The Secrets of the FBI by Ronald Kessler

Author:Ronald Kessler
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
ISBN: 9780307719713
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2012-08-07T04:00:00+00:00

18

“MUELLER, HOMICIDE”

AT EIGHT FORTY-FIVE ON THE MORNING OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, Robert S. Mueller III was planning a brown-bag lunch with reporters when his secretary told him to turn on the TV.

The new director of the FBI rushed down the stark white corridors of headquarters from his seventh-floor office to the Strategic Information Operations Center (SIOC). It was a $20 million, twenty-room complex of phones, secure computers, and video screens used to monitor and coordinate major breaking cases. He had just moved into his office the week before, and now Mueller was hit with the double whammy of dealing with the attacks and trying to uncover plans for possible new attacks while learning what his job was all about.

Nominated by President George W. Bush, Mueller was a graduate of Princeton. He had served in the Vietnam War and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart. After the Marines, Mueller thought he would like to become an FBI agent. With that in mind, he obtained a J.D. degree from the University of Virginia Law School in 1973. But instead of joining the FBI, Mueller became a prosecutor, first in the U.S. attorney’s office in San Francisco and then in Boston. Along the way, Mueller married his high school sweetheart, Ann Standish.

In 1990, Mueller was appointed assistant attorney general in charge of the Criminal Division of the Justice Department. In that position, he supervised prosecutions of John Gotti, the Libyan suspects indicted in the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing, and Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega.

Mueller left Justice in 1993 to become a partner in the Boston law firm of Hale and Dorr. But Mueller hated private practice. One day, he called Eric H. Holder Jr., the U.S. attorney in Washington. When Mueller headed the Criminal Division, Holder had reported to him. Now Mueller was calling him to apply for a job.

“He called up out of the blue and said he wanted to try murder cases,” Holder says. “I was like, ‘What?’ Here’s this guy who was the former assistant attorney general, the head of the Criminal Division. He came to the U.S. attorney’s office and tried cases as a line guy.”

Having tossed aside his $400,000-a-year partnership for a government salary in May 1995, Mueller began prosecuting knifings and shootings. He answered the phone, “Mueller, Homicide.”

In 1996, Mueller became chief of the Homicide Section in the U.S. attorney’s office. He went on to become U.S. attorney in San Francisco. After President Bush took office, Mueller became acting deputy attorney general, and Bush later appointed Mueller, fifty-six, FBI director.

At his confirmation hearing, Mueller was asked if he would take a polygraph test. In contrast to Freeh, who said he would take a polygraph test but never actually did, Mueller replied, “This may be my training from the Marine Corps, but you don’t ask people to do that which you’re unwilling to do yourself. I have already taken the polygraph.”

“How did you do?” Senator Orrin Hatch asked.

“I’m sitting here; that’s all I’ve got to say,” Mueller answered to laughs from the senators.

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