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| FREEH RETIRES | |
 June 22, 2001  |
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Louis Freeh steps down as director of the FBI, leaving behind a record of accomplishments and mistakes.
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Clinton Van Zandt, let's start with you. If we look at the ledger with the undeniable successes and the problems, what should we make of the Freeh era at the FBI? |
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| Managing 180,000 cases | ||||||||||||||||||||
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CLINTON VAN ZANDT: Well I think Louis Freeh really came in and tried to do the job. He was what agents wanted to see. He came in, he had been a street agent; he had worked his way up through the ranks. He had been a prosecutor. He had been a judge. He was a shining star. He brought everything that we needed but one thing, and that was someone who had run a corporation with 27,000 people. We need that in the FBI then; we need it today. RAY SUAREZ: So given his experience and his strength in the investigative work, can we at least lay the successes of the Bureau at his door while he has publicly taken responsibility for some of the snafus?
RAY SUAREZ: Michael Bromwich, how do you see that same thing? MICHAEL BROMWICH: I think it's a mixed legacy. I think he did some very good thing. I think he expanded the FBI's presence abroad. I think he focused the Bureau on international organized crime, on fighting terrorism and so forth. But I think that the head of an organization has to take responsibility for the failures that occur on his or her watch. You've gone through the litany of what those failures are. And I think Director Freeh, to his credit, didn't run away from those failures, but he presided over them. It's fair to call him to account for those. RAY SUAREZ: Those failures that he took responsibility for, often, Kris Kolesnik, rebounded to the benefit of the FBI and to the director himself?
RAY SUAREZ: Well, some of his supporters on Capitol Hill and in Washington have gone down that same litany and says, well, the director wasn't responsible for this and this and this and this. This was subordinates making mistakes; this was people way down the food chain making errors. What does land at his doorstep finally? KRIS KOLESNIK: Well, the cause of the problems are essentially the culture. That's the culture coming out. Usually it's not high-profile cases, because that's where you make a name for yourself if you prosecute a case successfully. And when you have a high-profile case, there's a lot of pressure sometimes to cut corners. And it's usually the people down further in the chain of command, not him. But he would always take responsibility. Ultimately he's the leader. He's the manager. And it does fall at his feet. |
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| Politics and diplomacy | ||||||||||||||||||||
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RAY SUAREZ: Elsa Walsh, you spent a lot of time with Louis Freeh. ELSA WALSH: I did. RAY SUAREZ: And the time that included going overseas and seeing the expanded work of the bureau. Tell us about what we should know about the man.
RAY SUAREZ: Do you also see his - the strength of his personal diplomacy in getting the Saudis to come around and cooperate? ELSA WALSH: Freeh said to me once - he said -- you can do fabulous investigative work but unless you have good personal relationships you're never going to get a case done. I think that when he came into the FBI, he saw that the relationship with the CIA and the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Agency, were completely dysfunctional and he made a big effort to try to improve those relation... that relationship to the point that when George Tenet, who is the CIA director, became the CIA director, he asked Director Freeh to swear him in because they both wanted to make a statement that we were now two agencies that were working together. In the Khobar Tower case, Louis Freeh felt that the Clinton administration was dragging its feet on it... on this case. Sandy Berger, who was the National Security Advisor at that time, said that was not the case. Regardless of what that interpretation was, Louis Freeh really worked on the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Vandar, and also established relationships with people in Saudi. He went there over and over again. It was oftentimes in the FBI they joked that Louis Freeh is the only sort of presidentially appointed street agent. In the Khobar case he did that and he did that with the crown prince. It got to the point where Freeh thought that the Clinton administration was dragging its feet so much that he went to the senior President Bush, George Bush's father, and said, "help me out because the Saudis say that they believe the Clinton administration is no longer interested in this case." So Freeh did something that - you know -- some people might consider quite insubordinate. And he asked Bush to make an appeal. And it worked. RAY SUAREZ: There's some disagreement over his status, his skill as a political player. Some people, in their appreciation of him over the last couple of weeks since he announced his retirement have said, no, he was total apolitical. And some people have had somewhat less of a generous assessment. Michael Bromwich, where do you come down?
