Sept. 22, 2006 – 8:18 p.m.
The FBI’s new top counterterrorism guy, Willie T. Hulon, says he’s going to stick around for awhile.
That’s got to be a relief for his boss, FBI Director Robert O. Mueller III, who has seen so many executives come and go since 9/11 that he probably has to carry a face book around the J. Edgar Hoover Building.
The door to the FBI’s counterterrorism office, in particular, has looked like an EZ Pass lane to a lucrative retirement over the past five years. All but one of its last six chiefs have quickly move through it to jobs in private industry.
But seven may be the charm. When Mueller offered Hulon the top counterterrorism job in June, they had a little chat.
“Yeah” Hulon said, cracking a slight smile during an interview in his comfortable office along the heavily secured executive corridor of FBI headquarters. “We had a discussion about not leaving as soon as I was eligible to retire.”
That would be 2007, as it turns out, a couple of months away.
But Hulon, a middle-aged African-American who still moves with an athlete’s gait, insists he’s going to stay put for the foreseeable future.
“I am committed to moving forward with what we have going with the establishment of the National Security Branch and other challenges we face,” he says.
The NSB was created last year to manage all of the FBI’s intelligence operations — a key recommendation of the 9/11 Commission. Previously, the bureau’s powerful 56 field offices controlled investigations on their turf.
The creation of the NSB gives Hulon immense, unprecedented power over a wide variety of domestic intelligence operations.
A big part of that is managing the bureau’s traditional counterintelligence missions, such as uncovering Chinese and other foreign spies here. Hulon is also responsible for ferreting out turncoats in the FBI’s own ranks.
But the FBI’s number one priority these days is stopping another terrorism spectacular on U.S. soil. Despite all the rewiring of U.S. intelligence since 9/11 — the addition of two huge new bureaucracies, the Department of Homeland Security and the uber-spooks National Intelligence Directorate — the FBI remains the nation’s number one domestic counterterrorism agency.
And so it falls to Hulon, 49, who spent two decades investigating drugs, gangs, domestic terrorism and violent crimes before moving into counterterrorism two years ago, to root out al Qaeda operatives before they can strike again.
“He’s a big bear of a man, yet he walks softly,” says a senior FBI official, who asked that his name not be used, “but don’t provoke him.”
Preventing another major attack is “pretty much” a 24/7 job, Hulon says, shaking his head at the pressure cooker his agents endure at the National Counterterrorism Center in Virginia, where they work side-by-side with their CIA counterparts — another post-9/11 reform. Hulon’s deputy Phil Mudd also came over from CIA, where he spent a career in terrorism analysis.
“We have some real good chemistry,” Hulon says of Mudd, “and we get together over coffee in the morning, and we talk about how we’ve really got to make some progress over the next two or three years, to get to where we really want to be and keep this team together for as long as we can.”
In one sharp departure from his predecessors, Hulon said he thinks it’s important for the head of FBI counterterrorism to have a basic understanding of the Islamic foe.
A year ago, Jon Stewart and other TV comics made hash out of FBI officials who were videotaped drawing blanks when asked basic questions put to them about Islam. Such expertise, they maintained, wasn’t important as being a “good manager.”
Hulon takes sharp issue with that.
“Yes, sure it’s right to know the difference” between Sunnis and Shi’a, whose 1,600-year-long war is being played out in the streets of Baghdad and fueling hatred of America, he said. “It’s important to know who your targets are.”
Just as Hulon was settling into his job, however, the FBI drew ridicule when it announced it had broken up a terrorist plot in Miami, in which the conspirators seemed more like wannabees than hard-core holy warriors.
To the critics, an undercover FBI agent had goaded a gaggle of sad-sack suspects into dreams of taking down Chicago’s Sears Tower.
But Hulon says that even the most rudimentary plots are violations of the law.
“I totally disagree it was not a worthwhile endeavor,” he said. “I do acknowledge that it was not ‘al Qaeda Central,’ but the fact that these guys were talking about various acts and were taking steps to do that — that was something we had to disrupt and neutralize.
“What we had were individuals who were talking about and planning and were readying an action plan. How successful they would have been is another story. But they had the desire and motivation to do something.”
Hulon’s appointment was not universally and instantly welcomed among FBI veterans, some of whom reacted like soldiers eyeballing their new lieutenant.
“I really wasn’t sure at first,” said one senior counterterrorism agent, declining to speak on the record. “But he’s done a good job. I like him.”
