The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump

by Andrew G. McCabe

discriminate between right and wrong. It can discern. It can punish. It can praise. Authority is activated by a crisis. And it must be earned, as Mueller had earned his. It keeps us solid when things are falling apart.

knew something about the bombs themselves—they were homemade devices that consisted of pressure cookers packed with ball bearings, nails, and explosives rendered from firecrackers.

From forensic evidence, we knew that the second bomb had detonated on the ground, next to a mailbox in front of the Forum restaurant. The analyst reviewed commercial video from across the street, looking at the Forum. The footage showed a man, wearing a white baseball cap, walk up to the spot with what appeared to be a backpack on his shoulder. We then looked at the Forum’s footage, which pointed in the opposite direction, showing the back of the crowd on the sidewalk, in front of the restaurant, watching the finish.

Guardian is the name of the FBI system that organizes complaints and baseline evaluations of every person who comes to our attention in the context of criminal activity, including terrorism and cybercrime. Having a Guardian means that you have been a subject of an investigative inquiry of some kind. A name comes in, it gets entered into Guardian, the person or the lead gets assigned to an investigator, and the process begins. The results of any investigative effort then get loaded back into Guardian, and if there’s not much there to go on—if it’s not enough to predicate the opening of a full investigation—it eventually gets closed. That’s what had happened with Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

In March 2011, the FSB, the Russian Federal Security Service, had told the FBI that Tamerlan and his mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, ethnic Chechen immigrants to the U.S., held radical Islamic beliefs.

We asked the FSB for more specifics, since we don’t investigate beliefs. We never got any more specifics.

Counterterrorism involves risk. It involves trade-offs. Go too far in one direction—toward the all-seeing eye of a national-security state on a permanent war footing—and you undermine the rights and liberties we cherish as a nation. I wish the trade-off did not exist, but it does.

Mueller, Joyce, and I decided on a new communications strategy with Congress. We would make more effort to inform congressional leadership of the details on the front end of a crisis, in hopes that we could spend less energy correcting mistaken impressions on the back end. We began making personal telephone calls to the congressional leadership during the earliest hours after major incidents and following up with regular updates.

Until or unless terrorism disappears from the world, or the U.S. becomes a surveillance state, the FBI will continue to open and close cases on a very small number of people who go on to do terrible things. But now, when the FBI finds out that this has happened, it takes us an hour to acknowledge the situation. There is no debate anymore.

The FBI’s Snowden problem had two dimensions: exposure and spoilage. His leaked documents brought counterintelligence under intense public scrutiny—not a situation in which counterintelligence thrives. Before Snowden, counterintelligence had always existed in a netherworld, right where it belongs. As a field of endeavor, it favors sheltered, quiet conditions and was rarely much discussed even internally. In presentations of the President’s Daily Brief and the director’s briefings, where the counterterrorism division was always under the gun, the counterintelligence division was almost never under the gun. Now, all of a sudden, because of Snowden, Mueller could not get enough counterintelligence. He brought out a twelve-gauge full of questions: Where is Snowden now? What is he telling the Chinese? What is he telling the Russians? What are we doing to get him charged? Have we figured out the full extent of what he took? How deep are we into the damage assessment? The assistant director of counterintelligence had never before looked down the barrel of Mueller’s questioning. He is the only person I ever saw come near to telling Mueller where to go.