Books That Explode Presidential Myths
No executive privilege here: These books memorably explode presidential myths, says Ronald Kessler
Ronald Kessler
Wall Street Journal
January 9, 2010
1. The Twilight of the Presidency
By George E. Reedy
World, 1970
Disillusioned by President Lyndon Johnson's arrogance, George E. Reedy, LBJ's former press secretary, brilliantly analyzes in "The Twilight of the Presidency" how presidents become consumed by the office. "The atmosphere of the White House is a heady one," Reedy warns. "By the 20th century, the presidency had taken on all the regalia of monarchy except robes, a scepter, and a crown." Obsequious aides and members of Congress are afraid to challenge the president directly. When the aides leave the White House and get their nerve back, Reedy says, they often denounce the president. The commander in chief soon comes to mistrust all around him. "No nation of free men should ever permit itself to be governed from a hallowed shrine where the meanest lust for power can be sanctified and the dullest wit greeted with reverential awe."
2. JFK: Reckless Youth
By Nigel Hamilton
Random House, 1992
In "Reckless Youth," Nigel Hamilton peels back myths about President John F. Kennedy, revealing his insatiable sexual appetite, his affair with pro-Nazi beauty Inga Arvad, and the importance of his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, in financing and orchestrating his campaigns. "We're going to sell Jack like snow flakes," the former ambassador said before his son first ran for Congress. Later Joe lamented that "with the money I spent"—$250,000 according to Hamilton—"I could have elected my chauffeur."
3. Truman
By David McCullough
Simon & Schuster, 1992
Just as they did with Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, the sages of the news media made great sport of portraying Harry Truman as a dunce. Reagan and Bush have their own defenders; David McCullough sticks up for Truman. This biography of the 33rd president concludes that Truman was an exceptionally wise leader, one who "stands forth now—especially now in the aftermath of the Cold War—as a figure of utmost importance." Truman's greatness as president is defined by his unshakable focus on national security, but his character—as delineated by McCullough—is most impressive. "Ambitious by nature," McCullough writes, "he was never torn by ambition, never tried to appear as something he was not. He stood for common sense, common decency. He spoke the common tongue. As much as any president since Lincoln, he brought to the highest office the language and values of the common American people. He held to the old guidelines: work hard, do your best, speak the truth, assume no airs, trust in God, have no fear." If today's presidential candidates were judged against that yardstick, we would all be blessed.
4. The Warren Commission Report
1964
Only about one in 10 Americans believes that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating President Kennedy. That is largely due to conspiracy theorists, like movie director Oliver Stone, who have so confused the issue that most Americans say we will never know the truth about the terrible events in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. The widespread doubts amount to another sort of "presidential myth," and it is a tragic one. Over the years, experts have attempted to allay suspicions about JFK's assassination, but there is still no better answer to skeptics than the 888-page report of the Warren Commission. Based on the FBI's meticulous investigation, the report presents compelling evidence that Oswald did indeed act alone. Like the 9/11 Commission, the Warren Commission presented a richly detailed account as spellbinding as the best mystery novels. As the investigation found, Kennedy might have been spared if he had simply heeded warnings about possible violence in Dallas. The president told the Secret Service that he did not want agents standing on the small running boards at the rear of his limousine. If agents had been on the rear running boards, they almost certainly would have jumped on Kennedy after the first shot—which was not fatal—and probably would have saved his life.
5. All the President's Men
By Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
Simon & Schuster, 1974
As with any cataclysmic event, revisionists and conspiracy theorists have played down and even denied President Richard Nixon's complicity in the Watergate cover-up, as well as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's role in helping to reveal what went on. This is an emerging myth that needs rebutting. Woodward and Bernstein's "All the President's Men" does an excellent job of it. I sat next to Bernstein at the Washington Post during Watergate. Almost every evening I heard his arguments with Woodward while they compared sources and hashed out their stories for each day's paper. I witnessed the best in investigative journalism. Their book tells a gripping, honest story of two reporters who helped unravel an epic abuse of power. In doing so, the book provides a cautionary tale about how easily an administration can conceal abuses from the press and the public.
