FBI Boston Special Agent Geoffrey Kelly, a member of the FBI Art Crime Team, describes how the FBI helped in the recovery and return of 22 artifacts believed to have been taken from Okinawa at the end of World War II. These artifacts had been missing for almost 80 years.

Former Director Webster celebrated his 100th birthday with the FBI at Headquarters on March 8 in, where else but the eponymous Webster Room. Long-time friends and FBI employees gathered for an ebullient birthday party, replete with cake and a spirited singing of “Happy Birthday.”

Office of Public Affairs Assistant Director Cathy Milhoan welcomed everyone and expressed her gratitude to Webster, saying they weren’t just there to celebrate an extraordinary birthday, but “Director Webster's extraordinary life of service to this country.”

Director Wray echoed Milhoan’s gratitude for Webster’s vast contributions. “I always say the sign of a great leader is that he leaves the place even better than he found it,” he said. “And the impact that you've had on this organization is still apparent at the FBI today. And I'm confident it will be for many, many, many years to come.”

A host of notables with whom Webster had served sent him video greetings, as did the FBI Chicago Explorers Program and Headquarters employees, who formed the number “100” in the HQ courtyard.

The Society of Former Special Agents “showered” him with birthday cards from across the country, and OPA presented a tribute video “in your own words,” Milhoan told Webster, as the audio and some video came from Webster’s 1979 video, relaying his thoughts about his first year to employees.

Born in 1924 in Webster Groves, Missouri, Webster was serving in the Eighth District Court of Appeals when the Carter Administration approached him to take on the role of FBI Director.

Asked why he wanted to take the job at an FBI still digging itself out of late Hoover-era policies, he reportedly said, "I’m an old Navy man, and I heard a boatswain’s pipe.”

Nevertheless, the choice couldn’t have been that simple. He’d been shortlisted before for the Supreme Court, a lifelong dream. Torn, he reportedly consulted a fellow judge who said, “your country needs you.”

He’d answered his country’s call before. He left Amherst as a sophomore for the Navy in WWII after Pearl Harbor. Then returned to the Navy for the Korean War after earning his law degree from Washington University in St. Louis.

On Feb. 23, 1978, he was sworn in as the FBI Director. During his nine years at the Bureau, the FBI undertook enormous investigations and made many advances in science and technology. Some of those accomplishments follow.

Post-FBI

As Webster’s tenure was ending, he planned to return to private practice, but the Reagan Administration tapped him to head the CIA, then enmeshed in the Iran-Contra affair. He is the only person to ever serve as FBI and CIA Director.

Over the years, he’s repeatedly answered the call to serve. He’s been on numerous boards, including as the chair of the Homeland Security Advisory Council, and on multiple commissions, including the Robert Hanssen spy case, the Fort Hood shooting and the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

He’s the recipient of countless awards, medals, honorary degrees, including the Distinguished Intelligence Medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Security Medal.

He continues to participate in public life, with op-eds published in the New York Times and the Washington Post. Recently, he took part in an FBI campaign on elder fraud, after a scammer, later sentenced to more than five years, called to say Webster had won the Mega Millions lottery and needed to send $50,000 to cover the taxes.

Milhoan affirmed that the elder-fraud video Webster made with the Office of Public Affairs is one of the most popular on FBI.gov. 

After Director Wray spoke, Milhoan invited Webster to the podium to speak. He received a standing ovation as he made his way up to thank Director Wray and all those who had gathered.

“I shall never forget the quality and the fidelity of the friends who serve in the FBI," he said. "You are wonderful, wonderful people and you are wonderful, wonderful friends, and you care about your country and your communities and the law itself…and you treat it nobly. I have never failed to be in admiration for the men and women of the FBI. And I know that Director Wray knows what I'm talking about. I don't know how you do it, but keep on doing it, please.” 

He continued, “I shall carry with me the honor that you gave me with the invite to appear before you today so that I could, in person, thank you and express my deepest admiration, my deepest appreciation and my confidence that you will go on as you have in the past under the kind of leadership that you now have and will continue to have — and that those who serve here will be the very best there is in all this world. Thank you so much.”

More than one employee wiped away tears as he spoke, perhaps hearing an inspiring “boatswain’s pipe” of their own in Webster’s wonderfully encouraging words for all who’ve chosen a life of service at the FBI.

In the U.S., the debate was spirited. Who’d own the team, military or law enforcement? Many cited the Posse Comitatus Act, a one-sentence post-Reconstruction law that, with few exceptions, bars troops from domestic law enforcement.

Tactical thinkers in the Training Division stood up FBI SWAT in 1973 but warned: Only a fulltime, highly trained, well-equipped team would be a match for a Munich-level event.

