Fbi Accused Of Trying To Trap Jewell Lawyers Say Agents Tried To Trick Olympics Guard Into Giving Up Rights
Two days after Richard Jewell found the bomb that later exploded during the Olympic Games, he received a telephone call from a Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent whom he considered a longtime friend.
The agent, Tim Attaway, who had been assigned to work in Centennial Olympic Park during the Olympics, told Jewell that he had been off-duty when the bomb had detonated and was having trouble finding out what had happened. Jewell, a security guard hired to protect an AT&T sound and light tower in the park, promptly invited his friend to come to his apartment for a lasagna dinner.
For nearly two hours, Jewell poured out a story, laced liberally with police talk and profanity, about how he had been guarding the tower when he noticed a suspicious green knapsack that later was found to contain the bomb. But it was only weeks later, after Jewell became a suspect in the July 27 bombing, that he realized his friend’s visit hadn’t been a social call.
Attaway was legally wired with a concealed recording device that captured his conversation with Jewell.
State and federal investigators spared no resources in their efforts to prove that Jewell was the person who had planted a pipe bomb in a crowded park, an act that killed one woman, injured 111 people and transformed the 1996 Summer Olympics into a symbol of America’s vulnerability to terrorism. For a while, at least, the FBI firmly believed it had its man.
But after three months, none of the FBI’s investigative tools not the surveillance, not the searches, not the polygraphs and the deceptive interviews, not even the hairs plucked from Jewell’s head - revealed any significant evidence that Jewell was the bomber.
On Saturday, the Justice Department cleared Jewell by issuing an unusual letter announcing he no longer is a suspect, barring the discovery of new evidence.
Jewell’s saga provides a fresh object lesson about the immense power of the federal government to disrupt the lives of those it only suspects of misdeeds, even with the thinnest of evidence.
And just as damning, it speaks volumes about the capacity of the news media to cause irreparable damage in a business where information - sometimes questionable information - can travel across the globe in milliseconds.
The case also raises questions about the tactics used by the state and federal agents who investigated the park bombing.
In an interview, Jewell said he was “overjoyed” to receive the letter and an accompanying statement from Kent B. Alexander, the U.S. attorney in Atlanta, expressing regret that the investigation had intruded on the lives of Jewell and his mother, Barbara.
But Jewell said it may never dissolve his worldwide notoriety. Nor can it wash away the three months he spent as a virtual captive in the apartment he shares with his mother on Atlanta’s Buford Highway.
“There will not only always be a shadow, but I think there’s going to be a deep hole and river to cross everywhere I go,” Jewell said. “There will be a non-healing scar that is always affixed to my name. I don’t know if that will ever be cleared up.”
Now, Jewell said, he plans to look for work in law enforcement. But he is not optimistic.
“Between slim and none,” he said of his chances. “I don’t know of any police department who would hire an officer who has so much press, negative and positive, as I have.”
Jewell also plans to sue several newspapers and television networks that he maintains have distorted his life story and his role in the bombing, according to his civil lawyers, L. Lin Wood and Wayne Grant.
After The Atlanta Journal reported on July 30 that Jewell had become the focus of the investigation into the bombing, a CNN anchor read the article verbatim on the air. Reports about Jewell led the nightly news and many newspapers the next morning. In each medium, forensic psychologists were enlisted to describe him as a loner type who fit the profile of a bomber.
The news media, Jewell said Sunday, “just jumped on it like piranha on a bleeding cow.”
For Jewell, the ironies surrounding his situation have at times been unbearable, say those who know him.
For most of his hapless career as a security guard and sheriff’s deputy, the beefy 33-year-old had dreamed of hitting it big in law enforcement, handling his duties with such zealousness that he often alienated his superiors.
But while those qualities may have helped Jewell find the bomb in Centennial Olympic Park, they also formed the foundation of the suspicions that quickly enveloped him.
After discovering the bomb, and helping to clear park visitors away from it, Jewell may have momentarily found the respect he had sought. But in characteristic fashion, his moment of achievement quickly dissolved into an unthinkable nightmare.
It’s just pretend, FBI says
The interview conducted by Attaway was not the only time that investigators tried to take advantage of Jewell’s eagerness to please the agents he so admired.
On July 30, shortly after The Atlanta Journal had published its story about Jewell, two FBI agents arrived at Jewell’s apartment and asked him to come to headquarters to help them make a training film on how to interrogate a witness.
Midway through the videotaped session, an agent, Don Johnson, left the room and then returned to tell Jewell that in order to make the film realistic he was going to start the interview anew and ask him to sign a waiver of his constitutional rights to remain silent and request a lawyer.
