William Webster served as director of the CIA from 1987 to 1991. Photo / Getty Images
William H. Webster, a former federal judge who became the only person to head both the FBI and CIA and who is credited with restoring trust to the two sullied agencies after the domestic-spying and Iran-Contra scandals of the 1970s and 1980s, has died. He was 101.
His family announced the death in a statement but did not provide additional details.
Webster served as FBI director from 1978 to 1987 and as the director of central intelligence from 1987 to 1991. He was universally addressed as Judge Webster, reflecting his years on the federal bench during the 1970s and his reputation for integrity. Inside the White House, officials once referred to him as “Mr Clean”.
A Republican, Webster was appointed to the judiciary by President Richard M. Nixon, but he acquired a reputation for objectivity on partisan issues and was courted by presidents from both parties for high-profile posts.
“The liberals who like me think I’m liberal; the conservatives who like me say I’m conservative,” Webster once said.
In 1977, President Jimmy Carter asked then-Attorney General Griffin B. Bell to begin looking for a new FBI director.
“The bureau had been taking some rough blows,” Bell later told the New York Times, “and we were looking for somebody who was absolutely above reproach.”
At the time, the FBI was reeling from disclosures that agents had participated in break-ins, illegally opened the mail of people under surveillance and spied on civil rights leaders. As Carter’s nominee for director, Webster told the Senate during confirmation hearings that the FBI “is not above the law” and should not “wage war on private citizens to discredit them”.
Ronald Kessler, a former Washington Post journalist and the author of books on law enforcement and intelligence, said in an interview that Webster was “the perfect person” to head the FBI and CIA.
“Both agencies in the past had abused their power,” Kessler said. “He restored their credibility and gave the people assurance that these agencies were really operating in the public interest.”
He added that Webster oversaw a transformative period at the FBI and credited him with turning “the bureau into a much more proactive force”.
As FBI director during the late 1970s and early 1980, Webster oversaw an undercover corruption investigation known as Abscam that ensnared several members of Congress. During the operation, an undercover agent posed as an Arab sheikh and the owner of Abdul Enterprises, hence the name of the operation. The disguised agents held meetings with senators and House members at a Playboy Club in New Jersey and aboard a yacht off the Florida coast.
Using hidden cameras and microphones, federal authorities recorded politicians accepting US$400,000 (about $420,000 at 1980 exchange rates) in bribes from the fake Arab sheikh in exchange for political favours. One senator and five congressmen were eventually convicted of crimes including bribery.
In the early 1980s, Webster also oversaw the formation of the bureau’s elite counter-terrorism force known as the Hostage Rescue Team (HRT). Envisioned as a domestic Special Operations unit, the HRT was modelled after the Army’s top-secret Delta Force – with one key difference.
During a tour of Delta facilities at Fort Bragg in the early 1980s, Webster observed the commandos conducting a simulated raid on a group of terrorists. Webster, impressed with the results, saw merit in the tactics used by Delta operators and inquired about what kind of equipment they carried on missions. He was told they employed only the latest technology, including night-vision goggles.
“I don’t see any handcuffs,” Webster replied.
An Army Major General then explained that his soldiers didn’t end missions by reading terrorism suspects their Miranda rights.
“It’s not my job to arrest people,” the general said.
Under Webster’s guidance, HRT members were trained first as law enforcement officers and secondly as elite sharpshooters. Since its inception in 1983, the HRT has taken part in rescue operations around the country and saved countless lives.
Webster’s success at the FBI was noticed in the Reagan White House during the late 1980s, when the administration was struggling with the fallout from Iran-Contra. The illegal secret operation involved selling weapons to Iran and diverting the profits to right-wing Nicaraguan rebels known as the Contras.
Investigations by Congress and a special prosecutor implicated the CIA and suggested the involvement of William J. Casey, the agency’s director. Casey resigned from office in February 1987 after a malignant tumour was diagnosed in his brain. He died three months later.
