Bad Blood at the FBI

By the time TWA flight 800 exploded off the coast of Long Island this past summer, the travel office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation headquarters in Washington, D.C. had begun to look like a ticket counter at La Guardia Airport. A two-year wave of bombings and terrorist attacks had kept the FBI's explosives experts circling the globe, hopping from one pile of smoking rubble to the next. One day they were rummaging through the charred garage of Manhattan's World Trade Center, the next they were flying off to the Philippines to pick through clues left by a terrorist who plotted t blow up U.S.-owned airlines.

Then, in nearly staccato fashion, came the monstrous blast in Oklahoma City, the 1996 car-bombing attack on a U.S. Army base in Saudi Arabia, the torching of churches in the South, the bombing of abortion clinics and a ragtag onslaught of domestic militias that seemed to compete with one another to attack federal installations. When an unattended bag exploded in Atlanta's Centennial Park during the Olympic Games, it indeed seemed that America was "under attack," as FBI Director Louis Freeh had put it.

Another kind of bomb, though, was ticking away beneath Freeh's office on Pennsylvania Avenue: Supervisory Special Agent Frederic Whitehurst, once the FBI's top bomb expert, had raised charges that agents in the bureau's vaunted crime lab routinely slanted evidence and even committed perjury in the pursuit of various cases. If Whitehurst's claims were true--and there were those who believed that they (continued on page 138)Bad Blood at the FBI(continued from page 129) were--the verdicts in thousands of cases, spanning a decade, could possibly be at stake.

In the wake of his allegations, White-hurst, a mustachioed Vietnam veteran with a Ph.D. in chemistry from Duke University, had been reassigned to a trainee slot in the bureau's paint analysis division in May 1994. It was clear to Whitehurst that he'd been demoted as a result of his criticism of the FBI's internal affairs. This was nothing new to him. For years he'd been dismissed as too much of a perfectionist--even a crank--by many of his FBI colleagues.

Then again, his performance reviews had been consistently outstanding. In fact, one report, written on the eve of the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995, described his explosives analysis as "rivaled by no one else in the laboratory."

Still, Whitehurst had stayed put when other agents rushed to the wreckage of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. He wasn't even permitted to work on the case. Instead, he was assigned to analyze paint and hazardous materials. When he criticized lab procedures there, he was transferred to the lab that evaluates bomb-removal robots.

"Fred, you can't work on high-profile incidents," a colleague once joked. "You are a high-profile incident."

Whitehurst had earned his reputation. Late at night, tapping away on a laptop in his suburban Maryland home, he had churned out stacks of numbingly detailed and often emotional complaints--to his bosses, to FBI lawyers, to congressmen and to officials at the Justice Department--more than 100 memos in all. Although White-hurst's grievances addressed a variety of cases, employees and procedures, they all had the same subtext: Something was seriously wrong in the laboratories of the FBI building.

In the aftermath of the World Trade Center bombing, Whitehurst leveled his most serious charge: A senior lab official, he claimed in an internal memo, had fabricated evidence in pursuit of the case. So meticulous was Whitehurst's paper trail that when O.J. Simpson criminal trial attorney Johnnie Cochran learned of it, he enlisted Whitehurst as the defense's "mystery witness," the agent who would supposedly destroy the FBI's blood analysis of the prosecution's evidence.

Judge Lance Ito, however, ruled that Whitehurst had no "direct or specific knowledge relating to" the FBI's testimony and kept him from the stand. Whitehurst's moment seemed over. He returned to the lab and his dead-end job. But a funny thing happened on the way to Whitehurst's oblivion: An outside panel, assembled by Attorney General Janet Reno, began to examine Whitehurst's charges more closely. And slowly, people began wondering if the scientist had something to say after all.

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When Fred Whitehurst joined the FBI in 1982 he took its motto seriously.

"Fidelity, bravery, integrity" carried a lot of weight with the ex-Army sergeant, a torpedo-like man with intense black eyes. During three combat tours in Vietnam, virtues such as "fighting for freedom" evaporated with every burning hamlet. From the Gulf of Tonkin to Watergate, Whitehurst believed, all the big crises of his generation had begun with little lies.

So when the circulars appeared with regularity from the directors of the FBI ("report all instances of waste, fraud and abuse"), Whitehurst, then a rookie agent with the bureau, followed them to the letter. He refused to tolerate even casual cheating--agents' phony time cards, inflated expense reports, the personal use of bureau cars.

He also stopped tolerating office humor about blacks and women. "Who's going to police us if we don't police ourselves?" Whitehurst would routinely ask colleagues.