“See, what I’m going to do,” Johnson explained, according to Jewell’s lawyers, who reviewed a transcript of the interview, “is I’m going to go right through it like, uh, I’m going to walk up and introduce myself to you, basically tell you who I am, show you my credentials, just like you are doing a professional interview. OK? And then, uh, I’ll just ask you a couple of questions like your name and your age and what I’ll do is I’m even going to go as far as to advise you of your rights. OK? Do you understand that?”
As Johnson handed him the waiver form, known as a Miranda warning, Jewell became concerned and asked to call a lawyer.
“Richard, do, do, do you feel you need a lawyer?” asked Diader Rosario, another FBI agent.
Johnson added: “Is there something that is bothering you why you think you need an attorney? It is my understanding that you are a hero.”
Jewell’s lawyers are convinced that the FBI’s intent was to use the training film as a ruse to gather a videotaped statement that would give the impression that Jewell had waived his constitutional rights.
Federal law-enforcement officials describe a different scenario. At the moment that Jewell was in the FBI interrogation room, officials in Washington and Atlanta were debating the question of whether he should be given a Miranda warning before being interviewed, the officials said.
In Washington, officials including FBI Director Louis J. Freeh felt strongly that to avoid legal challenge Jewell had to be informed of his legal rights.
Midway through the interview, Freeh contacted agents in Atlanta and instructed them to give the Miranda warning, federal law-enforcement officials said. Some agents felt that the decision cost them an opportunity to get significant admissions from Jewell.
Jewell’s lawyers consider the FBI’s tactics to be indefensible. “The fact that they tricked him for a training film when he was not in custody, that’s slimy, but legal,” said Jack Martin, Jewell’s criminal defense lawyer.
“But to try to get him to sign a document which somebody was going to use for some purpose as if it was a real Miranda waiver when it obviously was not, that may be an intentional violation of constitutional rights.”
After contacting Bryant, his lawyer, from FBI headquarters, Jewell drove home to find a mob of reporters waiting. That night, he and Bryant watched together in amazement as the story unfolded on television.
“Now we’ve become conditioned to this, but at the time you can’t imagine how astonishing it was to turn on Larry King, when you are just some ordinary Joe that nobody ever heard of, and you’ve got Daryl Gates and Bill Sessions discussing you with Larry King on national television,” Bryant said.
Doubts begin to surface
From the beginning, there were reasons to doubt that Jewell was the bomber.
According to police logs, the knapsack containing the bomb was discovered at approximately 12:57 a.m. Less than two minutes later, a 911 telephone call came into Atlanta police headquarters warning that a bomb would explode in the park in 30 minutes. It detonated at 1:20 a.m.
The 911 call was made from a pay telephone several blocks away from the park, and it was quickly clear to the FBI that Jewell could not have pointed out the knapsack and then negotiated his way through the crowded park to the telephone in less than two minutes.
In addition, law-enforcement officers who worked with Jewell to clear people away from the knapsack said they did not remember him leaving. That realization, however, did not eliminate the possibility of an accomplice, or that the call was somehow a coincidence.
Questions also were raised about why anyone would plant a bomb and then remain within the range of its blast.
On the morning of July 31, agents arrived at Jewell’s modest apartment and began to haul away virtually all of his possessions, ranging from his guns to rolls of duct tape to his mother’s Tupperware. Jewell watched from the steps outside, and a long line of television cameras recorded the scene from across the parking lot.
But apparently, prolonged testing and tracing of Jewell’s belongings turned up no physical evidence against him.
Life under a microscope
Throughout the investigation, Jewell chose to spend most of his time in his apartment to avoid the reporters and FBI agents. For a time, a consortium of television networks paid $1,000 a day to a tenant in a neighboring apartment complex to use her unit for their stakeouts.
Jewell said Sunday that he spent his time watching old movies, playing Nintendo video games, and talking on the telephone, “trying not to say the wrong thing” because he assumed that his line was tapped. He stayed sane, he said, only because he was trying to remain strong for his mother.
Jewell’s rare ventures outside often devolved into black comedy. A trip to the kennel to pick up his dog instigated a high-speed chase on Atlanta’s interstates by unmarked FBI cars and a television van.
When Bryant took Jewell to an Atlanta Braves baseball game one night, they watched with glee as the trailing FBI agents had difficulty talking their way into the restricted parking lot used by season ticket holders like Bryant.
There were moments of encouragement. When walking to lunch one day with Wood and Grant, a security guard reached to place a $10 bill in Jewell’s hand. “I just want you to know how much we support you,” the guard said, according to Wood. “What else was a security guard supposed to do than what you did?”
Now, Jewell hopes that life may return to some semblance of normalcy. But with the Justice Department’s clearance letter thrusting him back into the news, that may take a while.
Asked Sunday how his mother was faring, Jewell said, “She’s been better. She woke up this morning to find more press in the parking lot. She was not real happy.”
The investigation into the park bombing, according to the FBI, is continuing.