Los Angeles’ landing its bid in 1978 for the 1984 Summer Olympics (and Lake Placid, New York, hosting the 1980 Winter Games) helped Training Division leaders begin to see it that way too.

The division quietly stood up a research unit. Its members fanned out to the new European counterterror teams, then embedded a year with the nascent 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment — Delta.

Training with Delta confirmed their fears that FBI SWAT teams — which wore soft armor — carried pistols and shared long guns — were no match for a large-scale threat. They arranged for then-Director Webster to see Delta and the Naval Special Warfare Development Group (DEVGRU) conduct a hostage rescue exercise at Fort Bragg.

After a deafening live-fire battle in which “kills,” not arrests, were effected, Director Webster was invited to review the teams’ submachine guns, night-vision goggles, explosives, hard body armor and high-tech comms devices.

In what’s become Quantico lore, he asked about handcuffs. There are as many tales as tellers about the colorfully crisp response he got, and from whom, but the gist was a military remedy for a hostage taker doesn’t involve handcuffs.

That unsettling answer; Posse Comitatus; the military’s resistance to being subject to any post-operational legal process, such as having to testify in court; plus, the White House finally deciding the FBI was the domestic authority, is how the Hostage Rescue Team came to be.

First Generation and Certification

HRT’s founders didn’t see themselves as simply mustering the FBI’s stellar agents, but as creating a team founded on, and bound by, an ethos.

In the sweltering summer of ’82, they sat the team’s first candidates before an Academy blackboard. Chalked across it in big letters was “To Save Lives.” That’s your only mission, they were told.

As it is now, selection then was grueling. One hundred of the 150 agents who attended washed out.

On a few hours’ sleep, candidates ran for hours and hauled themselves up rope after rope. They tackled obstacle courses, including the Marine Corps’ confidence course, pulling themselves up its 30-foot-high ladder of truncated utility poles.

They were given odd instructions to see if and how closely they’d follow them. They were probed for fears and character flaws. They wrote research papers and powered through hostile “press conferences.”

They also learned close-quarters battle, or CQB: a live-fire exercise of breaching a door, casting in flashbangs and firing, usually while running, in a carefully choreographed pattern at targets inches away from hostages.

The “hostages” were team members who consented to sit still as bullets whizzed past their heads.

The first generation had one goal. That was to excel enough to be certified as a full-time, domestic counterterrorism team with capabilities akin to Delta’s and DEVGRU’s.

In October 1983, they were ready. FBI, Justice, Pentagon and White House brass, who’d be conferring certification, gathered in New Mexico to observe “Operation Equis Red.”

Packed into a tiny two-room building, team members were told terrorists had holed up in a cabin in the desert. They had a nuclear device and had taken hostage a scientist who could detonate it.

HRT snipers in ghillie suits crept into positions around the cabin. They sent back intel about its structure and occupants. With that information, breachers built a replica of the cabin and conducted exhaustive rehearsals and contingency planning.

At 3 a.m., word arrived negotiations had failed.

In short order, the breachers descended on the cabin, blasted down the door, tossed in flashbangs, ran in through the blinding flash, smoke and ear-splitting concussion and neutralized the terrorists, securing both the hostage and the nuclear device. It took 30 seconds.

The “terrorists” were the team’s founders and instructors; they’d barely been able to react, they said. And with that, HRT was certified.

Early Domestic Success

Shortly after HRT was certified, President Reagan gave the team its first job: counterterrorism lead at the ’84 Summer Olympics. The event that motivated the U.S. to form a domestic counterterror team fortunately was peaceful.

Helping to ensure that, the new team spent months in tactical planning, including surveying and collecting blueprints of every venue and other potential targets, like UCLA and Disneyland, over the 135 square miles of the event.

The media ballyhooed the U.S.’s security efforts. And in case would-be terrorists still missed the point, HRT brought reporters in for a two-hour firestorm of a demo of what a U.S. response would be for anyone trying to recreate the ’72 Munich Olympics.

As a new team whose capabilities not everyone understood, HRT had a slow start in requests for help, until they were called in to arrest members of the Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord (CSA) the next year.

A heavily armed, apocalyptic white-supremacy militant group deeply dug-in in the Ozarks, they declared war on the U.S., then prosecuted it with petty, sovereign citizen-like crime — until a member killed a Black state trooper during a routine traffic stop.

Executing a search warrant at a fortified, heavily patrolled compound in the woods in spring with little leaf-cover, and where townspeople would note a suspiciously fit cohort suddenly descending upon its motels, required finesse.

Operators posed as fishing parties in surrounding towns.

