It has a lot to do with the FBI, and it's also a funny story. An agent in New York wanted to have lunch, and he went around the field office around...

After talking to FBI agents, where is their number one choice to go with the FBI?

Duty.

Because every other chapter or so is about a city in your book, let me just ask you about some of these places and what the things were that got your...

They would discuss, you know, when they were going to hijack some truck or even murders that they committed. Every night the agent would dictate reports...

It's about a medium-sized office.

Oh, it's in some nice new part of town.

Yes. Right. It all starts to run together after a while.

Yes. It's over a nice Mexican restaurant, and it's fairly nice carpeting and very high security devices, of course.

They had a previous owner who wanted to give it up, and so they made a deal with her whereby she would keep the liquor license in her name but the FBI...

They were after real hard evidence that they could show to a jury that would convict these people. You know, these days juries are used to seeing video...

Right. It was this one agent who was undercover and he would have long hair and he was a real tough guy, and he had a lot of experience in running bars...

No. By the time I did the book, it was closed.

I think it went down about five or six years ago.

That's right, yes.

Oh, yes. They would get court approval for intercepting conversations in that way. Of course, in this case, since the FBI basically owned it, they could...

They are 10,300 agents and then about 23,000 total employees, including those agents.

Well, it's a lot. It's much more than any local police department, for sure, and probably more than most foreign law enforcement agencies, in part because...

You have to have a four-year college degree, which is different from a lot of other law enforcement agencies. Then they usually do take people who already...

That was one of the many myths under the Hoover regime, that they all had to be accountants or lawyers. In fact, only about roughly the same percentage...

He's still the head of the Dallas field office. He was formerly one of the top high-ranking officials in the FBI for many, many years, and he had a...

I think, overall, the more sophisticated agents like it. They think it's fair, and they've said it's dead-on accurate. In fact, they're amazed at how...

No coffee under Hoover one of those strange, endless quirks that Hoover had, which was that he didn't allow agents to drink coffee, although clerks...

Hoover had a lot of things that are very hard to explain, a lot of aspects to his personality. I think there was some idea in his mind that agents had...

Meanwhile, the really important crimes that only the FBI can address well were being ignored, such as organized crime, political corruption, including...

Absolutely not. I would probably be in some danger, or if I had written such a book under Hoover he would have a so-called "do not contact" list of...

I have.

Little scribbles from Hoover, some of which are indecipherable, but they definitely were not praise.

They were all press related. You know, "He's done this story," or "He's working on this story on FBI wiretapping. Do not cooperate." Even, "Here's a...

No way. The Freedom of Information Act had not been passed then, and they thought that these files would never be seen by the public, some of them,...

It was based on the concept that the FBI would use counterintelligence methods in a proactive way to disrupt political dissidents. Counterintelligence...

She was the victim of one of these typical star stalkers who would become fixated on her and constantly write her letters showing that he had actually...

You quote him or you quote Gardner here. I'm not sure who Gardner was.

"I matched her travel schedule from 1987 on," Gardner said. "When he said," meaning the stalker," `you were in Dallas on June 13,' she was in Dallas...

What were the techniques that they used in order to get him?

When the FBI follows someone, you know, it's not just one agent following the person. It may be five or six or seven agents, and they're dressed in...

It certainly is of this country, anyway. Yes, no one is quite sure why it is, just a combination of the sort of easy access out there to freeways. People...

Oh, it's roughly $2 billion, and this agent force of 10,300 compares with about 30,000 police officers in New York City.

I guess there have been five including the new one.

No, just the actual directors. Hoover was director for 48 years.

He became director in 1924. Before that it was an arm of the Justice Department, and it had various different names. I believe it started in 1908, and...

Well, the FBI started to get out of this mold, on the one hand, of going after car thieves and then, on the other hand, engaging in illegal practices...

On the back of the book it says, "Ronald Kessler, The FBI: Inside the World's Most Powerful Law Enforcement Agency by the award-winning journalist whose...

Do you agree with that language?

Let's go back to the beginning. When did you start this book?

Before we get into the specifics of this book, where are you from?

Where?

When did you get interested in journalism?

Did you have any access to the John Birch Society, being based there?

How many books have you written?

When was the first one?

When did you leave the Washington Post?

Why did you leave?

In the introduction and the last part of the book, a lot is spent on William Sessions. Let's go back to that. When you decided to write this book, where...

So, finally, it all came to a head when it turned out that they heard that I had been interviewing Bill Baker, who was then over at the Criminal Division...