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| Expanding the FBI | ||||||||||||||||||||
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RAY SUAREZ: Clinton Van Zandt, a lot of talk about the Freeh resignation is focused on how he grew the Bureau, especially overseas. CLINTON VAN ZANDT: Absolutely. RAY SUAREZ: And also how he came into a place that already was quite troubled after the Sessions' years. CLINTON VAN ZANDT: Sure. RAY SUAREZ: How do those two things mesh? Did the Bureau need to grow in the ways it did and did he address some of those problems he found when he got there?
I think Louis Freeh was very good at that. I think he was a visionary in that he saw that was the direction that international crime was going to be driven in, and he put the FBI in position to start moving. Unfortunately, our computer system and other things haven't kept up with us. But I think Louis Freeh's legacy is going to be he saw where the FBI needed to go. He tried to position us. I think now the Bureau needs to get away from bank robberies and they need to get on with what are the crimes of the 21st century going to be. We need to arm the FBI -- not with guns necessarily -- but with the training and with the equipment that's going to help them address cyber crimes in the future. ELSA WALSH: May I ask -- RAY SUAREZ: Kris -- EDWARD WARNER: I'm sorry. RAY SUAREZ: To your thoughts on that same question. The overseas expansion and the changing the culture question that's often asked about the FBI.
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| A changing federal agency | ||||||||||||||||||||
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RAY SUAREZ: In your view, was that in conflict with the domestic brief and the mission of the FBI? KRIS KOLESNIK: Well, I believe what happened was he wasn't spending enough time here having control over some of these cultural problems we're talking about. And I think that's where the basic failure of his tenure has been. RAY SUAREZ: Elsa Walsh?
I think if you remember students of the FBI will remember that Hoover thought that the mob wasn't a big deal. So therefore ignored it. Freeh was a young agent at that time and saw that. So, what he really focused his attention on was trying to sort of change the FBI'S role in terrorist investigations. I think he did that. You saw with the East African bombings and with Khobar. These were crimes that essentially in another era really probably would have gone unpunished and uninvestigated. They're too hard, they're too tough and the jurisdictional issues are just impossible. But he has essentially made real a policy, which says that if an American is murdered abroad, the FBI is going to go after you. And that didn't happen before. RAY SUAREZ: What does he hand on to the next director? MICHAEL BROMWICH: I think he hands on an agency, a large agency, 27,000 people that has a record of great accomplishment in law enforcement but now is a very troubled agency. The FBI personnel are very much affected by the bad publicity that the bureau gets. I think that morale of the FBI right now is probably at a very low ebb. So I think what needs to happen is a new director needs to be nominated. He needs to be somebody who is non-partisan and who is welcomed as a professional, who has law enforcement experience, who is a good manager, as Mr. Van Zandt suggested. Then the Bureau can get on with its business of restoring its reputation and doing some of the very fine work that it does. RAY SUAREZ: Guests, thank you all. |
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RAY
SUAREZ: With me now to discuss Louis Freeh and the highs and lows of
his career as FBI Director are Kris Kolesnik, former investigator for
the Judiciary Committee; he is now executive director of the National
Whistleblowers Center. Michael Bromwich, former inspector general for
the Justice Department, now in private law practice. Elsa Walsh, staff
writer for the New Yorker. She recently wrote a piece on Director
Freeh for the magazine. And Clinton Van Zandt, a 25-year veteran of
the FBI; he is now a private consultant. 
CLINTON
VAN ZANDT: Well, you know, the FBI has made some mistakes. But, Ray,
as you know, they work 180,000 cases a year. They don't bungle 187,000
cases a year. They do a very good job. Director Freeh, if there is anything
I think that Louis Freeh did wrong as director, number one, he trusted
people implicitly and sometimes they let him down. And I think his investigative
experience let him get too close to individual cases where perhaps a
manager or something of that big of an organization needs to be able
to back up a little bit, have other people come in. I don't think anyone
could have tried any harder. The times I sat down with Louis Freeh one
on one it was just amazing. The man was interested. He cared. He wanted
to find out what was best for the American people. And he was politics
be darned, we're going to do the job the best way he can. I think that's
what he tried to convey to the agents who worked for him. 