Mr. Kessler is the author of "In the President's Secret Service: Behind the Scenes With Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect" and the chief Washington correspondent of Newsmax.com.
Secret Service Putting the President at Risk
Ronald Kessler
Newsmax.com
August 10, 2009
The nation has not endured a presidential assassination since John F. Kennedy was killed in Dallas in 1963. That is largely because of the dedication of Secret Service agents. But since the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) took over the Secret Service in 2003, the agency has been cutting corners to the point where the lives of President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and other protectees are endangered.
That is the opinion of a number of current Secret Service agents who have told me for my book, "In the President’s Secret Service: Behind the Scenes with Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents," that it is a miracle an assassination has not taken place. But you do not have to be a Secret Service agent to recognize that the agency has been taking foolhardy risks.
After the attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life on March 30, 1981, the U.S. Secret Service learned to use metal-detecting magnetometers to screen those who have access to the president. But in recent years, when pressured by staffs of presidential candidates like Barack Obama or by the White House, agents have shut down magnetometers at major events when stragglers are still arriving and a speech is about to begin.
Only one such incident was publicized. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported that an hour before a rally for then-presidential candidate Obama was to start at Reunion Arena in Dallas on Feb. 20, 2008, the Secret Service stopped magnetometer screening.
As if shutting down magnetometers at an event is about to start is not shocking enough, when Vice President Biden threw the opening pitch at the first Baltimore Orioles game of the season at Camden Yards on April 6, 2009, the Secret Service skipped any magnetometer screening of the more than 40,000 fans. Moreover, even though Biden’s scheduled attendance at the game was announced beforehand, the vice president was not wearing a bullet-proof vest under his navy sport shirt as he stood on the pitcher’s mound.
A gunman or gunmen from anywhere in the stands could have gotten off multiple rounds before we could have gotten in the line of fire," says a current agent who is outraged that the Secret Service would be so reckless.
Before the Baltimore event, senior management on Biden’s detail decided "we don’t need magnetometers," overruling stunned agents on Biden’s detail and the agency’s own Baltimore field office.
Ironically, when I interviewed Nicholas Trotta, who heads the Secret Service’s Office of Protective Operations, for my book — the first book about the Secret Service the agency has cooperated on — he cited the use of magnetometers as a key to protecting presidents.
Now," he said, "Everyone goes through the magnetometer." Indeed, the Secret Service official said, often just seeing a magnetometer in use may deter an assassin. But when I mentioned that the Secret Service shuts down magnetometers under pressure, Trotta contradicted himself and changed his tune.
When we have a crowd of 70,000 people, we may or may not need to put all those people through magnetometers," Trotta said. "Because some of those people in certain areas might not have a line-of-sight threat that can harm the protectee."
What if an assassination occurred because someone was not screened? Trotta looked uncomfortable. Still, he plowed on ahead, saying it may be safe to forgo screening of crowds sitting further away from the president.
Has Trotta never heard of a gunman leaving his seat to zip off a shot or throw a grenade at the president? In fact, it was a decision to stop magnetometer screening that almost led to the assassination of President Bush on May 10, 2005, when a man threw a grenade at him as he spoke at a rally in a public square in Tbilisi, Georgia. Because local security services shut down magnetometer screening, the man was able to take a grenade into the event where Bush was to speak.
Failing to screen everyone who attends an event where the president or vice president is speaking makes as much sense as letting passengers board an airplane without passing them through metal detectors. When told of Trotta’s rationale for stopping magnetometer screening, Secret Service agents cannot believe he said what he did indeed say.
I was in absolute shock regarding his comment about the mags closing down and potential attackers being too far away to cause any problems," says an agent on one of the two major protective details. Imagine, the agent says, if three or four suicide assassins came in, with guns blazing. "I cannot believe the head of our protective operations actually said that," he says. "Yeah, let’s drop those magnetometers. Thank God you have it on record, because he would be one of the first people to be called to testify before a congressional committee if such an incident happened."