A CSA patrol tripping up on a sniper-hide was the group’s first inkling they were surrounded. Negotiators and the HRT commander capitalized on the psychological advantage of having invaded the group’s space undetected — and existing “out there” as an unseen multitude in the scrub.

When the group’s leader ventured out to meet with the HRT commander, snipers stood up along the pathway, revealing themselves, tens-of-people-deep along his way. The group’s leader quickly agreed to work with the FBI to ensure his members surrendered peacefully.

The next few years were building years for HRT domestically, as people began to understand the expertise they contributed to an operation. Soon, their purview would grow to overseas.

First International Mission

In the '70s and '80s, America was a frequent target overseas. Ambassadors, CIA chiefs of station and military personnel were assassinated. Military installations were bombed or attacked, as were embassies, including the embassy in Tehran, where Iranian students held more than 50 hostages for 444 days.

Americans argued about how to respond: Continue to denounce attacks and be seen as a paper tiger or be lured into reactionary attacks and be branded as no better than terrorists.

Then Hezbollah bombed the U.S. Marine Barracks in Beirut in '83, killing 241 U.S. service members. In response, Congress created a lawful path for action: they extended U.S. federal jurisdiction to overseas when Americans were harmed.

HRT was now international.

Its first test was Fawaz Younis, the lead hijacker of Royal Jordanian Flight 402. In 1985, Younis and his men overpowered the crew in Beirut, rigged the cabin with explosives, then demanded to go to Tunisia to meet with Arab League leaders, or they’d kill the passengers.

But the Tunis airport blocked its runways. After several rebuffed landing attempts — and two refuelings in other countries — Younis demanded to return to Beirut, where he ordered the hostages onto the tarmac, blew up the plane and fled.

Two Americans happened to be on board, and that was enough for a U.S. response.

Knowing there’d be little or no international cooperation, and that straying into any sympathetic country’s territory could jeopardize an arrest, HRT operators had to figure out how to keep the entire operation in international territory.

In what is still one of HRT’s lengthiest, most complicated arrests (President Reagan had to approve it), they decided to turn to the Navy for its sea and air capability.

To lure Younis into international waters, HRT operators anchored out a rented yacht just off Cyprus. Younis’s friend drew him there for a phony drug deal, and they arrested him.

Working with the Navy, operators were able to transfer to an ammunition ship that steamed four days to an aircraft carrier. From there, two HRT members, an FBI medic and Younis boarded a jet and were flown 13 hours, with three in-flight refuelings, to Andrews Air Force Base. It was then one of the Navy’s longest continuous flights from an aircraft carrier.

The operation made headlines for its audaciousness and Younis, who was neither a high-level operator nor had targeted Americans, was sentenced to 30 years. Would-be attackers saw for themselves the U.S.’s new resolve — and attacks on Americans waned.

Reimagining and Growth Years

HRT’s expertise often draws other agencies seeking help, including after they run into trouble during an operation.

In 1992, the U.S. Marshals Service’s attempted arrest of Randy Weaver on federal gun charges at his remote cabin in Idaho led to the 11-day Ruby Ridge standoff. Negotiators resolved it, but not before a deputy marshal and Weaver’s wife and son were killed.

In 1993, an attempted ATF raid at the highly fortified Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, left four ATF agents and six Branch Davidians dead and led to a 51-day standoff. After gas was inserted to drive the Davidians out, they set fire to their compound, killing 76, including many children.

The FBI was asked to take over after both incidents began. Afterward, the public and Congressional scrutiny of the FBI was intense, as was the Bureau’s own self-scrutiny.

Though the public conversation, enshrined in records, reports and copious articles, uniformly criticizes the Bureau, it also captures concerns about how long-term standoffs affect HRT. There was only one team then, and operators stayed for the duration of the standoffs.

What happens to the team’s perishable skills if they can’t practice them, particularly highly perishable close-quarters-battle and firearms skills, was one of the questions. How long can HRT go with no respite? What happens if such a standoff precludes operators from responding elsewhere?

What the concerns revealed was a growing recognition of HRT’s singular importance as the U.S.’s only full-time domestic counterterrorism team, and the concomitant need to invest more in it.

Many changes followed. First, the team grew from 52 to 77 operators and split into two teams so one could relieve the other. Then in 1994, Director Freeh stood up the Critical Incident Response Group, or CIRG.

It means that, at the compound, the gear is always packed, and the 757 is always on standby.

It also means everyone from operators to negotiators, to transportation, logistics, medics, intelligence and communications personnel are ready to take off and, wherever they land, set to contribute everything they have to carrying out the three simple words HRT’s founders wrote in big, bold letters on an Academy chalkboard 40 years ago: To Save Lives.