My FBI: Bringing Down the Mafia, Investigating Bill Clinton, And Fighting the War on Terror - Hardcover

Freeh, Louis J.; Means, Howard B.

 
9780312321895: My FBI: Bringing Down the Mafia, Investigating Bill Clinton, And Fighting the War on Terror
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0312321899 ISBN 13: 9780312321895
Verlag: St Martin's Press, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

Louis Freeh led the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 1993 to 2001, through some of the most tumultuous times in its long history. This is the story of a life in law enforcement, and of one man’s determined struggle to strengthen and reform the FBI while ensuring its freedom from political interference.
 
Bill Clinton called Freeh a “law enforcement legend” when he nominated him as FBI Director. The good feelings would not last. Going toe-to-toe with his boss during the scandal-plagued ‘90s, Freeh fought hard to defend his agency from political interference and to protect America from the growing threat of international terrorism. When Clinton later called that appointment the worst one he had made as president, Freeh considered it “a badge of honor.”
 
This is Freeh’s entire story, from his Catholic upbringing in New
Jersey to law school, the FBI training academy, his career as a US District attorney and as a federal judge, and finally his eight years as the nation’s top cop. This is the definitive account of American law enforcement in the run-up to September 11. Freeh is clear-eyed, frank, the ultimate realist, and he offers resolute vision for the struggles ahead.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

LOUIS J. FREEH served as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 1993 to 2001. He now is senior vice chairman of MBNA.


LOUIS J. FREEH served as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 1993 to 2001. He now is senior vice chairman of MBNA.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

My FBI
CHAPTER 1
Khobar Towers
Shortly before 10:00 P.M. local time on June 25, 1996, a Datsun driven by Hani al-Sayegh, a prominent member of the Saudi branch of Hezbollah, or "Party of God," pulled into the far corner of a parking lot adjacent to Building 131 at the King Abdul Aziz Airbase in Dhahran, along the oil-rich Persian Gulf coast of Saudi Arabia. The eight-story apartment structure was part of a housing complex known collectively as Khobar Towers, then home to more than two thousand American, British, French, and Saudi troops. Building 131 was occupied almost exclusively by members of the U.S. Air Force, enforcing the no-fly zone that had been in effect over southern Iraq ever since the end of the first Gulf War. With al-Sayegh in the Datsun was Abdallah al-Jarash, who had been recruited into Hezbollah at the Sayyeda Zeinab shrine in Damascus.
A few minutes later, a white, four-door Chevrolet Caprice entered the parking lot and waited for the Datsun to blink its lights--the all-clear signal. When it did, a tanker truck followed the Chevy into the lot. The truck had been purchased earlier that month from a Saudi dealership for approximately 75,000 Saudi riyals and takento a farm outside Qatif, twenty minutes or so from Dhahran. There it had been outfitted with some five thousand pounds of explosives and turned into a massive bomb.
After the truck backed up to a fence just in front of the north side of Building 131, the driver, Ahmed al-Mughassil, commander of the military wing of the Saudi Hezbollah, and his passenger, Ali al-Houri, a main Hezbollah recruiter, leaped from the cab, raced to the Chevy, and drove off, followed by the Datsun.
Sgt. Alfredo Guerrero was pulling sentry duty on the rooftop at Building 131 when he saw the driver and passenger abandon the truck and the two cars speed away. Almost certain that they were staring at a bomb in the lot below them, Guerrero and two other sentries sounded an alarm. Then Guerrero, who had been stationed in Dhahran for only a month, began to race through the top floors of Building 131, warning people to leave. The sergeant had cleared the better part of two floors when the tank truck exploded, ripping a crater thirty-five feet deep and eighty-five feet wide and shearing off the north face of the apartment building.
Despite the heroism of Alfredo Guerrero, who escaped without serious injury, nineteen Americans were murdered at Khobar Towers and more than five dozen others were hospitalized. In all, 372 U.S. military personnel suffered wounds in the explosion. Khobar was the most deadly attack on American citizens abroad in thirteen years, since the October, 1983 explosion at a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, killed 241 marines. And the totals might have been far higher. In his haste, the driver of the truck had parked perpendicular to Building 131. Had he parked parallel and delivered the impact of the explosion along a broader front, he might have succeeded in toppling the entire structure, with a catastrophically greater loss of life.
My wife, Marilyn, and I and our children were visiting my parents at their home in North Bergen, New Jersey, when the Khobar terrorists struck. June 25, 1996, was a Tuesday, not a Saturday or aSunday, but the day afforded a rare chance to get everyone together. I'd kept my schedule light. Just as important, schools had let out only a few days earlier, and summer camps and other activities would soon kick in. Marilyn and I grabbed a small window of opportunity, and as so often seems to happen in hyperbusy lives, the window closed before we were ever quite through it. My mother was preparing dinner for the family when the FBI command center called to tell me that the attack had taken place a half hour earlier. (Saudi Arabia is seven hours ahead of East Coast time.) I'd never heard of Khobar Towers, but that was irrelevant. Marilyn and I immediately began to refill the car with the kids and their gear.
My predecessor as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, William Sessions, had traveled with a large security detail, including a driver. He might have been wise to do so: the world is full of nuts. But I had been an FBI agent myself, one of the grunts, and I didn't choose to live in the grand style now that I ran the place. Nor did Marilyn and I want our children to grow up thinking they were in protective custody or that they had to travel in a convoy to see their own grandparents.
I was at the wheel of my own car, heading unaccompanied down the New Jersey Turnpike, when I first discussed the attack with Attorney General Janet Reno, my direct boss and first line of communication with the Clinton administration. I also talked with then Deputy National Security Adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger in those early hours after the attack. Sandy, who would take over as the principal adviser the next year with the resignation of Anthony Lake, was helping coordinate the national-security response, and the FBI was a vital part of that. I was on an unsecure car-phone line, though, and if Janet and Sandy did have more information than I had already picked up, they were unable to share it with me. In those early hours and for months to come, we all had far more questions than answers.
Six and a half hours after Khobar Towers was hit and Building131 destroyed--about 10:00 P.M. East Coast time--Marilyn and I were pulling into our driveway in Great Falls, Virginia, just as Bill Clinton first announced the attack to the public, in a brief address from the Oval Office.
"The explosion appears to be the work of terrorists," the president explained. "If that's the case, like all Americans I am outraged by it. The cowards who committed this murderous act must not go unpunished. Within a few hours, an FBI team will be on its way to Saudi Arabia to assist in the investigation ... ."
The president closed by echoing a point he had made earlier: "Let me say it again: We will pursue this," he said with a stern voice. "America takes care of our own. Those who did it must not go unpunished."
Those were words--and a promise--I would not forget.
 
