The Dallas Morning News
March 14, 2001, Wednesday Pg. 1A
Freeh style; Director eludes criticism despite FBI's troubles
BY Michelle Mittelstadt
WASHINGTON - FBI counterintelligence expert Robert Hanssen is accused of inflicting grave damage to U.S. intelligence operations over a 15-year career selling secrets to Moscow.
Yet even as the FBI acknowledges it lacked the safeguards to swiftly detect one of the modern era's most damaging espionage cases, the bureau's leadership generally has escaped criticism.
The Hanssen case appears to be the latest in a series of FBI controversies - ranging from perceived bungling of a Chinese espionage investigation to fallout from the 1993 Waco siege - that have not splashed over onto FBI Director Louis Freeh.
Some watchers of the bureau say that is a tribute to Mr. Freeh, a nimble political player who has carefully cultivated relations with Congress during his eight years in the high-pressure job.
"Louis Freeh knows who he works for, which is to say he does not work for the attorney general; he works for the U.S. Congress," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington security policy organization.
The FBI's congressional overseers are questioning how a mole could operate undetected for so long. Yet they've lobbed virtually no public criticism at the bureau's managers, if anything praising the counterintelligence coup that produced the Russian spy agency case file used to arrest Mr. Hanssen.
By Mr. Freeh's own reckoning, appropriate counterintelligence safeguards were lacking.
"We don't say at this stage, certainly, that we have a system that can prevent this type of conduct," Mr. Freeh said when he announced the Feb. 18 arrest of Mr. Hanssen, who is accused of spying for Moscow in exchange for $ 1.4 million in cash and diamonds.
Asked who should be held accountable, he replied: "The buck stops with me."
There's been virtually no talk, however, of personal accountability from the FBI's congressional and administration overseers. Emerging from a recent closed-door hearing on the spy case, Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee expressed dismay over the security breach but reiterated their faith in the FBI's leader.
"I have a lot of confidence in Louis Freeh as a director," the committee's chairman, Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., said. "You've got to remember, the FBI is not perfect."
The Freeh era
The FBI has been anything but perfect under Mr. Freeh's tenure, says Ronald Kessler, author of The FBI: Inside the World's Most Powerful Law Enforcement Agency. In a recent Washington Post opinion column, he suggested the FBI director be fired, saying the bureau has "lurched from one debacle to another" during the Freeh era.
Leaving the Intelligence Committee briefing, Mr. Freeh brushed past reporters, remaining silent when asked about the column.
Mr. Kessler's voice is in the distinct minority.
President Bush has expressed continued confidence in the director, who was appointed by President Clinton in 1993 and has two years remaining on his 10-year term.
Likewise, Mr. Freeh emerged largely unscathed from other controversies that dogged the FBI during his tenure: the Olympic bombing investigation that wrongly fingered security guard Richard Jewell, problems in the FBI crime lab, the Wen Ho Lee espionage inquiry and the belated admission that the FBI lobbed potentially incendiary devices at the Branch Davidians.
Mr. Freeh's reputation and record as an FBI agent, prosecutor and federal judge insulate him from criticism, FBI observers say.
"Freeh is an extremely competent and impressive guy," said University of Georgia political science professor Loch Johnson, a former congressional intelligence aide and author of a recent book on the post-Cold War intelligence community.
"I think the combination of his own personal talents, the confidence that he exudes and even more important the assiduous efforts at cultivating ties with his overseers uptown and downtown explains his success," Dr. Johnson added.
'Works very hard'
That view is shared by George Washington University professor Carl Stern, who served as the Justice Department's chief spokesman under Attorney General Janet Reno.
"He's sort of a blue-collar director, a guy who works very hard, and he has no pretense about him," Mr. Stern said. "And so whether his agency succeeds or fails, somehow it doesn't affect his personal reputation because it is clear that he is working as hard as we can ask of any human being."
Mr. Freeh also earned good will from congressional Republicans when he broke with his boss, Ms. Reno, on the merits of appointing independent counsels to investigate 1996 Democratic campaign fund-raising abuses. Three times, she opposed independent counsel inquiries - and Mr. Freeh's objections were strongly voiced in a memo to her that reached the hands of GOP lawmakers.
Ms. Reno, who had rocky relations with Republicans on Capitol Hill, "took the heat" for some of the FBI's failings, Mr. Stern said.
In the wake of the Hanssen arrest, some intelligence experts are faulting the FBI for resisting using routine lie-detector tests on its employees - something the CIA and National Security Agency adopted decades ago. Mr. Hanssen, who had access to some of the nation's most sensitive intelligence secrets, never was required to take a lie-detector test.
Ashcroft gets involved
Attorney General John Ashcroft announced on March 1 that the FBI would increase its polygraph testing, currently performed almost exclusively on new agents and those seeking higher security clearances. He and Mr. Freeh also initiated a review of the bureau's counterespionage measures. And on Sunday, Mr. Ashcroft announced that the Justice Department's internal watchdog will investigate FBI security procedures.
"There were horrendous security failures," said Kenneth deGraffenreid, a professor of intelligence studies at the Institute of World Politics and former Reagan National Security Council staffer.
Others agree.
The FBI had to know some intelligence losses could not be attributed to Aldrich Ames, the CIA agent who pleaded guilty in 1994 to espionage charges, said Mark Lowenthal, a former House Intelligence Committee staff director. "This isn't good for the FBI's reputation."
Yet he and others say blame cannot be laid at Mr. Freeh's feet alone.
"I don't put much on his doorstep because this is something that unfortunately is inevitable," Dr. Johnson said. "It's too bad that it lasted 15 years and was so damaging, but you are going to have traitors in any organization."
The problem, he and others argue, is that U.S. intelligence has been slow to modernize.
"We've had a sort of static view of security," Mr. deGraffenreid said. "It's been a long time since one of these spies climbed over the electric fences at NSA, ran past the Marine guards and cut through a vault door with a torch, cracked open a safe and got out.
"That isn't how spies do it now," he said. "But we spend most of our money on the guard dogs and the electric fences and the cypher locks - in other words protecting our secrets kind of like Fort Knox, from the outside, when in fact it's the trusted person on the inside."
Copyright 2001 The Dallas Morning News
