Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (91 page)

But Koresh had also embarked on an ambitious plan to acquire weapons. It was for these weapons, including assault rifles, hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition, and parts for making machine guns, that the BATF staged its raid. In the ill-planned BATF raid, the question of who fired first was never clearly answered. Survivors said that they did not shoot until they were fired upon by the federal agents. Four BATF agents were killed and several Branch Davidians lay dead.

That same day President Clinton ordered the FBI to take over the case. The initial FBI strategy was to make life hellish for the Branch Davidians by gradually shrinking the perimeter around the compound, shining searchlights at the house for twenty-four hours a day, and then playing ear-splitting noises. Koresh only used these ploys to strengthen his apocalyptic predictions and make himself more messianic to his followers. After negotiations in a fifty-one-day standoff went nowhere, and believing that the children inside the compound were at risk, Attorney General Janet Reno approved a plan to end the siege with an assault, and President Clinton endorsed the plan on April 18. The FBI planned to step up pressure by using CS gas, a type of gas deemed more effective than tear gas. The decision was made despite the fact that, as James Bovard noted in his book
Lost Rights
, “A few months earlier, the U.S. government had signed an international treaty banning the use of CS in warfare, effectively recognizing that its effects were so harsh that its use on enemy soldiers was immoral. But the international treaty did not prohibit the U.S. government from using CS against American citizens.”

Despite fears of a mass suicide, as had happened in Guyana when 900 followers of cult leader Jim Jones had taken their lives, the FBI launched its raid at about 6
A.M.
A modified tank began battering holes near the compound entrance and spraying a mist of CS gas. The Branch Davidians began firing at the tanks. By 9
A.M.
, a tank had smashed in the front door of the compound and the FBI thought the standoff was over. The FBI planned to continue the pressure of gas and tanks closing in until the cult members surrendered. But at around noon, wisps of smoke appeared, and the building was soon in flames, whipped by high winds blowing off the Texas prairie. Agents entering the building to try to rescue cult members found children in a concrete pit filled with water, rats, and excrement. There were no fire trucks on the scene, as the FBI thought that they would be endangered if a gunfight broke out.

When the conflagration was over, eighty Davidians, including twenty-seven children, were identified as having died in the fire. Seven, including Koresh, had gunshot wounds in their heads. Almost immediately, claims began to be circulated that the FBI had deliberately set the fire.

Later investigations, bolstered by evidence from listening devices that had been secretly sent into the compound in which Davidians were heard saying “Spread the fuel,” indicated that internal fires had been set by the Davidians. Kerosene and gasoline were detected on the clothes of some of the surviving cult members, but there remained a possibility that some of the fires may have started in the assault itself. In the aftermath, two BATF members were fired but later reinstated at a lower rank. No FBI officials were disciplined. Eight of the surviving Branch Davidians were convicted on charges ranging from weapons violations to voluntary manslaughter.

The country had always been supportive of the FBI and its handling of the case, but the two cases combined had a powerful impact on the public perception of the FBI and other agencies. According to Ronald Kessler’s
The Bureau
, “By 1999, a majority of the public believed that the FBI had murdered innocent people at Waco . . . and Ruby Ridge.”

•
Oklahoma City:
Waco would have aftershocks. On April 19, 1995, the second anniversary of the Waco fire, a truck bomb exploded in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City, blowing out the entire front of the high-rise office building and killing 168 people, 19 of them children. Suspicion was cast immediately on Arab terrorists in the wake of the World Trade Center bombing that had taken place in 1993. But within a few hours, the FBI had a piece of the truck used in the bombing and had traced it to a Kansas truck rental shop.

Within days, Timothy McVeigh was identified as the key suspect in the bombing. A decorated Gulf War veteran, McVeigh was already in jail awaiting a hearing. He had been arrested by an Oklahoma state trooper on the day of the bombing for driving without license plates and for carrying a concealed weapon. A fellow conspirator, Terry Nichols, had also been identified and captured and agreed to testify against his partner. McVeigh was convicted and then scheduled for execution. But even when the FBI had done things right, things now went wrong. Just days before McVeigh’s scheduled execution in May 2001, the FBI revealed to the convicted bomber’s attorneys that it had failed to turn over 3,000 pages of documents relating to the case. McVeigh’s scheduled execution was delayed by the new attorney general, John Ashcroft, while the condemned man’s attorneys reviewed the documents. The papers had no impact, other than to delay the execution and give the bureau another black eye. McVeigh was executed in June 2001, the first federal execution in America since 1963.