 
For the FBI, the Khobar Towers attack was indeed a call to action. The Bureau's primary responsibilities were and remain domestic, but during my first three years as director, we had been expanding our global presence. Crime and terrorism had gone multinational, and we had to do so ourselves if we were to combat it effectively within our own borders. The Bureau also had specific extraterritorial responsibility for bombings where Americans were killed. That gave us jurisdiction, and we needed to exercise it as quickly as possible.
Crime scenes can grow stale in a hurry. Evidence is lost, or it decays beyond any useful capacity. Well-meaning efforts to clear up the site of a human disaster can destroy vital information about angles of impact, the size of an explosion, and the nature of the explosive materials themselves. Often, too, the smallest and most easily lost remnants can be the most telling. A piece of circuit board no bigger than a fingernail found in the fields around Lockerbie, Scotland,ultimately led us to the Libyans who had blown Pan Am flight 103 out of the sky. We didn't want to miss something similar in this instance.
All that is standard operating procedure for any crime scene, but from the very beginning it was clear that the attack on Khobar Towers was no ordinary criminal event. For one thing, it had occurred in an extraordinary place. Although it has long been one of America's most vital allies in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia ranks among the world's most closed societies. The usual problems of gaining access to a crime scene on foreign soil and establishing liaison with local...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
St Martin's Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2005
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0312321899
ISBN 13 
9780312321895
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
336
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9780312321901: My FBI: Bringing Down the Mafia, Investigating Bill Clinton, and Fighting the War on Terror

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  0312321902 ISBN 13:  9780312321901
Verlag: Griffin, 2006
Softcover