Naturally, most agents didn't understand Whitehurst's fastidiousness. Many thought he was a jerk. But Whitehurst hoped--indeed, he expected--that things would be different in 1986, when he was promoted to the crime lab. Assigned to a unit that analyzed bomb-blast residues, Whitehurst looked forward to being able to concentrate on pure science.

That wasn't to be. Whitehurst found himself apprenticed to Terry Rudolph, a lab agent he considered dangerously sloppy. Hazardous chemicals were left out in the open, and work areas were contaminated, he charged in an internal memo. In fact, he said, a piece of missing evidence had turned up one day in a trash can. And to add to the confusion, agent Rudolph's case notes and data were chaotic and downright incomprehensible.

Whitehurst speculated that Rudolph's documentation was untidy for a reason. According to another Whitehurst memo, Rudolph supposedly once told him, "The more cryptic the [lab] notes, the less chance the defense counsel has to question the results." According to a statement Whitehurst later gave to FBI investigators, Rudolph also commented that "all the examiners in the FBI laboratory perjured themselves and he himself had."

The way Whitehurst went after Rudolph--relentlessly--would set a pattern of conflict that would continue through numerous cases over the next ten years.

His first concentrated assault concerned the 1989 trial in San Francisco of Steve Psinakis, a man charged with participating in a terrorist plot against Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos in 1981. At first blush, the FBI seemed to have a strong case against Psinakis, based partly on detonation cord that agents said they found in Psinakis' trash, and partly on tools agents had found in his house.

But that wasn't good enough for Whitehurst, who concluded that agent Rudolph had contaminated the evidence and poorly documented his case data. Whitehurst outlined his charges to supervisors; then, convinced that the warning was falling on deaf ears, he flew to San Francisco to present his opinions directly to Psinakis' attorneys. As a result, Psinakis was acquitted.

Whitehurst felt vindicated. The federal prosecutor in the case, Charles Burch, blasted Rudolph's "fundamentally unsound procedure" in a letter to William Sessions, who was then director of the FBI. "I believe," said the letter, "that sufficiently serious questions were raised in this prosecution about the FBI laboratory's procedures."

Whitehurst's superiors were not pleased--and he was censured, fined a week's pay and placed on probation for six months for having gone outside of proper channels. Nevertheless, the mercurial agent's career resumed, promotions came regularly and his job performance reviews were glowing. In fact, one internal report filed after the World Trade Center bombing praised Whitehurst's "exceptional dedication, perseverance and analytical abilities."

"No other matter than the World Trade Center investigation," said the report, "offers a better example of Whitehurst's exceptional ability to get the job done under the most extreme, stressful, high-visibility circumstances."

Despite such praise, the agent could not get Rudolph out of his teeth. He wanted every case that Rudolph had (continued on page 170)Bad Blood at the FBI(continued from page 138) touched to be reexamined. "Fred," a supervisor counseled him, "you may be right about Rudolph, but if you pursue this matter you will destroy yourself, your career and your family. Is it worth it?"

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Other targets soon came into Whitehurst's sights. One was David Williams, a senior FBI agent; the other was Roger Martz, chief of the lab's chemistry and toxicology unit.

On the night of February 23, 1993, when Whitehurst arrived on the scene of the World Trade Center bombing, Williams was already struggling to gain command of the garage where the bomb had been detonated. The NYPD, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the FBI were all jockeying for control of the evidence, which would be culled from 40 tons of rubble. At one point an outraged FBI agent even discovered an ATF technician ripping FBI labels off packets of evidence and sticking on her own bureau's labels.

Williams' performance at the crime scene was clumsy and sporadic, Whitehurst believed, but this was nothing compared with Martz' lab work, which Whitehurst claimed would lead investigators down a blind alley.

Whitehurst's objections focused on a piece of tire from the garage that looked as if it had smoky traces of the explosion on it. Agents in New Jersey, meanwhile, had raided a suspect's storage locker and confiscated chemicals that might have been used in making bombs.

Whitehurst noted that Martz had reported a strong presence of urea and nitrates--elements commonly found in bombs--on the tire fragment and on swabs taken from the New Jersey storage locker. To laymen--such as FBI street agents, prosecutors and judges--that may be enough of a match for an arrest warrant. To Whitehurst, it meant nothing. A public garage could be contaminated by urine and road salt, both of which contain urea. As for nitrates, everyone's hands are covered with them; so are walls, windows and furniture in a typical office. So Whitehurst lodged a protest--but Martz refused to budge. As a result, Whitehurst enlisted a lab colleague in an exercise: One of them urinated into a beaker, evaporated the liquid, then tested the dried residue with a mass spectrometer (the same type of equipment Martz used to analyze the alleged bomb materials from the garage). The readout: urea and nitrates.