Since the book came out, law enforcement sources admitted to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that the Secret Service did not screen crowds at the Orioles game and defended the decision by saying Biden’s presence had not been announced beforehand. But as I pointed out in a CNN interview with Blitzer, a simple Google search turns up dozens of stories that reported the day before the game that Biden would be throwing the first pitch. Nexis lists more than 50 such stories.
Agents trace the corner-cutting to the Secret Service’s absorption into DHS. Being submerged in what many view as a dysfunctional agency and having to compete for funds with a range of other national security agencies led to a lowering of standards. The fact that the Bush White House itself periodically asked the Secret Service to skip magnetometer screening undoubtedly contributed to an indulgent attitude.
Michael Chertoff, when secretary of DHS, contributed to that laxness in a very personal way. Because of objections by his wife, the Secret Service stopped performing checks on workers cleaning the Chertoffs’ home, even though agents knew that many of the workers were illegal immigrants, according to agents. Ironically, in October 2008, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) within DHS fined James D. Reid $22,880 for allegedly employing illegal immigrants when his Maryland cleaning company worked at Chertoff’s home and at other Washington homes.
When asked for comment, William R. Knocke, a DHS spokesman, said, "These are baseless and sensational allegations that I’m not going to dignify with a response."
Retired agents who served before the Secret Service began cutting corners say they have never heard of stopping magnetometer screening. When told of the practice, they assert that the Secret Service would never do such a thing.
The [political] staff sometimes would propose stopping the magnetometers when an event was about to start," says former agent William Albracht, who retired in 2001 and was an instructor at the Secret Service’s training facility in Laurel, Md. "I don’t know of any agent that has ever done that. That’s just not what we do. It doesn’t matter to us how your person looks in the media or to the crowds. It’s not really our concern. Our concern is that person’s safety."
You face pressure from political staffs all the time, but you don’t stop magnetometer screening," says Norm Jarvis, who taught new agents, was on Bill Clinton’s protective detail, and left the Secret Service in 2005 as a special agent in charge. "Sometimes things happen and the flow rate is a little slow. But nobody in the Secret Service would allow the staff to impair security and jeopardize the life of the president by stopping magnetometer screening."
Requests were made by staff to expedite or stop magnetometer screening," says Danny Spriggs, who headed protection and retired as deputy director of the Secret Service in 2004. "I would never have acquiesced to that."
Shutting down magnetometers is just one example of how the Secret Service has been cutting corners. In some cases, its weapons are outmoded and leave agents open to being outgunned by well-armed assassins. Contrary to announced policy, agents on major protective details are not allotted time for physical training or firearms requalification. Instead, agents are asked to cover up the lack of training by filling out their own physical training test forms for themselves. Counterassault teams, which are trained as units of five to six members, have been slashed to two agents, rendering them virtually impotent in the face of an attack.
While Secret Service agents are often heroic, the agency uses subterfuge to make them seem more so. When members of Congress and other VIPs visit the Secret Service training facility in Laurel, Md., the agency presents scenarios where agents respond to a threat. While the demonstration is billed as spontaneous, it is secretly rehearsed.
Asked about this, Ed Donovan, a Secret Service spokesman, did not respond.
When one considers how important preventing an assassination is to our democracy, the amount spent on the Secret Service — $1.4 billion a year, nearly two-thirds of it for protection — seems like a misprint. Indeed, while the agency’s budget increased substantially after 9/11, since then its budget has actually decreased when inflation is taken into account.
That does not include supplemental appropriations to cover incremental costs for coverage of campaign events and so-called national security events such as presidential nominating conventions.
This penny-pinching approach comes at a time when well-funded terrorists have replaced the lone deranged gunman as the greatest threat to American elected officials and when threats against the president are up 400 percent as compared with when Bush was president. Yet rather than ask for substantially more funds from Congress, the Secret Service assures members that the agency is fulfilling its job with the modest increases it requests, even as it takes on more duties, and sleep-deprived agents work almost around the clock.
