a boon to the Wall Street plunderings that helped create the greatest economic crisis in America since the 1930s.

Mueller remained in high repute as the Bush administration came to a close. So did Mudd, who stayed on as the director’s senior intelligence aide. With guidance from the secretary of defense, the former director of central intelligence Robert Gates, they began to develop a global counterterrorism strategy that won favor with both parties in Congress and both candidates running for the White House in the fall of 2008. All three would stay on under the next president. All three would shape his strategies.

“T
HE PURPOSE THAT HAS ALWAYS GUIDED OUR POWER
”

On April 28, 2009, President Barack Obama came to the Hoover Building for a public celebration of the FBI’s hundredth anniversary. A crowd of clerks and secretaries began to assemble in the central courtyard of the
Bureau’s concrete fortress. The FBI’s elite, bearing their gold badges, walked out to the courtyard with Obama. The centennial banner, drooping slightly, hung at the back wall.

“
Back in 1908, there were just thirty-four special agents reporting to Theodore Roosevelt’s attorney general. Today, there are over 30,000 men and women who work for the FBI,” the president began. “So much has changed in the last one hundred years,” he said, turning on the charm. “Thank God for change.” The crowd went wild.

“I also know that some things have remained constant,” he said, his voice leveling. “The rule of law—that is the foundation on which America was built. That is the purpose that has always guided our power. And that is why we must always reject as false the choice between our security and our ideals.”

Obama had come of age as a champion of civil liberties and constitutional law. In the Oval Office, he took a harder line than he had proclaimed in public. His choices on counterterrorism sometimes shocked his supporters. He decided to hunt and kill al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The United States carried the fight to thousands who adhered to the credo of jihad. Guided by the imperative of preventing the next attack, he went beyond what his predecessors had done to solve the conundrums of counterterrorism. He was the first president since the end of the Cold War to coordinate America’s military and intelligence powers into lethal forces under clear-cut rules.

Under Obama, the CIA and the Pentagon obliterated hundreds of terrorist suspects, and sometimes civilians as well, with a ceaseless barrage of rockets fired by drones over Afghanistan and Pakistan. While American commandos killed Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders, the State Department used muscular diplomacy to win cooperation from many of the nations of Islam, aided by the uprisings of the Arab Spring, led by rebellions against dictators in the name of democracy. To maintain law and order in the war on terror, Obama gave the FBI control over the toughest al-Qaeda captives, the high-value detainees. He entrusted Robert Mueller and his agents with the task of arresting and interrogating terrorists without mangling American laws and liberties.

The FBI was now a part of a growing global network of interwoven national security systems, patched into a web of secret information shared among police and spies throughout America and the world. The Bureau trapped more suspects with more stings, and more sophisticated ones. It
sometimes worked at the edge of the law, and arguably beyond, in the surveillance of thousands of Americans who opposed the government with words and thoughts, not deeds or plots. But it also used superior intelligence work to arrest Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan immigrant allied with al-Qaeda, and to bring him to a federal court in New York, where he pleaded guilty to plotting to plant a bomb in a subway as the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approached. In October 2011, another al-Qaeda-inspired terrorist, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, pleaded guilty to trying to destroy a Delta airliner with 278 passengers over Detroit on the previous Christmas Day. He had explosives planted in his underwear.

The federal judge asked him if he knew he had broken the law. “Yes, U.S. law,” he said. The cases were proof that terrorist suspects could be tried and convicted in American courts under law, without military tribunals or confessions extracted by torture in secret prisons.

On the home front, Americans had become inured to the gaze of closed-circuit cameras, the gloved hands of airport guards, and the phalanx of cops and guardsmen in combat gear. Many willingly surrendered liberties for a promise of security. They might not love Big Brother, but they knew he was part of the family now.

Yet there was still a sign that the rule of constitutional law might govern counterterrorism in the years to come. A new set of guidelines for the FBI’s intelligence investigations emerged on November 7, 2011. It followed from a decade of struggle over how to use the immense powers thrust upon the Bureau in the war on terror, and three years of trying to repair the damage done in the name of national security under the Bush administration.

The FBI’s new rules set specific legal limits on intelligence searches and seizures, wiretaps and bugs, data mining and electronic eavesdropping, the trapping and tracing of e-mails and cell phones. The 460-page manual, made public with significant deletions, looked like something new in the twenty-first century. It looked as if the American government was trying, in good faith, to balance liberty and security.

The FBI, which still has no legal charter from Congress, had been fighting for a century over what it could do in the name of national security. Attorney General Edward Levi had been the first to try to govern the Bureau thirty-five years earlier, in the wake of Watergate. He had acted in the tradition of Justice Harlan Fiske Stone, the pillar of the law who first appointed J. Edgar Hoover, and who had warned that a secret police was a menace to a free society.

