A crooked Boston agent illustrates the FBI malaise that allowed September 11 to happen, reports ROGER FRANKLIN.
NEW YORK - Sooner or later, probably about the same time victory has been declared in Afghanistan, Washington will get around to taking a long-overdue look at the security lapses that allowed the horrors of September 11 to happen.
Given the benefit of experience, the coming scene in a congressional hearing room will be such a set piece that anyone who has spent more than a few weeks in the United States capital could write the dialogue in advance. Think of it as masochism with a political edge.
At the witness table, a representative sampling of the men who run the FBI.
Wielding the whip, a panel of theatrically aggrieved congressmen.
"In our efforts to foil terrorism," one or other indignant panellist will begin, "how is it that Uncle Sam spent so much to achieve so little?"
It is true, the inquisitor will say in tones dripping with sarcasm, that the FBI's annual budget is chump change. After all, what does a paltry $US30 billion ($72.6 billion) buy these days?
But surely, he will add with a wink to the reporters waiting for a punchline, the FBI could have found a spare dime for a phone call to the immigration authorities.
"Had it done so, well over half the September 11 killers would have been identified as visa violators before they had a chance to book those final one-way flights."
The witnesses' response is also easy to predict. They will remain resentfully silent as the laughter subsides, throats will be cleared and then the FBI brass will serve up their own theatrical cliches - the sort of excuses even now being floated at off-the-record briefings to determine just how well they might fly: a free and open society makes surveillance difficult; minority sensitivities must be considered; and finally, the guardians of domestic tranquillity really have been starved of the cash they need to keep the country safe.
Since this is Washington, the exercise in ritual humiliation will end as these things always do, with the money shot.
After a final, stern lashing, one of the congressmen will utter a weary pledge that, yes, the agency's budget will have to be increased.
As every FBI man since J. Edgar Hoover has known, when it comes to protecting the US from communists, Martin Luther King or, these days, terrorists, no congressman will ever run the risk of a political opponent blaming the next outrage on his parsimony with the public purse.
Even when dragged screaming to the woodshed, the FBI's instinct for playing to the ultimate weakness of all elected officials has never faltered.
The pity of it all is that the narrow focus on terrorism will do nothing to address the real problem: the FBI shows every sign of being an agency too far gone to be worth saving.
The proof is to be found not at Ground Zero on the shattered tip of Manhattan but 290km to the north in Boston, where the culprits are old-fashioned Irish-American gangsters rather than Muslim fanatics.
The man who illustrates the FBI's internal decay is a former agent called John Connolly, once a protege of Hoover himself and, in his heyday, a much-praised gangbuster whose mantelpiece is decorated with some of the agency's highest honours.
Until a few years ago, Connolly was the bureau's poster boy, the man to whom tame reporters would be referred whenever another puff piece about the agency's victories in the war on organised crime was in the offing.
According to those stories, Connolly put the New England mafia out of business almost by himself. He had, for example, a remarkable knack for gathering underworld intelligence.
"If John doesn't know where the bodies are buried, he can make one phone call and find out," an approving superior said back in 1990.
But the truth was rather different: Connolly had a hand in putting the corpses there.
As has now emerged in court documents that charge Connolly with obstructing justice and aiding criminal conspiracies, the Irish agent from the slums of South Boston formed an alliance with a childhood friend, a psychopath called James "Whitey" Bulger, who led the Winter Hill Gang.
According to prosecutors, the bargain they struck was simple: Bulger's crew would be allowed to operate with impugnity as long as they fed Connolly titbits about the activities of their Italian-American rivals.
When the Winter Hill boys killed someone - in one case, the stepdaughter of their deputy leader - Connolly would find someone else to frame.
One such victim, Joseph Salvati, a humble labourer with a weakness for the horses, spent decades behind bars for the murder of a man he had never even met.
True, Connolly was not an agent when the 1966 conviction was recorded, but he did inherit the case files and quite deliberately suppressed a wealth of evidence that should have set Salvati free.
The reason? The real killer was an enforcer for a protected bookmaker, who nominated Salvati to take the fall because he had failed to pay a $US400 gambling debt.
Court documents leave no doubt that Hoover knew of the coverup, as did a succession of later FBI chiefs. In one instance, when the enforcer tried to ease a troubled conscience while serving life for yet another murder, Connolly and his partner allegedly promised to have him killed in prison if he persisted in causing trouble.
So is Connolly just one bad apple in an otherwise unblemished barrel? That has been the party line at the FBI since reporters first began unravelling the web of Connolly's corruption, one strand at a time.
But even as Connolly was stonewalling a grand jury last week, he was forming a film production company with former Summer Hill gangster James Flynn. The goal, says the Boston Herald, is a "sympathetic telling of Connolly's life."
Tom Cruise, George Clooney and Matt Damon are said to be bidding for the rights - and yet, from the FBI's chiefs in Washington, not a peep of protest.
The reign of self-serving silence at the FBI goes on forever.
Story archives:
Links: Terror in America - the Sept 11 attacks
Timeline: Major events since the Sept 11 attacks
The G-men could be too far gone for guardianship
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