-
Freeh, Louis J. with Howard Means.
My FBI.
New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005.
ISBN 0-312-32189-9.
-
This may be one of the most sanctimonious and self-congratulatory
books ever written by a major U.S. public figure who is not Jimmy Carter.
Not only is the book titled “My FBI” (gee, I always
thought it was supposed to belong to the U.S. taxpayers who pay the
G-men's salaries and buy the ammunition they expend), in the preface,
where the author explains why he reversed his original decision not to
write a memoir of his time at the FBI, he uses the words
“I”, “me”, “my”, and
“myself” a total of 91 times in four pages.
Only about half of the book covers Freeh's 1993–2001 tenure as
FBI director; the rest is a straightforward autohagiography of his years
as an altar boy, Eagle Scout, idealistic but apolitical law student
during the turbulent early 1970s, FBI agent, crusading anti-Mafia
federal prosecutor in New York City, and hard-working U.S. district
judge, before bring appointed to the FBI job by Bill Clinton, who
promised him independence and freedom from political interference in
the work of the Bureau. Little did Freeh expect, when accepting the
job, that he would spend much of his time in the coming years
investigating the Clintons and their cronies. The tawdry and
occasionally bizarre stories of those events as seen from the FBI fills
a chapter and sets the background for the tense relations between the
White House and FBI on other matters such as terrorism and
counter-intelligence. The Oklahoma City and Saudi Arabian Khobar
Towers bombings, the Atlanta Olympics bomb, the identification and
arrest of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, and the discovery of long-term
Soviet mole Robert Hanssen in the FBI all occurred on Freeh's watch;
he provides a view of these events and the governmental turf battles
they engendered from the perspective of the big office in the Hoover
Building, but there's little or no new information about the events
themselves. Freeh resigned the FBI directorship in June 2001, and
September 11th of that year was the first day at his new job. (What
do you do after nine years running the FBI? Go to work for a
credit card company!)
In a final chapter, he provides a largely exculpatory account
of the FBI's involvement in counter-terrorism and what might have
been done to prevent such terrorist strikes. He directly attacks
Richard A. Clarke and his book
Against All Enemies
as a self-aggrandising account by a minor player including
some outright fabrications.
Freeh's book provides a peek into the mind of a self-consciously
virtuous top cop—if only those foolish politicians and their
paranoid constituents would sign over the last shreds of their
liberties and privacy (on p. 304 he explicitly pitches for key
escrow and back doors in encryption products, arguing “there's
no need for this technology to be any more intrusive than a wiretap
on a phone line”—indeed!), the righteous and incorruptible
enforcers of the law and impartial arbiters of justice could make
their lives ever so much safer and fret-free. And perhaps if the human
beings in possession of those awesome powers were, in fact, as righteous as
Mr. Freeh seems to believe himself to be, then there would nothing to
worry about. But evidence suggests cause for concern. On the next to last
page of the book, p. 324, near the end of six pages of
acknowledgements set in small type with narrow leading (didn't
think we'd read that far, Mr. Freeh?), we find the
author naming, as an exemplar of one of the “courageous and
honorable men who serve us”, who “deserve the nation's
praise and lasting gratitude”, one Lon Horiuchi, the FBI sniper
who shot and killed Vicki Weaver
(who was accused of no crime) while she was holding her baby in her
hands during the Ruby Ridge siege in August of 1992. Horiuchi later
pled the Fifth Amendment in testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary
Committee in 1995, ten years prior to Freeh's commendation of him
here.
March 2006 