Neither the DHS inspector general nor Congress has penetrated the agency’s invincible veneer to uncover the shortcomings.
Since an assassination jeopardizes democracy itself, few agencies are as important as the Secret Service. Agents who are concerned that the Secret Service is on the brink of a disaster say that only a director appointed from the outside can make the wholesale changes that are needed in the agency’s management and culture.
Without those changes, an assassination of Barack Obama or a future president is a real possibility. If that happens, a new Warren Commission will be appointed to study the tragedy. It will find that the Secret Service was shockingly derelict in its duty to the American people and to its own elite corps of brave and dedicated agents.
Celebrating the FBI
Ronald Kessler
The Washington Post
July 27, 2008
When it created the FBI 100 years ago today, Congress worried that the new agency would become a secret police force, trampling on civil rights and carrying out the whims of successive presidents. After a century of bumpy history, that concern has not gone away.
Critics paint a portrait of a bureau that has no qualms about probing the reading habits of sinless grandmothers. High-profile bumbling in the Wen Ho Lee and Richard Jewell cases has shed further doubt on the bureau's intentions. And on some occasions, the FBI has been forced to admit overstepping, as when Director Robert Mueller said earlier this year that the bureau had misused "national security letters" to obtain personal records on American citizens.
But the idea that the FBI doesn't mind -- and may even like -- running roughshod over rights is misguided. In fact, the bureau has demonstrated remarkable restraint over most of the course of its history, at the same time that it has established an impressive record of success in investigating and pursuing threats.
Much of the criticism mischaracterizes problems. For example, in uncovering the deficiencies with national security letters, Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine said the FBI did not intentionally violate any rules. He determined that the FBI in most cases had obtained information to which it was, in fact, entitled. Few press reports carried those caveats.
Critics have claimed that the USA Patriot Act allows the FBI to use "sneak and peek" tactics in libraries to find out who is reading "Tom Sawyer" without informing the targets until after a search. But the FBI always had authority, with a judge's approval, to conduct a search without telling the suspect until a later point in the investigation.
If the FBI were trying to stop a terrorist bombing and needed to search the computer of a suspect in order to round up the plotters without tipping them off, would anyone want the FBI to inform the suspect that his computer was about to be searched? If the FBI cannot be trusted to search computers or wiretap within the framework of the law, then why trust agents to make arrests or carry weapons?
To be sure, under Director J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI engaged in illegal wiretapping of domestic targets and spied on political opponents for presidents. But since the Hoover days, no court has found that the FBI has engaged in an abuse -- meaning an illegal act for improper or political purposes.
Under the Clinton administration, the bureau was so cautious that agents were explicitly prohibited from following suspects into mosques. And they had to jump through hoops before they could sign on to online chat rooms to develop leads -- though any 12-year-old could easily enter. FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III has struck the right balance. As he said during the FBI's anniversary celebration, "It is not enough to stop the terrorist -- we must stop him while maintaining his civil liberties."
Mueller has turned the FBI into an agency that emphasizes preventing terrorist incidents, rather than prosecuting them after the fact. Since 9/11, the FBI and CIA have rolled up 5,000 terrorists worldwide. Every few months, the FBI announces new arrests.
Besides fighting terrorism, the FBI developed criminal profiling, which has led to the arrests of thousands of serial rapists and serial killers. It pioneered the use of DNA to pinpoint or to exonerate suspects. It wiped out the Ku Klux Klan and has largely eviscerated the Mafia. It has taken down financial titans who defrauded investors of billions of dollars, and it has uncovered some of the most damaging spies in U.S. history. If your child were kidnapped, you would want the FBI on your side.
The FBI's fight against terrorism and other crime has produced an American success story, fully justifying faith in the bureau. But only if we continue to provide FBI agents with the tools and other powers they need to uncover clues to terrorist plots will we win the war for the country's survival.