Whitehurst and the colleague presented their findings to an assistant section chief. Martz backed off from his claim, allowing that he may have accidentally contaminated the test material with urea from his perspiring hands.

Martz refused to discuss the incident for this article.

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Whitehurst eventually made Martz--like Rudolph before him--the focus of his zeal. He began researching other cases Martz had been involved in.

One was the conviction of Walter Leroy Moody Jr. for the 1989 mailbombing murder of federal judge Robert Vance in Alabama. Martz, along with senior bomb analyst Tom Thurman, supplied critical testimony in Moody's trial concerning bomb residue found in Judge Vance's kitchen. The men testified that the substance was known as Hercules Red Dot double-base smokeless powder--the same powder used in other bombings for which Moody had been convicted.

Whitehurst researched the case and was floored. "I don't know where they made that up from," he claimed in a letter to the FBI's inspector general, one in a growing file in the inspector's office. "The work of the FBI laboratory in no way, shape or form 'identified' that powder as Hercules Red Dot smokeless powder." Worse, Whitehurst was convinced that neither Martz, who holds a B.S. in biology from the University of Cincinnati, nor Thurman was qualified to discuss the composition of chemicals. "Mr. Thurman has very little, if any, idea what makes an explosive function," Whitehurst argued in a memo. "He has spent his time in the field as an explosives ordnance technician. He is simply a man who blows up explosives.

"Mr. Thurman trained to be a technician in the U.S. Naval Explosive Ordnance Disposal School. He did not train to be a scientist." ("As much as I'd like to get my two cents' worth in," Thurman responded when reached at his FBI office, "I can't.")

In the end, Whitehurst claimed that Moody "may have been guilty as hell, but he didn't get a fair trial."

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Whitehurst was closely following developments in an alleged plot by Iraqi agents to assassinate George Bush during the former president's postwar trip to Kuwait in April 1993. An unexploded bomb had been discovered in a car near the former president's. Whitehurst had been assigned to the case and was comparing material retrieved from the undetonated bomb with bomb material the CIA traced to Iraq.

He couldn't find a definitive match. "At this time that link cannot be made," Whitehurst wrote in his internal report. "This laboratory therefore has no information to support the hypothesis that Iraqi agents were involved with the assassination attempt."

Whitehurst was understandably taken aback a few days later when he heard President Clinton say there was Iraqi involvement in the plot. Clinton then launched 23 Tomahawk missiles at Baghdad. When then-U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright made the administration's case to the United Nations, she spoke of extensive FBI reports.

Whitehurst was furious. "The truth of the matter," he wrote to the inspector general, "is that Unit Chief Chris Ronay or someone reworded and/or purposely misinterpreted my report, despite my strong statements disavowing a relationship between the explosives used in the past by Iraqi agents and those used in the Bush assassination attempt."

Ronay, now retired, says Whitehurst missed the bigger picture: "There were more important things than the explosives--other technologies--involved in this," he says. "A lot of the other intelligence doesn't even take into account the explosives analysis. If Whitehurst thinks that there was no justification for finding the Iraqis guilty, he's wrong."

Ronay won't say what the "more important things" were. The Kuwaitis charged six men in the plot. Two were sentenced to be executed and four were jailed for life.

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"I'm working on the biggest FBI investigation ever--the investigation of the FBI laboratory," Fred Whitehurst told a friend one day. It was false bravado. The fact was, the FBI was taking him down, piece by psychological piece.

It started after the Psinakis incident, when the bureau sent Whitehurst to a facility in Charlottesville, Virginia for Vietnam veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. The place was a flea-infested dump, Whitehurst later complained to a lawyer in the FBI's general counsel's office. Some vets were even dealing, he said, and therapy amounted to daylong, zonked-out crying jags.

"I can assure you," he wrote to the attorney, "that even today I can cry about my experiences in Vietnam. The taste of the horror of war will never leave my mouth. But I function just fine. My record proves it. The problem is not what can I do about Vietnam, but how can we continue to ignore the corruption in the FBI?"

