I’ve been working on a novel set in Washington around the time of the 2008 primary season, and have come to do a little research on former FBI director Louis Freeh. Louie’s been back in the news, not that he wants to be, very much, representing one of his best buddies, Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, probably the leading bag man in DC. Among other things, the Prince gave Mrs. General Powell a vintage Jaguar the day after the General retired, an exact duplicate of the one Mrs. Powell told the Prince she missed so much.
The Prince has been tangled up in some disputes over payoffs by an outfit called BAE Systems, one of the largest arms dealers in the world. The Justice Department has just announced a settlement with BAE. Will the Prince be involved? Don’t hold your breath. The NYT has details here. So does the Manchester Guardian.
You can read an interview with Louie Freeh explaining why the Prince’s hands are clean here. Louie recently took out Italian citizenship. I wonder why?
Afterwords
There’s remarkably little written about Freeh, who resigned from the FBI before his ten-year directorship ended, prior to 9/11. I strongly suspect that he was pushed out, exhausting the patience of his Republican overseers by his failure to destroy President Clinton, bungling any number of cases in his attempts to do so. In 2005, Freeh published My FBI: Bringing Down the Mafia, Investigating Bill Clinton, and Fighting the War on Terror, a monumental effort at ass-covering, written largely in response to Richard Clarke’s accurate portrayal of Freeh as a monumental incompetent. The only reviewer to take Freeh to task was I.C. Smith, here, but even Smith is in thrall to the notion that Freeh is “a moral man with strong Catholic beliefs.” In fact, Freeh was, from the very get-go, a shameless political suck-up who made the FBI the political tool of first the Clinton Administration and then the Republican Congress.* The Republicans, one guesses, had had their fill of Freeh’s promises, and, recognizing incompetence when they saw it, pushed him out.
*“Why Freeh bothered to write such an incomplete book is perplexing to me,” says Smith. If Freeh had written a “complete” one, he probably would have ended up in jail.
