FBI Story: Inside Look at Agency in Need of Reform

Take, for example, the 1996 case of FBI agent Gary Harlow, former instructor at the Quantico training facility. In 1996, Harlow left his elite instructor job at Quantico and began working on for the Clinton White House, doing top-secret clearances.

Then one summer night, Harlow had an argument with his wife. He allegedly punched her in the face, whereupon she fled for medical care. It was while getting her broken nose fixed that Mrs. Harlow informed the doctors about how well armed her FBI agent husband was. The doctors immediately informed the local police.

When police arrived at Harlow's house they did not find him home but instead stumbled upon a huge cache of weapons. Somehow, over the years at the FBI academy, Harlow had managed to acquire more than 100,000 rounds of ammunition, night-vision gear, plastic explosive, hand grenades, gas masks and machine guns - all of it marked "Property of the FBI."

Harlow was arrested in his car shortly thereafter. The arresting officers noted that Harlow had seven machine guns with him in the car. At his trial Harlow pleaded guilty to "theft of government property" and was declared "not a threat to society" by a federal judge, who gave him a year in jail.

The punch line? The FBI did not fire Harlow for stealing the guns and ammo. The FBI decided to terminate his employment only after he confessed to also faking some White House clearances.

Clearly, the problems faced by the FBI cannot be corrected by a simple count of guns. The real problem is not the gun but the weapon that is created when you turn a human being into an FBI agent. You can audit guns, but can you defuse a person?

For example, there is the strange tale of two former FBI agents, Eugene and Marguerite Bennett. Eugene Bennett was fired from the FBI in 1993 after he pleaded guilty to fraud and obstruction, involving money stolen from the agency. He was sentenced to one year in prison. Mrs. Bennett left the FBI after she admitted she had lied under oath to protect her husband.

On June 23, 1996, Eugene Bennett kidnapped the Rev. Edwin Clever at gunpoint. Bennett then forced Clever to call Mrs. Bennett and tell her she was needed at Prince of Peace United Methodist Church for an unspecified emergency.

Mrs. Bennett suspected the call from her clergyman was forced and that her husband was up to no good. Thus, she decided to go to church with a gun. Upon arriving at the church, she confronted her husband and she fired one shot at him, which missed.

Eugene Bennett was arrested later at his home after a brief standoff with police. According to Bennett, he had to lock up his "evil alter-ego Ed" in the garage before surrendering.

Further investigation by police led to the discovery of a bomb in a locker at Northern Virginia Community College (NVCC) in Woodbridge, where Marguerite Bennett worked as a police supervisor. More explosive materials were found in a locker at NVCC's Annandale campus. In addition, a pipe bomb was found outside Prince of Peace Church right after Eugene Bennett was arrested.

At the center of this battle was a messy divorce between the Bennetts. Bennett had previously contended in divorce papers that his wife was having a lesbian affair with best-selling crime novelist Patricia Cornwell.

According to Bennett, Cornwell and his wife would meet frequently after hours at a gay bar near the FBI Quantico training facility. At the time of the incident, Cornwell was attending the Quantico Virginia FBI facility at the special invitation of Director Louis Freeh.

The punch line? Neither Mrs. Bennett nor Cornwell's agent would comment on Bennett's allegations.

Allegations of sex and the FBI are an issue that has never been confronted. There are long-standing allegations that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover often wore a dress. There are also allegations that the FBI has used prostitutes for commercial espionage.

The allegations first surfaced in Insight magazine when investigative journalist Tim Maier wrote that underage male and female prostitutes were being used to obtain intelligence information from foreign diplomats during the December 1993 Asia Pacific Economic Conference (APEC) in Seattle.

In 1998, this reporter filed a Freedom of Information (FOIA) request seeking all information on the use of prostitutes as agents during the 1993 APEC conference. In response, the FBI found 250 pages of materials concerning the surveillance of foreign officials at the Seattle economic conference.

According to the FBI, only 13 pages of the "SECRET" and "TOP SECRET" documentation could be released. Some of the documents not released by the FBI "originated with another Government agency." Government censors heavily blacked out many of the secret documents returned by the FBI.

One such FBI "SECRET" document, dated November 1993, contains a partially blacked-out passage, noting that the FBI needed to gather surveillance data "in ample time for the information to be disseminated to Secret Service and Department of State."

Another secret November 1993 document, marked from "DIRECTOR FBI" to "FBI SEATTLE", directs the FBI office in Washington state to pay particular attention to a certain foreign "delegation" whose identity remains blacked out as secret. According to the heavily classified document, the "referenced communication provided information from a sensitive and reliable WF source."

I am told by an inside source that, much like the McVey case, more documents on the FBI use of prostitutes for economic espionage were recently discovered and that I should pursue the subject with the agency. A better question is: why?

There are many reasons to reform the FBI. Watergate, Clipper chip, Carnivore, Wen Ho Lee, McVey, White House travel office, TWA 800, the Atlanta Olympics, 900 missing files, Ruby Ridge and Waco to just name a few. Perhaps there are other reasons to reform the FBI such as Gary Harlow or the Bennetts.

Just what do you want a federal police to do? The real question for you the reader is what do you want the FBI to be? Do you change the system or change the people? How would you reform the FBI?

Before you answer, consider this final gem. The FBI's top counter-intelligence agent Robert Hannsen was a leading candidate to become the next FBI director until he was caught selling secrets to Moscow.