My FBI: Bringing Down the Mafia, Investigating Bill Clinton, and Fighting the War on Terror (Hardcover)

by Louis J. Freeh (Author)
Key Phrases: crime site, New York, White House, Bill Clinton (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Freeh defends his performance as FBI director (1993-2001) and retaliates against Richard A. Clarke's Against All Enemies and Bill Clinton's My Life in this smooth memoir, written with the help of Means. "I spent most of the almost eight years as director investigating the man who had appointed me," Freeh declares on the book's first page, but readers expecting juicy revelations about those investigations are going to be disappointed. Freeh goes into fascinating detail when describing the FBI's work on the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia-the most damning thing he has to say about Clinton is that Clinton didn't push for the prosecution of the bombers. Freeh's recounting of his work as an FBI agent in 1970s, when his team helped eviscerate the power of the Italian mafia in New York, is similarly generous with details. And his accounts of his childhood in New Jersey and his years working his way through Rutgers are also engaging. Freeh argues convincingly against the establishment of a separate Domestic Intelligence Service, for the FBI's use of international agents and for a major investment into the Bureau's technological capacity-it's horrifying to realize that the agency has less computer power than any of America's major enemies. In a few pages of near end of the book, Freeh lambastes Clarke, calling him a "self-appointed Paul Revere" and a "second-tier player." He also accuses Clarke of deception, alleging that Clarke lied or distorted information in five places, including Clarke's assertion that Freeh is a member of Opus Dei. If corroborated, these accusations may deal a serious blow Clarke's reputation. When it comes to the Clinton investigations, however, Freeh doesn't really deliver anything new. And his explanations for the rift between them come off as disingenuous. "Maybe I was, in Clinton's eyes, too much the altar boy," Freeh muses on page 17. More than two hundred pages later, he reveals that he snubbed the President's first two collegial gestures, and elsewhere Freeh drops references to his close friendship with H.W. Bush, who worked as director of the CIA before he was president and after whom Freeh names the FBI's new command center in 1999. "We had differences of temperament," Freeh acknowledges about Clinton. His book would have been stronger if he acknowledged more directly that he and Clinton had differences of politics, too. After all, it's to Clinton's credit that he appointed Freeh despite those differences, and to Freeh's credit that he didn't allow them to hamper his excellent performance on the Oklahoma bombing and Robert Hanssen cases, among others.
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From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
For nearly a dozen years, Louis J. Freeh has been pointedly silent about the man who appointed him director of the FBI. That moratorium ends officially and loudly with the publication of Freeh's My FBI, a scorching account of his relationship with Bill Clinton and of leading the bureau at a time when, as Freeh writes, the president's "scandals . . . never ended." To understand the depth of Freeh's antipathy, consider this one anecdote: Sometime after he resigned in 2001, Freeh ran into the former White House counsel who had recommended Freeh for the job. The lawyer reported that Clinton had just complained to him that the worst advice the lawyer ever gave him was to appoint Freeh. "I wear it as a badge of honor," Freeh writes. And that's just the second chapter.

How did it come to this? A president's relationship with an FBI director should be a mixture of hands-off and hands-on. Unlike cabinet members, who serve at the pleasure of a president, directors are now given 10-year terms -- in part to avoid another 48-year reign like that of J. Edgar Hoover, and in part to provide insulation from political pressure. A potentially secret police force constitutes a great opportunity for abuse by presidents and a threat to be used against them. But even if an FBI director cannot expect to be best friends with the president, he should, as Freeh writes, "be able to go directly to the president, sit down with him and say You should know about this." In Freeh and Clinton's case, there were vital issues to discuss and collaborate on. But the problem for Freeh was that he never could get to those hands-on moments. "There was always some new investigation brewing, some new calamity bubbling just below the headlines ." By the time Freeh resigned, he had met with Clinton at most three times.

My FBI is no ordinary Washington memoir. To be sure, Freeh tells a number of engaging stories about his rise from FBI street agent -- one undercover assignment entailed parading around nude in the locker room of a local health club frequented by a prominent mobster -- to his mob-busting days as a federal prosecutor in the famed Southern District of New York. There are a few too many gratuitous bromides bestowed on colleagues and even neighbors. But these accolades serve the purpose, intended or not, of contrasting starkly with Freeh's portrait of Clinton as a man whose only moral compass is political expediency. When a judge cited Clinton in 1999 for contempt for lying in the Paula Jones case, Freeh describes it as a disgrace equal only to Richard M. Nixon's. If it had been him, Freeh writes, "I would be so devastated that I might never show my face in public again. The ex-president, however, seems to suffer no such pangs of conscience."

In retrospect, it should have been clear to both men that this was a doomed relationship. Could there be two more different people? Freeh, a former altar boy and a moralist at his core, always carried a worn prayer book in his suit jacket. But Freeh was impressed with the breadth of Clinton's questions in their first meeting, and by the time Clinton assures Freeh there will be no political interference if he takes the job, Freeh has joined the legions of the charmed. When Clinton sits down, without prompting, to write a birthday greeting to Freeh's 7-year-old son, the deal is sealed.

Freeh acknowledges making mistakes in the relationship. He lacked tact in trying to distance himself. He turned down an early dinner invitation to the White House with the Clintons and Tom Hanks; he even sent back his White House pass with a terse note, indicating he would sign in every time he came calling. "It was seemingly a declaration of open hostility on my part," he writes. But, he argues, "I was the nation's top cop," and just a few months into his tenure, Clinton was already the subject of a criminal investigation in what became known as Whitewater. "Until the matter was sorted out," Freeh writes, "I had to be accountable for every trip I made to the building where the president worked and lived."

The final stake through the relationship's heart, however, was the president's response to the June 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers, an American military facility in Saudi Arabia, in which 19 Americans were killed. It is fitting that Freeh opens My FBI with Khobar Towers; there was no case he cared more deeply about or pursued more relentlessly. It became his Moby-Dick. Only hours after the bombing, Clinton dispatched the FBI to track down the perpetrators, promising the nation they would not go unpunished. Freeh personally oversaw the case, and when it soon began to appear that top Iranian government officials might be behind the attack, Freeh says the investigation stalled: "Where I found myself most stymied [was] not halfway around the world on the Arabian Peninsula but at home, a half dozen blocks up Pennsylvania Avenue." The problem, in Freeh's view, was that in May 1997 an Iranian moderate, Mohammad Khatami, had been elected president and seemed to be the United States' best hope of normalizing relationships. "The Khobar Towers investigation was not going to get in the way of that," Freeh writes.

The tale of duplicity Freeh tells is complicated, but the basic outlines are these: The Saudis, who had suspects in custody, had communicated in a limited way their findin