THE FBI DIRECTORS

Part II

With the recent drama in the media over Kash Patel as President Trump’s FBI Director designee I thought I would give you my thoughts on former FBI Directors of the modern era - roughly 1978 to the present. You can my Patel article here…

These are strictly my opinions as a 25-year FBI veteran who served in every role from street agent to special agent in charge of an FBI field office, including two tours at FBI Headquarters and a detail assignment as the FBI’s representative to the National Security Council (NSC) at the White House for two years during the George W. Bush administration.

This review only includes Directors who served during the approximate same timeframe as I did, including three Directors I did not personally serve under, but whose tenure was close enough in time to my service that I saw the results of their directorships through an informed lens. It does not include interim Directors, of which there were several in-between appointed Directors.

This started out as a single issue but I soon decided it would be too long to publish as is. Instead, I will publish it over a series of weeks in three or four segments. This article will consider three Directors, out of order, for reasons I’ll explain below. You can read Part I devoted exclusively to James Comey here…….

In Part II here, I look at three more former Directors of the modern era.

WILLIAM H. WEBSTER

Webster (1978 - 1987) was really the first Director of the modern era. Clarence M. Kelley (indirectly) succeeded J. Edgar Hoover after his death in 1973, but many agents considered him a holdover from the Hoover era, having retired as an agent himself in 1961, and returning years later as Director.

Webster was considered by agents as stiff and prickly. He insisted on being addressed as Judge Webster versus Director as a homage to his years as a federal judge. While he kept many of the Bureau traditions alive, he also modernized the FBI. Major accomplishments included recognizing the scourge of organized crime and drugs and assigning agents to seriously investigate them. Previous Directors largely ignored the issues because those types of investigations invited their own problems. There was little trouble agents could get themselves into chasing bank robbers and fugitives, went the prior logic.

Webster was Director during the ABSCAM investigation in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s; an undercover operation that targeted and convicted several U. S. Congressmen and a U.S. Senator for bribery. Some believed it was entrapment by the FBI in retaliation for Congressional oversight of the Bureau’s overreach in intelligence matters, while others thought it was a bad idea go after the entity that provided the Bureau’s funding.

Webster’s reign included overseeing the spool up of the task force concept that brought state and local police into FBI offices to partner on crime problems. The Bank Robbery Task Force in New York grew to include additional task forces on violent crimes and eventually terrorism. This would become significant after 9/11. The Hostage Rescue Team (HRT) was formed under Webster.

Quality of life for agents stabilized under Director Webster. Where agents were previously subjected to five or ten transfers during a career, street agents could now look forward to generally no more than three. A small to medium office assignment after Quantico (in a city other than their home,) then one of the FBI’s Top 12 offices, then an “office of preference” (OP) transfer to an office of their choosing, based on availability and seniority. Despite a great deal of talk around the coffee machine about where one sat on the OP List, many agents opted not to take one and stayed in a Top 12 office city where their family life had stabilized.

While it didn’t start under Webster, large numbers of Vietnam veterans came into the Bureau under him. They were a new breed of agent. Hoover-era agents were button- downed rule followers. Many were scared to death of Hoover’s idiosyncrasies. Those who couldn’t or wouldn’t bend to his will resigned or were “removed from the rolls of the Bureau.”

Many Vietnam veteran agents were NCOs who went to school on the GI Bill when they returned home or were junior officers. They were deeply suspicious of management because they saw a lot of bad decision making during the war. As in, they didn’t understand why they had to take a hill from the NVA they’d just given back the day before. They brought their management suspicions with them. Many good agents refused to go into management, which was voluntary, because they didn’t want any part of failed leadership efforts.

This led, in some part to weak management in the Bureau, and a cadre of agents, some of whom were rule breakers and who cut corners. It wasn't all bad; they got things done and developed great cases despite bureaucratic hurdles, but it led to problems. Some of this is what got worse under the next Director, William Sessions. Webster’s time as FBI Director ended with the death of Ronald Reagan’s close friend and CIA Director William Casey, and he was nominated by Reagan to take over at CIA.

WILLIAM S. SESSIONS

Many FBI agents considered Sessions (1987 - 1993) a total failure. The fascination with appointing federal judges, first Webster, and now Sessions, was lost on most agents since judges have little management experience outside of running a small office of loyal, highly educated law clerks. When rumors swirled around the agent cadre that Sessions’ first question upon arriving in Washington, D.C. was where the FBI Director’s residence was, many suspected he was out of touch about the job.

Sessions accelerated the tradition most Directors still have today of frequently traveling to FBI field offices to meet with the troops. While nice in concept, it didn’t work in his favor. He often brought his wife along into the office, which was awkward; she would wander away from him and engage in idle chit chat with employees while he was giving a speech. He didn’t seem especially knowledgeable about the field office he was in, didn’t appear to have read the briefing books prepared for him, or even convey an in-depth knowledge about what was going on in the larger FBI.

Discipline became a problem under Sessions’ watch. There were still rules, but it seemed like only the most egregious transgressions were punished. And only then when they became public. The standards at the FBI Academy were loosened and the training time had been cut to twelve weeks. While partially, though not totally his fault, there was a long hiring freeze of new agents for several years. This would become a problem down the road when there was no bench of experienced agents qualified to become supervisors.