And then go back to the back of this book, "Inside the World's Most Powerful Law Enforcement Agency by the award-winning journalist whose investigation...

Then I asked Sessions about it in one of my interviews with him. I had about four interviews with him, and I went to New York with him on the FBI plane...

She had been his administrative assistant for a long time, even going back to when he was chief judge of the federal court in San Antonio. She had caused...

I talked to his wife Alice, and she said that they were aware of it. They socialize a lot. They saw her car, and there had been some complaints. In...

It's done very, very gently and not as a big list of all these abuses you're engaging in but rather, "By the way, this is the rule on this matter."...

On the FBI plane, right.

That's right.

Yes, unfortunately.

I paid the shuttle price from Washington to New York.

I'd asked to go on a trip with him just to depict how he takes his trips, what he does, etc. In this case he had given out awards to FBI agents in New...

They did.

I was sly, I guess.

It was a combination of things, which frequently happens when you do a book, where you want the cooperation of the subject but you also want to remain...

He's not been charged criminally, but the Justice Department is billing him $30,000, which can be collected in a civil action if necessary for some...

Yes, the government would pay for security devices at his home as long as they were reasonable and really would enhance security. The same thing happened...

The difference is the kind of fence. The security people said that the proper kind of fence was one that the White House has and embassies in Washington...

A lot of public officials have been removed for much less. For example, John Sununu was kicked out of the White House for taking some plane trips that...

How do you know this?

What was your relationship with him and Mrs. Sessions from the beginning? What happened to that relationship?

How could this person who's so affable and seemed so caring and stood for equality also be so blind to the fact that he was engaging in wrongdoing?...

He started comparing himself with some of the other directors, and he said that other directors' wives had been sick or had died, that William Webster's...

I think it has to do with her mind-set, that that's the kind of personality she is. She would imagine all kinds of things. For example, she kept saying...

It's not a criminal matter. There is a range of wrongdoing and abuse that can occur without it being a criminal case, and in this case the Office of...

Oh, yes. He's been on TV and on radio and been interviewed constantly, in fact.

Well, he's addressed them. He's been asked about them. I don't think, in my opinion, that he actually has answered them honestly. He's come up with...

I don't know; I think he's looking for a job, basically.

Perhaps, I'd probably be wrong on this, I think he might be around 60, roughly.

I really finished the manuscript a year before, but then I kept updating it and adding to it quite extensively, including 5,000 words on the Waco incident...

Oh, yes. I'm used to this very long gestation period, which is frustrating for a former newspaper reporter. Of course, ideally, I would have liked to...

That's what started the investigation. Sessions did finally meet with me but didn't discuss the specifics, wouldn't answer the questions. Obviously,...

I say in the book that he definitely did talk to Alice Sessions before he did his story, so she clearly was at least a source. I don't know where he...

That one of the major investigations that the Washington office undertook was the Watergate investigation; that it was, of course, the FBI that did...

Fred Fielding was another one.

There'd been a number of names floated.

Yes, the point of that was simply that, as Woodward and Bernstein wrote in their book All the President's Men, they had a number of sources. Deep Throat...

My wife Pam and my daughter Rachel and my son Greg.

My son is 26; he's an artist in New York. My daughter Rachel is 24 and she's at the Wall Street Journal Washington Bureau.

She's a news assistant and writing stories on the side as well and hoping to be a reporter.

She is an author also. She's a former Washington Post reporter now writing books. She wrote a book about the spy sites of Washington, and she's writing...

That's part of Simon & Schuster. They like to be identified as just Pocket Books and not Simon & Schuster because they are almost in competition with...

Yes, with WordPerfect it's much easier to just go like that, chronologically, and I think it's easier for people to pick out the notes that way.

There were 314 people interviewed, mostly agents who were current _some former agents, some other employees as well.

Yes, everyone except for a few very sensitive ones were tape recorded with people's permission.

It's in a bank vault.

I usually keep it for several years and then rerecord for the next book.

Yes, but if you don't mind, I'd like to keep that quiet. It's about another very secretive, very powerful institution, and it will be out next year.

I recall my temple newspaper doing a story about the blue laws of Massachusetts and quoting a number of clergymen as saying that even they didn't think...

One new thing that I learned in here was that if you're an agent and you're gaining access to, I'm not sure what building or what place you look into...

There's a lot more and we only have a minute. Can you give us, to finalize this, your attitude about the FBI after spending all this time looking into...

Those are things that I was certainly not aware of, but I also have a greater appreciation for the successes and the amazing techniques that the FBI...

Thanks, Brian.