Posted on 01/30/2002 7:21:38 AM PST by truthandlife
The director of the F.B.I., Robert S. Mueller III, has removed a senior counterintelligence official from her job over her handling of an investigation into suspicions of Chinese espionage, bureau officials say.
The espionage investigation centers on suspicions that China tried to recruit a spy against the United States. Officials provided few additional details, and as a result the identity of the subject of the investigation is unknown. They also would not say whether any spying had actually taken place and what, if any, information may have been compromised.
Federal Bureau of Investigation officials said Mr. Mueller had lost patience with Sheila Horan, one of the bureau's highest ranking women, for failing, in his view, to conduct a sufficiently aggressive inquiry into the accusations. Mr. Mueller was said to be especially displeased that she did not provide him sooner with details about the case.
In what officials said was an unusually swift decision, Mr. Mueller transferred Ms. Horan from her job as acting head of the bureau's national security division to an administrative support position. They said she was expected to leave the bureau. Ms. Horan did not respond to a telephone call to her office.
The agency's national security division, also known as the counterintelligence division, has been reeling since the espionage inquiry last year that unmasked a senior agent, Robert P. Hanssen, as a Russian spy, and has been trying to regroup at a time when the F.B.I.'s counterintelligence operation has been vastly overshadowed by the bureau's efforts to cope with terrorism.
Any suggestion of Chinese involvement in espionage has been particularly delicate to the Justice Department since the collapse of the case against Wen Ho Lee, a nuclear weapons scientist who was initially suspected of spying for China. Dr. Lee, who pleaded guilty in September 2000 to one count of mishandling classified material, has charged that he was singled out for hostile scrutiny because he is Chinese-American.
Mr. Mueller, who was on the job less than two weeks when the Sept. 11 terror attacks occurred, has been preparing to announce a broader personnel shakeup and reorganization of the F.B.I.'s top managerial ranks. His actions in Ms. Horan's case are widely viewed in the bureau as reflecting his increasing confidence as head of the law enforcement agency.
Mr. Mueller has been demanding more accountability from top officials at the F.B.I. and has been under pressure from Attorney General John Ashcroft to strengthen the bureau's management.
The espionage inquiry is said to be unrelated to Beijing's discovery last month of sophisticated satellite-activated bugging devices installed aboard a Boeing 767 jetliner that was delivered to China in September as President Jiang Zemin's official aircraft.
President Bush is scheduled to visit Beijing in a few weeks. Thus far, the bugging case has brought no official protest and appears to have had little impact on the United States- China relationship.
Friends of Ms. Horan said that Mr. Mueller had unfairly blamed her for longstanding problems in the F.B.I.'s counterintelligence operations. In particular, they said, she was singled out for weaknesses that Mr. Mueller had concluded had hampered the bureau's efforts to thwart Chinese espionage.
Other officials said that Mr. Mueller had been planning to overhaul the counterespionage operations and had been impatient with the breezy and independent style of Ms. Horan, an agent with more than two decades of experience at the F.B.I.
In recent months, Ms. Horan's standing had eroded. She had been a deputy to Neil Gallagher, who before his retirement had headed the national security division and took much of the criticism from Congress concerning the Lee case. Under Mr. Gallagher, Ms. Horan had been in day-to-day charge of spy investigations.
Earlier, Ms. Horan had worked at the F.B.I.'s Washington office heading counterterrorism investigations. She was placed in charge of the initial investigation into the East Africa embassy bombings in 1998, an inquiry that led to the conviction of several Al Qaeda followers of Osama bin Laden.
The shakeup over the Chinese case comes as Justice Department internal inquiries into the F.B.I.'s counterintelligence operation are nearing completion and are expected to conclude that the national security division needs to be strengthened and brought under tighter managerial control.
A broad review of the F.B.I.'s counterespionage division has been under way for nearly a year led by William H. Webster, the former director of the F.B.I. and the Central Intelligence Agency. Another review by the Justice Department's inspector general is nearing completion.
That's what I would like to know, too.
Specifically, what was her involvement, if any, in the coverups of the Clinton scandals, filegate, etc.
Was she cozy with the Reno DOJ?
Was she an "affirmative action" promotion, designed to pander to NOW and make the upper ranks of the FBI "look like America"?
I am thinking that maybe the Bush administration is craftily beginning its purge of the scumbag contingent in many of these DOJ operations. I hope.
Would really appreciate your thoughts, insights on what is behind Horan's reassignment.