After the Charlottesville experience, the FBI ordered Whitehurst to get a psychological evaluation. He saw four therapists, all of whom agreed he suffered from stress. However, one of them, while noting Whitehurst's frayed nerves, reported in November 1993: "He does not show, in my opinion, a full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder." More than passingly familiar with the agent's work situation, the psychologist added:

"It is important to note that Mr. Whitehurst's primary allegiance is to the truth, and, as such, he may not always appear to be working in agreeable fashion with prosecutors or even his colleagues. "This, of course, does not make him oppositional," the psychologist concluded. "Rather, it simply means he is doing his job."

Still, 17 months later, when a huge blast tore off the front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, the bomb expert remained benched, relegated to his bare cubbyhole in the FBI's Washington office, studying photocopier ink and paint swatches. With a mixture of envy, disgust and curiosity, he again watched his colleagues spin into action.

As Whitehurst would learn, one piece of evidence in the Oklahoma City bombing case was a knife that police allegedly confiscated from suspect Timothy McVeigh. Martz had supposedly examined the blade and found traces of PETN, a chemical commonly found in bombs. He wrote up his report. Then another lab examiner, Steve Burmeister, conducted his own tests.

Burmeister found traces of nitroglycerin, but no PETN. As he often did, he discussed his findings with Whitehurst and the two men concluded it was impossible to determine if the knife had arrived with PETN or nitroglycerin on it, or if these substances had been picked up from other materials in the FBI lab. The contamination problem had long been a crusade of Whitehurst's.

"We have no idea what Martz could have done wrong with the evidence," Whitehurst reported in an April 27, 1995 memo, this one sent to the Justice Department's inspector general, the FBI general counsel's office and the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility.

"Did Martz lean on a table possibly contaminated with PETN residue," Whitehurst speculated, "and then transfer the residue to McVeigh's shirt, or to Martz' collection of lab glassware? Did he use any piece of possibly contaminated equipment? We will never know."

Whitehurst also claimed Martz was "now looking like crazy for ammonium nitrate because someone said the bomb was made of ammonium nitrate. He's trying to prove guilt. He's not following the time-honored profession of looking for the answer. Martz doesn't know anything about explosives."

Whitehurst then made a prediction: "When this comes to light in the trial of the fellow McVeigh, it will be extremely problematical for the prosecutor."

McVeigh's attorney, Steve Jones, deposed Whitehurst on behalf of his client. "Based on information Whitehurst stated under oath in his deposition, I anticipate that a subpoena will be issued for him to testify for the defense in Mr. McVeigh's trial," Jones told playboy, predicting that at least two other lab employees would back up Whitehurst's criticisms. "We will make a frontal assault" on the FBI bomb lab, Jones declared. Indeed, prosecutors in the case indicated to reporters that they wouldn't call Roger Martz or David Williams to the witness stand. "But I can call them," Jones was quick to add.

As preparations for the Oklahoma bombing trials accelerated, unflattering stories about Whitehurst showed up in the press. "There is fear that Whitehurst is driven in part by a craving for danger," said an article in Time magazine last November that also called him a "rogue agent." Meanwhile, the FBI had opened an investigation of Whitehurst, charging that the agent had leaked classified information to Congress, as well as for this playboy article.

Furthermore, Whitehurst was denied access to some of his personnel files. In documents filed in court, he described his pursuit of his records from office to office, commenting: "There was no signout sheet to indicate where the records were." He was also told he had no authority to know who had those records, or to have access to them himself.

By 1996 Whitehurst had his own lawyer and sued the FBI for violation of the Freedom of Information and Privacy acts. He accused the bureau of "harassment and intimidation" in retaliation for his whistle-blowing. He demanded his bomb-unit job back and a cessation of all investigations of him. Because the FBI prohibited Whitehurst from discussing classified matters--virtually his entire case--with his attorney without first telling his supervisors what he planned to talk about, Whitehurst filed an amended complaint, alleging, among other things, a violation of his right to full and private legal representation. At that point, according to Whitehurst's attorney, the bureau moved to fire him outright.

Frederic Whitehurst remains remarkably confident when he speaks of his current troubles.

"You know," he says, "what we need to do is just go on about our job. If people need to go to jail, that's not my problem. Our job is law enforcement, it's not beating the shit out of one another."

Which doesn't mean Fred Whitehurst has gone soft. "If you find out there's some criminal activity going on within my Department of Justice and you report it to me, then I will go forward and report it--that's my job. And I work a case like you wouldn't believe."

On January 24, 1997 the FBI placed Frederic Whitehurst on administrative leave as an "interim" step pending further investigation. The agency confiscated Whitehurst's badge and gun and barred him from entering any FBI building. The case is far from finished.

"Who's going to police us if we don't police our-selves?" Whitehurst would routinely ask.