Ronald Kessler, a former Washington Post reporter, is chief Washington correspondent of Newsmax.com and author of The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI.
The Real Joe McCarthy
Ronald Kessler
The Wall Street Journal
April 22, 2008
Fifty-four years ago today, Sen. Joseph McCarthy started his televised hearings on alleged Soviet spies and communists in the Army. The spectacle grabbed the country's attention for the next two months. By the end of the McCarthy hearings, the senator’s career was over; before an audience that often numbered 20 million Americans, he came across as bullying and unscrupulous. Yet today, more and more conservative writers are trying to vindicate the late senator. Authors M. Stanton Evans and Ann Coulter, for example, have claimed that McCarthy was more right than wrong because he, along with dozens of other anticommunists, was correct that the government was riddled with spies. The FBI agents who actually chased Soviet spies have a very different perspective.
Robert J. Lamphere, who participated in all the FBI's major spy cases during the McCarthy period, was one. Lamphere also was the FBI liaison to the U.S. Army's Signal Intelligence Service's Venona program, which was intercepting secret Soviet communications. He used leads from the intercepts to work cases involving notorious espionage figures such as Klaus Fuchs, Harry Gold, David Greenglass, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and Kim Philby.
Lamphere, who died in 2002, told me in an interview that agents who worked counterintelligence were appalled that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover initially supported McCarthy. True enough, the Venona intercepts revealed that hundreds more Soviet spies had operated in the government than was believed at the time.
"The problem was that McCarthy lied about his information and figures," Lamphere said. "He made charges against people that weren’t true. McCarthyism harmed the counterintelligence effort against the Soviet threat because of the revulsion it caused."
McCarthy’s crusade began on Feb. 9, 1950, when the Republican senator from Wisconsin gave a speech to the local Republican women's club in Wheeling, West Virginia. "While I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of 205–a list of names that were known to the secretary of State and who, nevertheless, are still working and shaping policy of the State Department," he said.
However, the next day in Salt Lake City he told his audience that the number of communists was 57.
After the first speech, Willard Edwards, the author of articles in the Chicago Tribune on the communist threat, urgently asked Walter Trohan, the paper’s Washington bureau chief, to come speak with him in Edwards’s office.
Edwards, according to Trohan, confided that just before the Wheeling speech McCarthy had asked him about the number of communists in the State Department. Edwards gave McCarthy the figure of 205. Now he realized his mistake. "Edwards said it was more or less a rumor," Trohan told me. "It was just a piece of gossip."
Bogus figures or not, McCarthy soon became a national figure. Back in Washington, he told FBI director Hoover that he had "made up the numbers as he talked." Hoover advised him not to give specific numbers in the future. McCarthy asked if the FBI would give him information to back up his charges. "Review the files and get anything you can for him" was Hoover’s order. Result? "We didn’t have enough evidence to show there was a single Communist in the State Department, let alone 57 cases," said William Sullivan, who became the number three man in the bureau.
The Army-McCarthy hearings followed a pattern, notes Donald A. Ritchie, associate historian of the Senate. Typically, McCarthy held hearings in executive session first, "like a dress rehearsal," says Mr. Ritchie, who studied the transcripts of the hearings. Mostly McCarthy didn’t have any hard evidence against the people he was interrogating; he just hoped to get them to contradict themselves or to take the Fifth Amendment, or to confess.
"He interviewed about 500 people in closed session," Mr. Ritchie told me. "He called about 300 people to public session. After they’d testified in closed session, he’d go out in the hall, and he’d tell the waiting press what had just happened," Mr. Ritchie says. "We looked at both the New York Times’s and the Chicago Tribune's accounts and then we compared that to what actually went on inside the hearings. What he told the press grossly exaggerated what took place."
As his arrogance grew, McCarthy began accusing President Dwight D. Eisenhower of being soft on communists. Hoover realized the dance was over; just before the Army-McCarthy hearings started he ordered the bureau to cease helping the senator.