The FBI might now have created the first realistic operating manual for running a secret intelligence service in an open democracy. The new rules said at the outset that “
rigorous obedience to constitutional principles and guarantees is more important than the outcome of any single interview, search for evidence, or investigation.” They made it clear that the FBI could not investigate people for “opposing war or foreign policy, protesting government actions, or promoting certain religious beliefs,” or because they were aliens or anarchists or Arab Americans. The unleashing of the unlimited powers of the FBI’s ability to conduct unwarranted searches and seizures and surveillances now required a declaration of war by Congress rather than a secret presidential decree. These principles once might have seemed self-evident, but the FBI had violated them time and again in the past.

The continuity of Robert Mueller contributed to this change. No other FBI director ever had the stability to serve the ten-year term that Congress had imposed on the office after Hoover’s death. Some had left in disgrace or disrepute. Mueller had persevered. He passed the milestone a decade after the 9/11 attacks. Obama asked him to stay on for two more years. He would serve until September 2013, if he could withstand the pressure of each passing day. He would be approaching seventy by then, and he had aged in office, his hair white, his face gray, his eyes weary, as every morning brought a barrage of fresh threats and false alarms. But ever since he had confronted a president over the limits of his powers to spy on American citizens, he had stood for a principle. He had said back then that he wanted no historian to write: “
You won the war on terrorism, but you sacrificed your civil liberties.”

The chance remained that the principle might prevail, the possibility that in a time of continual danger Americans could be both safe and free.

F
OR
R
OBERT
D. L
OOMIS, WHO TAUGHT ME TO WRITE;
FOR
P
ROFESSOR
D
ORA
B. W
EINER, WHO TAUGHT ME TO READ;
FOR
K
ATE
, R
UBY, AND
E
MMA
D
OYLE, WHO TEACH ME TO LIVE

A
FTERWORD

This work owes its life to Robert D. Loomis, who has been making books at Random House for fifty-five years, a career as long as J. Edgar Hoover’s. He knew Hoover and they shared a Jack Daniel’s or two back in the day. Working side by side with Bob, my manuscript on his desk and his pencil in his hand, has been one of the great pleasures of my life, an experience only the luckiest authors have had.

At Random House, a remarkable team turned our manuscript into a book. My deepest thanks to Gina Centrello, Tom Perry, Susan Kamil, Benjamin Dreyer, Theresa Zoro, Ben Steinberg, Andy Ward, Amelia Zalcman, Avideh Bashirrad, Erika Greber, Susanna Sturgis, Lisa Feuer, Richard Elman, Steve Messina, Carole Lowenstein, Susan Turner, Beck Stvan, Barbara Fillon, and Lisa Barnes. I owe enormous gratitude to the world’s best literary agent, Kathy Robbins, and her staff, including David Halpern, Louise Quayle, and Mike Gillespie. My thanks also go to counselor F. Richard Pappas, Esq., and to Matthew Snyder at CAA.

Enemies
has been blessed by great fortune in the timing of the release of documents kept secret since World War II. In recent months, the FBI has declassified thousands of records that provided depth and scope for this book. The Bureau’s official historian, John H. Fox, Jr., and his staff have performed a public service by publishing these documents online, a labor for which they deserve acclaim.

Many of the oral histories in this book have been compiled and copyrighted by the Society of Former Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and are cited here with the written and oral permission of the society. The intelligence files of J. Edgar Hoover were provided to me after a twenty-six-year effort initiated under the Freedom of Information Act and brought to fruition by David Sobel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I thank him and the FBI personnel who worked to complete the declassification.

The FBI has a squad of public relations officers whose skill and experience
is exceeded only by the Pentagon’s. I have chosen not to work directly with them to preserve the integrity of the book and to spare readers the wooden prose of press releases. The FBI nonetheless provides a significant amount of public information online within the limits of a bureaucracy bound by secrecy.

I have worked with secret documents and investigated secret agencies for twenty-five years. I know that no outsiders—and few insiders—comprehend the full scope of the secret operations of the government. This book is incomplete. It nonetheless represents an effort to write a chapter of the history of the United States over the past century. Readers may argue, but I believe the records cited in this book speak for themselves. They are the annals of Americans’ fight to be safe and to be free.

We will forgo our freedom in the future if we fail to read our history. “A popular Government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy or perhaps both,” James Madison wrote at the beginning of our nation’s continuing struggle to create a free republic. “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives.”

N
OTES

PRIMARY SOURCES

• Federal Bureau of Investigation records declassified under the Freedom of Information Act (FBI/FOIA)

• Federal Bureau of Investigation oral histories complied by the Society of Former Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI/FBIOH)

• Federal Bureau of Investigation records and correspondence in the Foreign Relations of the United States volumes
Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment: 1945–1950
and
The Intelligence Community: 1950–1955
(FRUS Intelligence)