Sessions inherited a cadre of agents who were referred to by some as “clagents,” short for clerk/agents. They were former clerks, many in low level jobs like filing fingerprint cards, who had successfully sued the FBI to become special agents, claiming they had been promised agent positions if they first became clerks. Many of them, though certainly not all, who now had 5 to 10 years in the Bureau went on to become significant discipline problems. Not all the disciplinary problems related to the clagents.

Some agents abused the Bureau’s take home car program, drank on duty, drove drunk, didn’t attend firearms as required and several were goldbrickers; they came and went as they pleased, didn’t have significant cases or informants, and were not held accountable. Though it didn’t start on his watch, maybe the worst scandal in the Bureau’s history involving mob leader Whitey Bulger and the Boston FBI office exploded while he was Director. Again, while not all on him, (or even the FBI some would say,) the incidents at Ruby Ridge and Waco occurred during Sessions’ time as Director.

We’ll see in Part III how Director Louie Freeh restored discipline.

Sessions’ personal behavior didn’t help set the overall tone at the FBI, and he was eventually fired by President Clinton for among other transgressions, using the FBI airplane to visit his daughter, and to deliver firewood to his vacation home.

CHRISTOPHER WRAY

Director Wray (2017 - 2025) is being covered out of chronological order here because I don’t have a lot to say about him. I’ll have much more to say about Directors Freeh and Mueller in future articles so I’m saving space in those upcoming edition(s). But the best word to describe Wray’s tenure, which ends as President Trump takes office, is ‘caretaker.’ I’ve heard it said he didn’t so much lead the Bureau, as the Bureau led him. That sounds accurate.

Wray was the product of a prominent southern family of lawyers, business owners, and local government officials. He attended boarding school at Phillips Academy, Yale, Yale Law School, clerked for a federal judge, then spent five years at the white shoe law firm, King and Spaulding.

He went to the U.S. Attorney’s office then DOJ for a total of nine years, rising quickly to senior positions in the Criminal Division. Then he went back to King and Spaulding in Atlanta for twelve years, where his wife hailed from a prominent area family. Her grandfather was a former Atlanta mayor and owned the Atlanta Constitution. Wray made $9.2 Million his final year there, and the Wall Street Journal estimates his net worth at up to $42 Million. Reportedly, his wife and adult children still lived mostly full-time in Atlanta. In short, he didn’t seem to have a lot in common with FBI agents and employees.

Wray’s biggest accomplishment seems to have been defending the FBI’s performance in the Crossfire Hurricane (CH) and related Russia Collusion investigations, (that mostly happened before his watch,) FISA abuses, the events of January 6, 2021, and the Bureau’s role in the unprecedented raid of former President Trump’s home at Mar A Largo. There’s lots to say about all those events, (maybe in future articles,) but Wray’s reflexive responses that everyone acted honorably in these events rings hollow.

More agents and lawyers should have been fired over CH and FISA abuse. Instead, he defaulted to the old standby fix of “additional training” for employees who handled FISAs. If you’ve ever been forced by an employer to sit behind a computer screen clicking through PowerPoint slides, that was the extent of training. And not to get too down in the weeds, but by the time of the final Carter Page FISA, the FBI, DOJ, and the Special Counsel (Mueller,) already knew the Steele Dossier was total nonsense, and the FBI had made Steele’s primary sub-source of information an FBI informant. In other words - not a training issue.

The use of Bureau resources to prosecute hundreds of January 6th misdemeanors, unprecedented in FBI history, (the Bureau rarely investigated misdemeanors prior to January 6th,) is something he should have pushed back on. If misdemeanor cases emanated out of January 6th, they should have been worked by the Metropolitan D.C. or Capitol police. He allowed the FBI to classify all these misdemeanors as domestic terrorism, giving the Biden Administration the talking points that domestic terrorism and white supremacy were the nation’s top terrorism issues.

After two agents were tragically murdered serving a search warrant in Miami on what was considered a low risk operation, he oversaw the use of FBI SWAT teams for almost all arrest and search warrants. Including misdemeanor warrants related the January 6th, (above) and for trespassing at abortion clinics. Agents were authorized to dress very casually (some would say unprofessionally,) and not display their credentials or say their last names during interviews for fear of being doxed. All of this helped contribute to today’s historic low opinion of the FBI.

During his farewell speech, he cited as an accomplishment how many new agents entered on duty during his time as Director. Since agents are hired and retire in pretty predictable timeframes regardless of who is Director, this seems like a weak feat.

History will remember Christopher Wray as among the most inconsequential FBI Directors.

Next - Louis Freeh and Robert S. Mueller III

What I’m Working On:

Book 2 in the CJ Hawk - FBI Thriller Series, ZULU CENTER, dropped on December 9th. A special thanks to everyone who has bought an eBook, paperback, or downloaded it on Kindle Unlimited. (In production is the Audiobook version which will be available as soon as next month.) I’m not supposed to have favorites, but if I did, this book would be it. (So far!)

Next up is Book 3 in the CJ Hawk - FBI Thriller series, WASHINGTON FIELD. I’m nearly done with the first draft, but final edits and timing for release will be dictated by the FBI’s Pre-publication Review Unit who must review all of my FBI-related books - even fiction.

Also, I have a nice outline in place for Book 3 in the Detective Kiki Diaz Thriller Series, titled McLEAN STATION. Since it does not have to go through pre-publication review, look for it to probably come out first, sometime in 2025.

Lastly, I’m working on something really exciting that will probably come out in 2026. I can’t disclose too many details, but look for something that blends thrilling FBI stories with historical fiction.

You can follow everything I’m working on at www.fxregan.com.

Until next time,

F.X.