During the hearings, McCarthy failed to substantiate his claims that communists had penetrated the Army. He did, however, insinuate that Fred Fischer, a young lawyer at Hale and Dorr, the law firm representing the Army, was a communist sympathizer because he'd been a member of the National Lawyers Guild at Harvard Law School. Supreme Court Justice Arthur J. Goldberg had also been a member of the group, which was alleged to be a communist front.
Upon hearing this accusation, Joseph Welch of Hale and Dorr, responded, "Until this moment, senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or recklessness." When McCarthy continued to hound Fischer, Welch said, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"
A Senate committee concluded that McCarthy’s behavior as a committee chairman was "inexcusable," and "vulgar and insulting." On Dec. 2, 1954, the Senate voted 67-22 to censure him; on May 2, 1957, McCarthy, age 48, died of acute hepatitis, widely believed to be a result of his alcoholism.
As a top Justice Department attorney, John L. Martin prosecuted scores of spies during a long career, and read many of the FBI's most secret raw files on historic espionage cases, including the files on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Judith Coplon, Alger Hiss and Rudolph Abel. "While Venona later confirmed and expanded upon what the FBI knew about Soviet operations in the U.S.," Mr. Martin says, McCarthy used "the umbrella of national security to justify his outrageous practice of besmirching reputations of loyal Americans."
Efforts to vindicate McCarthy overlook the fact that he did not help the cause of dealing with the spy threat. Rather, he gave spy hunting a bad name. In sanctioning McCarthy’s intimidating tactics and dishonest charges, revisionists dangerously invite history to be repeated.
Mr. Kessler, a former Wall Street Journal and Washington Post reporter, is chief Washington correspondent of Newsmax.com and the author of "The Terrorist Watch: Inside the Desperate Race to Stop the Next Attack" (Crown Forum, 2007).
Robert Mueller Overcame the Biggest Threat to the FBI
By Ronald Kessler
Newsmax, May 25, 2011
For FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, the biggest threat to the bureau was a movement to do away with the FBI’s counterterrorism effort and replace it with a new terror-fighting agency similar to the British MI5.
Such an agency would have investigative powers but none of the FBI’s law enforcement powers.
Former National Security Agency director William E. Odom, a retired general, first floated the idea back in 2002. In a later Washington Post op-ed headlined "Why the FBI Can’t Be Reformed," Odom wrote that the bureau’s shortcomings in fighting the terrorist threat were systemic.
"No one can turn a law enforcement agency into an effective intelligence agency," he said. "Police work and intelligence work don’t mix. The skills and organizational incentives for each are antithetical. One might just as well expect baseball’s Washington Nationals to win football’s Super Bowl as believe the FBI can become competent at intelligence work."
These and other similar proposals to break up the FBI came from people who had never investigated terrorism cases and seemed to have no idea how the FBI investigates terrorism post-9/11. But that did not stop members of Congress from endorsing the idea, giving them another chance to go on TV and proclaim that they were doing something to stop terrorist attacks.
Mueller dispatched agents to look into how MI5 and counterterrorism agencies in other countries work. He concluded that applying the MI5 model to the bureau made little sense.
As proposed, the change meant creating a new wall that would bifurcate the counterterrorism effort. In Great Britain, when an arrest must be made, MI5 presents the case to a police agency such as the Metropolitan Police based at New Scotland Yard. MI5 then has the task of trying to persuade that agency to pursue it. Thus, rather than tearing down walls that impede cooperation and sharing of information, as happened before 9/11, an American agency patterned after MI5 would create a new barrier.
More important, without law enforcement powers, MI5 cannot use the threat of prosecution to try to elicit cooperation and recruit informants.
Because terrorists often finance their activities by smuggling cigarettes, selling stolen designer clothing, or dealing in drugs, the FBI’s structure makes it easy for the bureau to pass along leads from agents pursuing such criminal cases to agents focused on counterterrorism.
During creation of a new agency, the country would be vulnerable to attack as investigators are recruited and trained and as they try to develop relations with counterparts in foreign countries.