•
The Unabomber:
Between 1978 and 1998, the United States was plagued by a wave of mail bombings. Most of the bombs, which consisted of hundreds of nails, cut-up razor blades, and metal fragments, were made to look like ordinary parcels, which exploded when their victims opened them. Because the earliest of these bombs targeted professors of science and engineering as well as airline executives, the FBI dubbed the perpetrator the Unabomber (UNA = “Universities and Airlines”). The Unabomber struck sixteen times, killing three people, injuring twenty-three others, and causing millions to live in fear.

In 1995, the media were sent a 35,000-word manifesto written by the Unabomber describing his targets as modern industry and technology. According to this document, he believed that the only way to restore humanity’s self-esteem was to destroy the institutions that fostered technology and innovation. The FBI ultimately spent the next seventeen years and $50 million tracking down the Unabomber in the longest, most expensive manhunt in history.

The case broke only when the Unabomber’s own brother recognized the political rhetoric in the manifesto. A genius-level former professor, Ted Kaczynski, now identified as the Unabomber, had taken to living in the mountains of Montana in a shack without electricity or plumbing. Assisted by the brother, who received a reward that he then distributed to the families of victims, the FBI arrested Kaczynski on April 3, 1996. He pleaded guilty to the bombings and expressed no remorse for his actions. In 1998, he was sentenced to four consecutive life terms in a Colorado penitentiary.

•
Olympic Park:
When a pipe bomb exploded on July 26 in the midst of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, FBI agents were immediately suspicious of a security guard who had alerted police to an abandoned mysterious backpack twenty-three minutes before the bomb exploded. The guard, Richard Jewell, had helped evacuate the area after the bombing, which killed two people. Three days later, a local newspaper reported that Jewell was the innocent victim of a bungled investigation and an irresponsible media feeding frenzy that essentially presumed his guilt. The FBI eventually focused its investigation on Eric Robert Rudolph, a fugitive charged with an abortion clinic bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, and Atlanta. (The subject of an intensive manhunt, Rudolph was captured in 2003.)

•
Los Alamos:
Bombs of another sort figured in still another FBI fiasco, the pursuit of a spy supposedly selling atomic bomb secrets to the Chinese. When a Chinese defector to Taiwan gave up bundles of classified documents, suspicion fell immediately on Wen Ho Lee, a Chinese-American scientist at the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory since 1978. The Department of Energy initially investigated the matter but turned the case over to the FBI. In fact, no one was even certain that the secrets had ever been stolen. But in 1999, an indictment was brought against Wen Ho Lee, charging him with copying atomic bomb secrets. Denied bail and shackled in extremely harsh conditions as he awaited trial, Wen Ho Lee professed innocence. The case against him eventually fell apart. In the end, the government settled for a guilty plea to the lesser charge of making copies and mishandling national security information, and Lee was sentenced to time already served. Whether Wen Ho Lee—or anyone, for that matter—had sold documents to the Chinese was never a certainty. But the FBI had again bungled a high-profile investigation. A federal prosecutor who investigated the case said, “This was a paradigm of how not to manage and work an important counterintelligence case.” (In late 2002, Wen Ho Lee reported that he was unable to find employment either at a university or in a laboratory.)

