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Online NewsHour

FREEH RETIRES

June 22, 2001

Politics and diplomacy

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RAY SUAREZ: Elsa Walsh, you spent a lot of time with Louis Freeh.

ELSA WALSH: I did.

RAY SUAREZ: And the time that included going overseas and seeing the expanded work of the bureau. Tell us about what we should know about the man.

ELSA WALSH: Well, I spent about a year traveling around with him and talking to him. I think that, you know, there were a lot of problems on Louis Freeh's watch, but they weren't mistakes of bad faith or of malice. And he was a person, as Kris said, who was determined to fix things when a problem arose. I think that yesterday when you saw the indictments in the Khobar Towers case, which is what I wrote about, that was probably the most important case to Louis Freeh. As George Tenet, who was the CIA director, said, you can see all of Louis Freeh's values on his sleeve in the Khobar case, the tenacity, the determination, the empathy for the families, the sort of unwillingness to give up. And I think that when you spend time with Freeh, he has a very disarming presence. He comes across as quite humble, and most people of his stature in Washington suck a lot of air out of the room, but he isn't that way at all, but you really can seriously under estimate the steeliness that's underneath that demeanor, because Freeh is a gentle bulldog.

RAY SUAREZ: Do you also see his - the strength of his personal diplomacy in getting the Saudis to come around and cooperate?

ELSA WALSH: Freeh said to me once - he said -- you can do fabulous investigative work but unless you have good personal relationships you're never going to get a case done. I think that when he came into the FBI, he saw that the relationship with the CIA and the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Agency, were completely dysfunctional and he made a big effort to try to improve those relation... that relationship to the point that when George Tenet, who is the CIA director, became the CIA director, he asked Director Freeh to swear him in because they both wanted to make a statement that we were now two agencies that were working together. In the Khobar Tower case, Louis Freeh felt that the Clinton administration was dragging its feet on it... on this case. Sandy Berger, who was the National Security Advisor at that time, said that was not the case.

Regardless of what that interpretation was, Louis Freeh really worked on the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Vandar, and also established relationships with people in Saudi. He went there over and over again. It was oftentimes in the FBI they joked that Louis Freeh is the only sort of presidentially appointed street agent. In the Khobar case he did that and he did that with the crown prince. It got to the point where Freeh thought that the Clinton administration was dragging its feet so much that he went to the senior President Bush, George Bush's father, and said, "help me out because the Saudis say that they believe the Clinton administration is no longer interested in this case." So Freeh did something that - you know -- some people might consider quite insubordinate. And he asked Bush to make an appeal. And it worked.