The continuing chaos at the Department of Homeland Security, which combined 22 agencies and departments, is an illustration of what can happen when a new government agency is created.
The FBI’s focus on violations of criminal laws keeps its agents from violating civil liberties. Without that framework, agents might begin to stray into investigating political beliefs or dissent or even gathering personal information for the purpose of subtly blackmailing political leaders, as happened when J. Edgar Hoover was director. In doing so, they would lose their compass, forgetting what their target is and botching investigations because of a lack of proper focus.
Arthur M. "Art" Cummings II, who headed counterterrorism and counterintelligence investigations until last year, considered nutty the idea of handing over such awesome powers to a new agency not trained in law enforcement.
Cummings and other agents who worked with MI5 in Great Britain knew that its lack of law enforcement powers constantly impeded the British officers’ work, although recent changes have improved coordination between MI5 and the police.
"I find it astounding that anyone would take the position that what you want to do is essentially strip away the law enforcement powers and say, ‘Now go fight terrorism,’" Cummings told me for my new book "The Secrets of the FBI."
"To think that you’re going to develop a domestic intelligence service from the ground up and do it in anything short of a decade before they can even walk, let alone crawl, is crazy," he said. "And then to think that they could do that and still have the organization grounded in the Constitution and the civil liberties that go with that, I think is crazy as well."
"The FBI model of combining intelligence and law enforcement responsibility is the envy of allied services, including the British," says John Martin, who, as chief of the U.S. Justice Department’s counterespionage section for 25 years, had extensive dealings with MI5.
"Indeed," he adds, "MI5 is constantly impeded by its inability to quickly translate intelligence operations into arrests and prosecutions. Setting up an MI5 in the United States would create a significant and unnecessary barrier to fighting terrorism and espionage at a time when this country needs to enhance its communications among agencies and to quickly react to terrorist threats."
Instead of adopting the MI5 model, Mueller met with members of Congress privately to explain why such a move would be a disaster. At the same time, he changed the direction of the bureau so that it placed first priority on gathering intelligence to prevent plots rather than obtaining evidence for possible prosecutions.
While the FBI has always looked for leads to stop the next plot and often successfully rolled up plots before they happened, the pressure was always to go on to the next case. The FBI’s primary goal traditionally had been to lock people up.
Cummings told agents that could actually put the country at risk. Instead of bringing a prosecution, the primary goal should be gathering intelligence to penetrate terrorist organizations and develop leads on future plots.
Of course, the FBI has been using intelligence since it pursued tips to close in on John Dillinger at the Biograph Theater in Chicago. It used intelligence to wipe out the Ku Klux Klan and nearly wipe out the Mafia. But using the word intelligence conveys a mindset that emphasizes the importance of holding off on an arrest in order to develop new information.
"Pre-9/11, the first consideration was, I got an indictment in my pocket," Cummings says. "The CIA would have run the other way, rightfully so. They didn’t want anything to do with testifying in a court of law. And we ran on the assumption that if you had an indictment, you used the indictment. Slap it down on the table, pick the guy up, you throw him on an airplane. You bring him home, you put him in jail, and you go, ‘Okay, I’ve done a great job today.’"
If that were to happen today, Cummings says, "I would have told my agents they basically just put Americans more in jeopardy rather than less in jeopardy. It’s a completely different approach and bears little resemblance to the previous one."
The success of Mueller’s effort to turn the FBI into a prevention agency is self-evident: With the exception of the shooting rampage by Army Major Nidal Hasan, there have been no successful terrorist attacks since 9/11.
Every few months, the FBI announces new arrests of terrorists. In many cases, instead of waiting years to nail them with terrorism-related charges, the FBI will charge terrorists with lesser crimes that result in deportations or put them away for years.
At the same time, no abuse — meaning an illegal or politically motivated act — has ever been found during Mueller’s nearly 10 years as FBI director.
By combining the best features of a law enforcement agency and a national security agency, Mueller turned the bureau into a powerful weapon against terrorism and overcame the greatest threat to the FBI.