KRIS
KOLESNIK: Well, if there's one thing he was definitely good at, it was
translating some of these failures into more money, more agents, more
authority. And the way he would do that is he would take the full responsibility.
And that was very impressive to members up in the Senate because they
don't usually hear that from the head of an agency. And so what he would
do is he would go up and he would say, it's my fault. And they would
say, okay, how much more money do you need to fix the problem? How many
more agents do you need and so on? And they thought they were holding
him accountable but he was basically playing them like a fiddle. 
ELSA
WALSH: Well, I spent about a year traveling around with him and talking
to him. I think that, you know, there were a lot of problems on Louis
Freeh's watch, but they weren't mistakes of bad faith or of malice.
And he was a person, as Kris said, who was determined to fix things
when a problem arose. I think that yesterday when you saw the indictments
in the Khobar Towers case, which is what I wrote about, that was probably
the most important case to Louis Freeh. As George Tenet, who was the
CIA director, said, you can see all of Louis Freeh's values on his sleeve
in the Khobar case, the tenacity, the determination, the empathy for
the families, the sort of unwillingness to give up. And I think that
when you spend time with Freeh, he has a very disarming presence. He
comes across as quite humble, and most people of his stature in Washington
suck a lot of air out of the room, but he isn't that way at all, but
you really can seriously under estimate the steeliness that's underneath
that demeanor, because Freeh is a gentle bulldog.
MICHAEL
BROMWICH: I think he was extraordinarily skilled politically. I think
that the best evidence of that is the budgetary success he had on Capitol
Hill over the years. He swelled the Bureau's budgets by billions of
dollars. I think it's 65 percent since he came in in 1993. So I think
he was very politically adept in that way. I do worry though about a
director who starts to take a larger role than perhaps is appropriate.
I think what Elsa has talked about suggests that Director Freeh and
the Khobar Towers case thought that he was authorized or that it was
appropriate for him to be setting United States foreign policy and balancing
law enforcement interests versus other foreign policy concerns. That's
the president's job. The president is elected to balance those values.
I would be worried about Director Freeh or any other FBI Director making
those kinds of decisions. 
CLINTON
VAN ZANDT: Well, let's talk about the overseas issue. During his tenure,
the FBI increased its legal attaches, FBI agents overseas. We've doubled
the number. You have to realize today that 40 percent of the investigations
that the FBI conducts has some type of international aspect to it. Now
the State Department fought the FBI kicking and screaming for FBI agents
to go overseas. They considered that their exclusive turf. But it was
the FBI agents who would have to go over and investigate. Just like
we're saying now, you have to have those personal contacts. You have
to go out and have dinner with people before they're going to trust
you, especially when you're dealing in an international arena. 
KRIS
KOLESNIK: Well, I think they're two different issues. I agree with Clint
that he had to, if he was going to open up these offices overseas, he
was going to have to spend a lot of time socializing, hobnobbing. In
fact, he spent a lot of time on Embassy Row here in Washington doing
the cocktail circuit. He would talk to the ambassadors about the need
for opening up an FBI office in their country and he would talk about
the benefits of it for both countries and he would go overseas and he
would dine with heads of state and do the same sort of thing.
ELSA
WALSH: I think that one of the sort of the primary legacies that he
will leave and something that a lot of people don't realize is that,
in fact, the FBI now is as essential to national security as the Pentagon
is, as somebody of the National Security Council said to me, because
with the Cold War having diminished what are the big threats to the
United States? There is terrorism and there is cyber crime. And these
are crimes that have no borders. I think what Freeh saw that that was
going to be the future. In fact when he first came into the FBI he said
to a number of people who were right around him, he said that I don't
want to have happen with terrorism what happened to the FBI with the
mob. 