“The thing that sets Willie apart,” said the senior FBI official,“is that he is regarded as an agent’s agent. He is well regarded by other FBI executives. They view him as a straight shooter on the Hill.
“And here is the toughest test,” the official said. “Across the country, street agents respect him as a guy who knows what they do.”
One of Hulon’s priorities, in fact, has been to chip away at the FBI’s reputation for big footing into cases developed by local police.
“I think we are doing much better than we [did] before 9/11,” says Hulon, who started out as a cop in Memphis, where he was born and raised.
“In the last year, I don't think you’ve heard any major city police chief complain that the FBI is not sharing information,” he says, pointing to the bureau’s work with the Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York, which includes the NYPD, to disrupt an alleged plot to blow up tunnels into Manhattan.
“The one thing they did state was that the information was shared from beginning to end by the FBI, the JTTF and the other federal agencies,” Hulon said, maintaining that “everybody there praised the FBI.”
Maybe so, but last year a number of states and large metroxpolitan areas started creating their own “fusion centers” to coordinate regional intelligence on their own. The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security were basically invited along for the ride.
Hulon, the former city cop, gets it.
“As we go on,” he said, “I see improvements, from month to month.”
Hulon was 10 when the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated a few blocks from his house.
“I remember it vividly,” he said, folding his hands in front of his face. The city had been in turmoil for weeks with a strike by sanitation workers, one of whom was a neighbor he greatly admired.
The FBI had a poor image among African-Americans, which only worsened with the revelations of FBI founder J. Edgar Hoover’s enraged antipathy for the civil rights leader.
None of that evidently affected the young Hulon, the son of a truck driver and a homemaker, whose favorite TV shows were “Dragnet” and “The FBI Story.”
“I always had a desire to be in law enforcement, even when I was a very, very small child,” he says.
“My parents were hard-working, law abiding citizens, so they taught me as a child that law enforcement was good, and . . . not to be afraid of law enforcement, that the policeman is there to help you.”
After graduating in 1979 from Rhodes College, a nearby private liberal arts school, Hulon joined the Memphis City Police, only to move on within two years to the FBI. He rose steadily through the ranks, even as the FBI fought off suits from black agents alleging they were passed over for promotion on the basis of race. A long-running class action discrimination suit was settled in 2001.
(The bureau has also wrestled with suits by gays, Hispanics and Arab-American agents alleging patterns of discrimination.)
With the promotion of Michael Mason from the Washington field office to run the criminal division last summer, African-Americans now hold two seats in the FBI’s highest ranks.
That’s a long, long way from 1968. But Hulon downplays the racial symbolism of his hire.
“I don’t look at it as an African-American doing the job,” he said of his career. “I’ve done this pretty quietly.”
IMAGINE: The FBI still holds confidential files on John Lennon. The U.S. vs. John Lennon, a new film that chronicles the Nixon Administration’s campaign to deport the thinking man’s Beatle for his anti-Vietnam War protests also spotlights the 24-year-long legal campaign to get access to records on the government’s surveillance of him in the early 1970s. “This case has been going on so long that the Fab Four team of plaintiff and attorneys fighting the FBI has already well outlasted the Beatles,” crows a press release from law firm Morrison & Foerster. Some files are here.
SPEAKING OF THE FBI (AGAIN): Veteran former FBI undercover agent Mike German, who blew the whistle on management misdeeds, later documented in a Justice Department Inspector General’s report, has joined the ACLU as policy counsel. The blonde-haired, blue-eyed agent spent most of his 16 years working undercover among white supremacy groups.
BEERS ON US: The National Security Network debuts Tuesday, Sept. 26, helmed by Rand Beers, a former Bush White House counterterrorism chief, but with a heavily Democratic crew. “Aimed at revitalizing national security policy for a new era,” the NSN will further explain itself at the National Press Club, with help from Rep.
NUCLEAR SPIES: The CIA suspected in 1997 that the Russians had conducted a clandestine nuclear bomb test, according to once Top Secret documents made public late Friday, Sept. 22. One report shows that CIA Director George J. Tenet assembled an outside review panel to investigate “after detection of a seismic event in the vicinity of Novaya Zemlya on August 16, 1997,” the National Security Archive at George Washington University said in a statement announcing publication of 33 formerly classified documents on its Web site. “That detection, combined with satellite reconnaissance showing unusual activity at the test site, led to concerns within the Intelligence Community that Russia had conducted a nuclear test despite its pledge to abide by the terms of the (Comprehensive Test ban Treaty)."
Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.