•
Walker/Ames/Hanssen:
The Wen Ho Lee case was one in a string of highly visible espionage cases that left the FBI’s counterspying abilities open to serious question. One was the Walker case. Without detection for seventeen years, Navy communications specialist John Walker and his son Michael had spied for the Soviets, selling them important U.S. Navy secrets. Walker began spying in 1968, undetected by FBI surveillance of the Soviet embassy in Washington, and brought his son into the operation in 1983. He also brought his brother Arthur Walker, a retired Navy commander who was working for a defense contractor, into the ring. John Walker was caught only when his marriage failed and his embittered ex-wife alerted the FBI about his activities. Walker was arrested in May 1985, along with his son, brother, and a fourth accomplice. After cooperating with the government, John Walker got a life term, his son a twenty-five-year term, Arthur Walker received three concurrent life sentences and was fined $250,000, and the fourth accomplice was sentenced to a 365-year term and a fine of $410,000.

The second major counterintelligence failure of the period was a CIA-centered fiasco that spilled over to the FBI. Aldrich Ames, the son of a CIA operative, joined the CIA in 1962. By the mid-1980s, he was spying for the Soviets, but it took years for the CIA or FBI to catch on to him, despite the fact that Ames was living way above his means. With a government salary of about $70,000, Ames drove a Jaguar and lived in a house worth half a million dollars. Over the years, the FBI had observed Ames meeting with the Soviets, but were stonewalled by the CIA, who never pressed the investigation when asked. As it turned out, Ames had received $2.5 million from the Soviets since 1985 and had betrayed more than a hundred CIA operations. In 1994, he was eventually caught, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to life without parole.

The Walker and Ames cases were thought to be massive intelligence failures. But they paled against the damage done by Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent who worked for the Soviets and had access to the most sensitive government secrets. A former Chicago policeman, Hanssen joined the FBI in 1976. Just three years later, he began selling classified documents to the Soviets. His wife discovered his spying and made him confess to a Roman Catholic priest who told him to give his spying profits to Mother Teresa, but Hanssen continued his damaging betrayal. Through the 1980s and 1990s, Hanssen sold secrets to the Soviet KGB, exposing double agents who were working for the United States.

In January 2001, Hanssen was arrested and charged with spying for the Russians. He pleaded guilty to selling 6,000 pages of documents along with computer disks to the Soviet Union and later the Russians over a period of twenty-one years. Ames’s spying had led directly to more deaths, but Hanssen had turned over far more damaging information. The FBI and CIA needed Hanssen’s cooperation, so he was given life in prison without possibility of parole.

In summarizing the Hanssen case, Ronald Kessler writes in
The Bureau,
“Hanssen felt confident that the FBI would not catch him—not even if he broke into an FBI official’s computer . . . [that] he could put erotic stories on the Internet using his real name and heavily mortgage his house without raising any suspicion. So complacent was the FBI that, when a computer repair technician found hacker software on Hanssen’s computer, no one asked about it. Nor were five-year background checks done on a regular basis, as is required for agents with Hanssen’s level of clearances.

All of these failures—which must also be measured against the FBI’s noteworthy but usually overlooked successes in counterintelligence—would be embarrassing to the agencies, disturbing to American taxpayers, and perhaps even shocking—if not for the events of September 11, 2001. Less than a year after the September 11 terror attacks, reports of the significant information that various FBI field agents had begun to collect about Islamic terrorists who were actively plotting an attack using airplanes started to surface. These revelations came after administration officials and the head of the FBI had pointedly told Americans that there had been no warning of the attacks.

Clearly, many FBI agents were on to the possibility of a terror strike. A memo written by one FBI field agent in Phoenix warned about Middle Eastern men with possible connections to terror groups enrolling in flight schools. His memo went to New York and Washington FBI offices, but no further action was taken. Even when a man was arrested in August before the terror attacks because of his suspicious behavior at a flight training school, their reports were apparently not taken seriously up the chain of command. Documents relating back to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing also had never been translated from Arabic. Similar hints of potential hijackings had come to the CIA, but the two agencies have always been known for their fierce turf protection. Congressional requirements that the CIA not be involved in domestic spying—spawned after CIA abuses were revealed in the 1970s—also created a roadblock to intelligence sharing that might have proven valuable. The level of the FBI’s awareness as well as its inability to piece together important clues to the impending terror attacks is still unclear. In June 2002, President Bush ordered a massive reorganization of America’s intelligence gathering and domestic security branches into a new cabinet-level department, which was created late in 2002.