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FBI AGENTS WANT NEW BOSS TO RAISE MORALE

By James Gordon Meek

WASHINGTON - When Robert S. Mueller III is sworn in as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation this month, he'll face the task of pulling the FBI out of a political tailspin that has vaporized public confidence in the agency. Lately, FBI agents have taken a series of public whippings over embarrassing foul-ups splayed in the news media. And those in the ranks are starting to bruise.

"Everybody likes to repeat the same mantra: Waco, Ruby Ridge, Hanssen, Wen Ho Lee," Los Angeles-based FBI Agent Scott Garriola said, referring to a slew of controversial cases that have shadowed the bureau in recent years. "Agents are a little disheartened by all the negative publicity out there when you don't see a lot of positive," Garriola, president of the Los Angeles chapter of the FBI Agents Association, said.

FBI watchdogs, such as Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy of Vermont, said the torrent of revelations this summer over alleged wrongdoing by the bureau is not just hurting the application of justice; spirits at the FBI are getting drowned to Titanic depth as a result.

That's a serious problem, according to intelligence analyst John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org in Virginia. "Morale is, unavoidably, closely connected to effectiveness," Pike said.

FBI agents are under intense media scrutiny right now, and the result is a dulling of their investigative prowess, said Ronald Kessler, author of "The FBI: Inside the World's Most Powerful Law Enforcement Agency." "There's been a lack of commitment because of the poor morale," Kessler said. "[Agents] feel they're beaten on the head no matter what they do so they act like human beings and start retreating."

The multiple reviews of FBI conduct and practices by the Department of Justice and the inspector general, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and by former FBI and CIA Director William H. Webster, whose assessment the bureau invited, have not helped improve their esprit de corps.

Nor have agents been pleased about incessant whisperings that all 13,000 agents eventually will be subject to expanded polygraph examinations. In his quarter-century as an FBI agent, Robert Philip Hanssen never was given a lie-detector test. He was a Russian mole inside the bureau's national security division.

While the various outside reviews eventually will offer recommendations on how to catch the next spy within, recently departed FBI Director Louis J. Freeh told his 27,000 employees in a March memo, "Improving the internal security of the FBI is too important to wait." He ordered immediate polygraph exams for a small group of Senior Executive Service staff and for those who are working in national security jobs and hadn't been wired to the sweat machines in the past five years. Freeh's memo was not just intended to quell public criticism of the bureau over allegations that Hanssen carried out spy chores unfettered during his FBI career. The director also wanted to calm restlessness in the ranks and reassure his agents that they are trusted.

Trust is no small matter of honor, former Deputy Director Robert M. "Bear" Bryant said. "There are people who I've been through life and death situations with, who I would trust with anything," Bryant said of his FBI years.

For 93 years, the FBI motto, "Fidelity, bravery, integrity," was sacrosanct - until Hanssen. Before his arrest Feb. 18, only two agents had been accused of espionage in the bureau's history. After Hanssen was arrested, the agents' representatives urged Freeh and Attorney General John D. Ashcroft to apply any new mole-hunting measures conservatively. The two responded that initially only 500 were to be polygraphed. Of that group, 25 since have failed polygraph exams or their tests were deemed "inconclusive." Does that mean 25 spies? Unlikely, said experts, who estimated that the margin of error ("false positives") on polygraph-test results can be 2 percent to 5 percent, or even higher.

But it heightens fears that, if random polygraphs eventually are administered to the entire corps of agents, scores of innocents could be sidelined into what they refer to as "the rubber-gun squad." After CIA turncoat Aldrich Ames was caught selling secrets to the Russians in 1994, new security measures at that agency included polygraph tests that froze the careers of 300 employees whose exams were inconclusive. Some tests later were found to have produced false positives. A handful of people at the CIA are on administrative leave today because of "difficulty with the process," U.S. intelligence officials said.

Several former top FBI officials recently interviewed, including Bryant, said all agents should be subject to random lie-detector tests, regardless of the morale issues. Bryant said the polygraph is a tool the FBI must use judiciously and administer randomly. Given the typically high percentage of inconclusive tests and false positives, he said, Freeh was smart to order automatic reinvestigations for any employees whose polygraph results showed anomalies. But if agencywide lie-detector tests are implemented at the FBI, it will "devastate" morale, Richard J. Gallo, president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, said.

