-Caveat Lector- http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/front/971628 Houston Chronicle July 18, 2001, 11:27PM Cover-ups inside FBI disclosed Dated computers among problems By MICHAEL HEDGES Copyright 2001 Houston Chronicle Washington Bureau WASHINGTON -- FBI officials Wednesday described massive problems inside the agency, including cover-ups, retribution against whistle-blowers and computers so outdated that they won't run basic software. Senators at a Judiciary Committee hearing spanked the FBI for its latest blunder in losing hundreds of guns and laptop computers. The lawmakers then listened as FBI officials testified to deep, entrenched troubles in the country's major law enforcement agency. Belying the bureau's image of a high-tech law enforcement organization, FBI assistant director Bob Dies said, "for a variety of reasons, the FBI information technology has had no meaningful improvement in six years. Some parts of our system are much older." Dies, a former IBM executive hired to rectify major problems in the FBI's information systems, said at least 13,000 FBI desktop computers, "cannot run today's basic software" and that the FBI agents are working on computers lacking "features that your teen-agers have enjoyed for years." Kenneth Senser, a CIA official sent to the FBI to review bureau security procedures in the wake of the spy charges against former FBI agent Robert Hanssen, testified about major failures in that area. Senser said the FBI's security lapses had contributed in Hanssen's ability to spy for Moscow for 20 years, as the former agent admitted in a guilty plea this month. FBI internal security measures, "were often poorly coordinated, inefficient, and not as effective as possible," Senser testified. The testimony about poor FBI security and abysmal technology reached a Senate panel already steaming about media reports of 449 lost weapons and 180 lost laptop computers, with at least a few containing sensitive information. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-NY, said, "The fact that, with computers with classified information and with weapons like machine guns, the FBI had such lax procedures is damning ... One scratches one's head in wonderment and asks, `How does a law enforcement agency lose guns, especially machine guns?' " Iowa Republican Sen. Charles Grassley said, "To have laptops missing that could have national security information on them would be atrocious. For the FBI to have lost firearms and failed to account for them is inexcusable." But even more troubling to some senators was a series of accounts Wednesday of cover-ups, stonewalling and retribution inside the bureau. Active duty agents described a deep, angry split inside the bureau, while senators vowed to protect them from retaliation from inside the FBI. An internal FBI struggle pitted rank and file agents against officials who have senior executive status, acquired by being appointed to top jobs by the director or his deputies, officials testified. John Roberts, an FBI agent who was assigned to conduct a thorough review of the FBI's action during a shootout at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, testified that not only were his findings whitewashed, but also he and another investigator, "received what we perceived to be threats from (high-ranking FBI) personnel." Roberts said he bucked the threats and filed a report detailing "serious misconduct" by seven FBI senior executives who he said were involved in an attempted cover-up of FBI misdeeds at Ruby Ridge, where an FBI sniper accidentally shot to death the wife of white separatist Randy Weaver in 1992. But the report was ignored by Justice Department officials, Roberts said. A formal finding was issued in January saying no misconduct occurred. "I find this conclusion to be outrageous," Roberts testified. "I believe anyone who reviews this matter will find the conclusions alarming." Recently retired FBI agent John Werner, who worked with Roberts on the Ruby Ridge case, agreed that officials inside the bureau "use intimidation and retaliation against anyone who would ... challenge their interests." Werner said the internal divide had caused major morale problems among line agents. "Agents expressed reluctance to become involved in a management system they believed to be hypocritical and lacking ethics," he said. As with other FBI critics testifying Wednesday, Werner emphasized that there were many positives within the agency. "It is important not to forget the dedicated hard work performed by the more than 26,000 FBI employees who successfully investigate thousands of cases each year," he said. "There are things broken in the FBI, primarily management related, but the basics of how agents conduct their investigations (are) not broken." Frank Perry, an FBI agent who handled hundreds of ethics complaints at the bureau while detailed to internal affairs, said the senior executives in the FBI were joined into a "made member" club dedicated to quashing probes of alleged wrongdoing. Perry said recently retired FBI Director Louis Freeh had once told him that "senior executives complained to him that he was over-emphasizing `this integrity thing.' " Patrick Kiernan, appointed by Freeh to head a new ethics unit in 1996, said he encountered stonewalling and threats of retaliation when he was assigned to help in the review of the FBI's siege on the Branch Davidian compound near Waco in 1993. "Sometimes career advancement at any cost becomes the ultimate goal and decisions are made for selfish interests, as opposed to the good of the organization or the country," he said. Senators on Wednesday heard some reports of progress in solving the FBI's problems, along with suggestions to address ethics concerns. Dies said he was "on schedule and within costs" to implement a "workable system of information technology" within the FBI over the next several months. But he warned that the improvements were just a foundation, that "would not by itself give the FBI a world-class, state of the art (computer technology) system." Senser outlined a seven-step program designed to catch future Hanssen-type spies. "No security system can absolutely prevent a trusted insider from making the decision to compromise this organization and the country," he said. 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