Scully and Muldur deal with this FBI tactic all the time.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
You never hear about people like Sheila Horan until something truly terrible happens. But after more than two decades in the FBI's secretive national-security division, she knows her way around terrorism. And now she has been thrust into one of the most difficult manhunts in her career, as on-the-scene boss of the investigation in East Africa that the U.S. hopes will one day nail down the names and addresses of the terrorists who ruthlessly massacred 257 innocents and wounded more than 5,000 in the twin bombings of the U.S. embassies. Agent Horan found herself in Nairobi last week presiding over a makeshift command center in the partly wrecked railway station bus park across from the embassy. Her task: to supervise 215 FBI agents in both capitals, along with explosives experts from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, as they sort through concrete rubble, twisted metal, bits of glass--every scrap of debris that could yield the vital physical evidence that might identify who was responsible for the senseless violence.
It could take weeks before investigators confirm the most basic facts. After nearly seven days of digging, Horan was able to announce one tiny step forward: pieces of the vehicle that carried the Nairobi bomb had been found. The first planeloads of material evidence were sent to Washington for analysis over the weekend. Investigators expect to spend an additional four weeks conducting at least 700 interviews in Kenya, while Horan's deputy leads other agents through a similar process in Tanzania.
Already speculation is focusing on one man who is thought likely to be behind the bombings: Osama bin Laden, a militant Muslim multimillionaire. Bin Laden's outspoken screeds against America and suspected involvement in many of the most spectacular terrorist assaults of the '90s have earned him the reputation of a virtual Dr. No whose tentacles extend to almost every secret cell around the globe. Though he has denied responsibility for some of the attacks, bin Laden is still widely considered the world's prime villain after the legendary terrorist Carlos the Jackal; the State Department last year labeled bin Laden "one of the most significant sponsors of Sunni Islamic terrorist groups." He seeks to overthrow the Saudi royal family and drive U.S. forces out of Saudi Arabia, away from its holy cities, Mecca and Medina. Bin Laden is nearly everyone's favorite suspect this time too--largely because he is the obvious one. Newsday reported on Sunday that a relatively low-level associate of bin Laden may have been identified by an embassy guard as having been in the truck carrying the bomb in Nairobi. Clinton aides are looking at contingency plans for covert operations to capture bin Laden from his reputed high-tech lair deep inside Afghanistan.
Over the weekend, FBI agents were flying to Pakistan to interview one Mohammed Sadique, 32, who, according to a Pakistani newspaper, was detained at the Karachi airport on Aug. 7 because his passport appeared faked. Sadique then reportedly admitted involvement in the plot and attempting to link up in Afghanistan with two other returning co-conspirators. The scheme, said the paper, had received help from people sympathetic to the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a group reportedly financed by bin Laden and linked to the assassins of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. U.S. investigators are taking the allegations seriously but, says one senior American official, there are "no guarantees" that Sadique's claims are true. Only when the Pakistani and Egyptian leads are run to ground, when the composition of the bombs is known, when the delivery vehicles have been precisely identified, can the U.S. know where to lay the blame.
Without such evidence, no matter how much investigators might believe in bin Laden's guilt, the U.S. would have no way to bring him to justice. "We don't have enough to stand up in front of the American people and say he or his henchmen have done it," says a U.S. official. "Whether we ever have enough that withstands the test of law to take them to trial, that's a different question."
--Reported by Peter Hawthorne /Dar Es Salaam, Scott Macleod /Paris, Clive Mutiso /Nairobi and Elaine Shannon And Douglas Waller /Washington
Clinton aides should have considered the effect of operational security on the lives of the covert operators they were considering sending to Afghanistan.
The whole paragraph says it all, really. We will truly be paying for 8 years of Clintonism for decades.
Yep. I bet she DOES sue. She's probably a Clintonista.
GW Bush has reportedly revealed some operational details of the new US missile defense system to China and Horan would know about those revelations as well."
The thing that still baffles me when I try to apply ANY type of Rationalle to those moves is --- Why Was It Done?
Could ANY of the participants in those allowed transfers actually believe the Chinese would NOT use it against us?
It looks like a reormation is occurring in the FBI -
what officials said was an unusually swift decision
may at least be done to appear that the Chicoms are not running the Fed govt intelligence agencies. We'll see.
But is Ms. just a visible target, low hanging fruit, or is she actually very helpful to doing the job?
But the larger issue is that this whole shift from National Security to Economic Security in the FBI (remember that Clinton program?) was the very point of departure that distracted the FBI from doing its normal job. It was masked as another peace dividend that major actors in the world would leave us alone. Now only economic spying would be an inssue in the post Soviet, post cold war world. Ms. Moran is a key person pushing that policy.
Since 9-11 we know how wrong that policy is.
"What's the big deal?"; "Everybody else has been doing it!"; "Why have I been singled out?"; "It's discrimination!"
Isn't everybody not having sex and spying for the Red Chinese ... and paid for the latter but not the former?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.