John Collingwood, assistant director in charge of the FBI's office of public and congressional affairs, said officials are sensitive to the concerns over polygraphy. The questions being asked relate strictly to counterintelligence and espionage, Collingwood said. The agents' hand-wringing extends to other possible checks, such as financial audits more intrusive than those used in the mandatory five-year reinvestigations of agents, which Hanssen passed. The specter of having their personal income and spending dissected by close colleagues makes some agents uneasy.

Increased internal security could be a threat to the soul of the FBI, experts like Pike, who warns of an exodus of agents, said. "You may lose some people, but the professionals in the staff at the FBI will take these issues and they'll deal with them. It just takes some insightful leadership," Bryant said.

The brash self-confidence of FBI agents has been well-nurtured over the bureau's 93 years. J. Edgar Hoover, director for 48 of them, established the FBI's independence within the Justice Department and stoked the public image of the smart but tough "G-man," nattily dressed in fedora, wool suit and Tommy gun.

The time following Hoover's death in 1972, however, was tumultuous. In the 1970s, Congress began investigating the U.S. intelligence community's domestic spying; revelations that agents voyeuristically snooped around the private lives of public figures like Martin Luther King Jr. harmed the bureau's reputation, former official FBI historian Susan Rosenfeld said. "That was the worst period of time for morale," Rosenfeld said.

The FBI bounced back in the early 1980s as a new generation of agents successfully busted up political corruption and the mob. Two young agents then were Freeh and Acting Director Thomas J. Pickard, whom Mueller will replace in September. Today, roughly half of the active FBI agents have less than five years' experience at the bureau.

But many veterans said rookies are the solution to the bureau's institutional troubles. Unlike some of their older colleagues, new agents are polygraphed when they join the bureau. They are more technology-savvy and commonly are referred to by the older agents as smarter and better-qualified for the job than the previous generation. The morale of young agents was boosted by Freeh, a former street agent who quit the FBI after six years to chase mobsters as a federal prosecutor in New York.

Critics also pointed to the belated discovery of thousands of Oklahoma City bombing documents the FBI didn't turn over to convicted terrorist Timothy McVeigh's defense attorneys until a few days before his scheduled execution date.

Ephraim Margolin, a past president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers working in San Francisco, said the FBI is notorious for withholding documents during discovery. "In cases that get appealed and reversed, the due-process argument that information was not made available is a common one," Margolin said. "There must be some fire behind all that smoke."

The McVeigh documents gaffe occurred as FBI officials were in the middle of archiving millions of documents in a new computer system and was purely an unintentional error, Nancy L. Savage, national president of the agents association, said. Savage said, "It's upsetting to agents that they're portraying us in the media as some out-of-control agency." Savage said agents are hopeful that Mueller will provide powerful leadership at a time when the bureau needs it most. Instead of fighting the president and attorney general, as Freeh did on many occasions, the new director can focus on internal issues that need to be addressed, she said. "Mueller has the mandate of the Department of Justice and the White House," Savage said. "Those are major issues he doesn't have to face."

But Mueller has money troubles to grapple with. Though Freeh boosted the rolls at the bureau and raised the operating budget from $2.1 billion in 1993 to $3.2 billion this year, a recent budget shortfall compelled officials to direct commanders in the 56 FBI field offices to cut costs. Another March memo from FBI headquarters directed offices to cut back on some field and outside police training and declared a hiring freeze for a number of support positions.

Regardless of Mueller's management skills, the days of total trust between agents may be ending, thanks to traitor Hanssen. John J. Sennett, a senior agent and association officer in Albany, N.Y., said that many of his colleagues are "lamenting the passing of the days when they could take certain things for granted: that we were all in this together, that we all knew the secret handshake, and that we could all rely on that."

Garriola said his colleagues are making good cases, in spite of the recent hard knocks. "I still think we're the greatest law enforcement agency out there," he said, "and I have confidence in the work we do every day."

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