FBI Fumbles

Investigating the investigators

In January 1981, days after President Reagan's Inauguration, the FBI'S second-ranking official appeared before a Senate committee to assure its members that they could go ahead with Raymond Donovan's confirmation as Secretary of Labor. FBI agents, he testified, had found nothing unsavory in Donovan's business dealings as a construction executive, despite the rumors of underworld connections. One troubled Senator asked if the investigation might not have been more thorough. No, replied Executive Assistant FBI Director Francis Mullen, "I do not know what else we could have done."

As it turned out, there was a lot the FBI could and should have done. It could have informed the committee, as it did White House Counsel Fred Fielding, that underworld informants had linked Donovan with known mobsters. In addition, FBI agents could have pursued other suggestive leads. They did not until months later, TIME has learned, because Mullen ordered his investigators to ease off Donovan, with what a top FBI official says was the tacit agreement of White House aides. Mullen, now acting director of the Drug Enforcement Administration, says the charges against Donovan were too "nebulous, way out" and "nonspecific." Thus, during the 1981 committee deliberations, according to a top FBI official, Mullen told subordinates: "We've reached the point where we've got to cut it off and move forward." After Mullen's dictum, the official said, "the amount of follow-up investigation [of the leads] was minimal," and evidence unfavorable to Donovan in FBI files in New York City and Newark was left buried.

Mullen had told the Senators flatly that "there is no information available to the FBI which indicates that" Donovan or his Schiavone Construction Co. were "mobbed up." At the time, many committee members were skeptical, and Mullen admits his testimony may have been too "positive" and "sweeping." With last week's more serious claims that Mullen chose not to ferret out more damaging allegations against Donovan, a new congressional inquiry may be in the offing. Says Missouri Democrat Thomas Eagleton, a member of the Labor and Human Resources Committee: "The aroma is so pungent that I think there will be hearings."

Of even keener interest than Mullen's role is why the White House agreed to the curtailment of the FBI's probe of Donovan. The day before the Labor Secretary's confirmation hearings began, an FBI official telephoned Fielding and informed him of "a tape recording" linking Donovan socially with "hoodlums." Fielding insists that he passed along all important information to his superiors, but says the White House was not fazed by the unsubstantiated charges. Counters one senior presidential adviser: "Fred was the only one directly in touch with the FBI investigation."

Whether Mullen and his colleagues cut short their probe because they thought they had a White House imprimatur or for other reasons, FBI officials admit that the laxness of the investigation 17 months ago was their agency's doing. According to FBI Director William Webster, it was the unfortunate result of the Administration's desire to wrap up the probe quickly, while Mullen claims that the "pressure was from [Senator Orrin] Hatch," the Republican chairman of Donovan's confirmation hearings. Whatever the source of the pressures, the FBI showed poor judgment--at least--in succumbing to them.

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