Seeking a replacement known for probity, Reagan tapped Webster to clean up the CIA. Webster swiftly fired two employees connected to Iran-Contra, demoted another and issued reprimands to four others, according to Kessler’s 1992 book, Inside the CIA.
In addition, Webster established policies that provided more oversight of clandestine operations. He hired more lawyers to review the legality of missions and gave more powers to the CIA’s inspector general.
Thomas Twetten, a veteran CIA officer who served in high-ranking positions, said in an interview that Webster was considered an unlikely candidate to lead the agency. He had spent little time overseas and was unfamiliar with practices used in the collection of intelligence.
“He was not a foreign-affairs expert. That was not at all his strong point,” said Twetten, who later served as a CIA deputy director. “He came from a law-and-order background as a judge.”
Twetten said Webster excelled as a manager at the CIA. To compensate for his lack of foreign affairs experience, Webster tapped Richard J. Kerr, a respected intelligence analyst, to serve as his deputy.
He also persuaded a covert officer to come out of retirement to lead the agency’s cloak-and-dagger branch. That officer, Dick Stolz, proved to be one of Webster’s best hires, Twetten said. Stolz was a revered figure in the intelligence community, and bringing him back to the CIA added stability to a deeply shaken agency.
“You have to give him a lot of credit,” Twetten said. “He did fine because he let everybody play to their strengths.”
Webster was responsible for establishing specialised counterintelligence and counternarcotics centres, units that tracked spies and drug rings in countries around the world.
He also sought to patch up a long-standing rivalry between the FBI and CIA. In particular, he improved co-ordination between the agencies on counterintelligence, and he helped establish a programme – run jointly by the CIA and FBI in Washington – to recruit Russians to spy on their own Government.
In the end, Webster was credited with presiding over a period of relative quiet at the agency.
“He was criticised for not being a strategic thinker, but that’s not why he was selected,” Vincent Cannistraro, a former high-ranking CIA counterterrorism official, told the Post in 1991. “He was selected to calm troubled waters.”
Webster was known as a man to be taken seriously. But on occasion, he displayed a lighter side. For instance, as the 14th director of central intelligence, he signed some of his correspondence – with winking double-0 James Bond flair – as “00-14”.
William Hedgcock Webster was born in St Louis on March 6, 1924, and grew up in suburban Webster Groves, Missouri. His father owned small businesses and his mother was a homemaker.
After serving as a Navy officer during World War II, Webster graduated in 1947 from Amherst College in Massachusetts, and he received a law degree in 1949 from Washington University in St Louis. He was recalled to Navy duty during the Korean War.
He worked in private practice in St Louis, representing major corporate clients such as Mobil Oil, and served briefly in the early 1960s as US attorney in eastern Missouri. In 1970, President Nixon appointed Webster to a judgeship on the US District Court for Eastern Missouri. In 1973, Nixon appointed him to the US Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit in St Louis.
In one notable case on the appeals court, Webster ruled that the University of Missouri could not deny funding or facilities to a gay rights organisation on campus, citing the First Amendment’s protection of free assembly.
The university appealed Webster’s ruling and petitioned the US Supreme Court to hear the case. The Supreme Court declined.
Webster was lean and patrician in appearance and ascetic in his tastes. A Christian Scientist, Webster largely abstained from alcohol. His chief indulgence was tennis, and his partners over the years included President George H.W. Bush, Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham and actor Zsa Zsa Gabor.
After leaving the CIA in 1991, Webster continued to be called on to handle sensitive matters. He chaired the Homeland Security Advisory Council, which advised the secretary of homeland security about terrorism threats. He also chaired a Justice Department commission that investigated the 2009 Fort Hood shootings, in which an Army psychiatrist, Major Nidal Hasan, was eventually convicted of killing 13 people and wounding more than two dozen.
The commission suggested that the FBI review its policies to clarify the chain of command for counterterrorism operations.
In 1950, Webster married the former Drusilla Lane. She died in 1984 after refusing medical treatment for cancer, citing her Christian Science beliefs. Webster married the former Lynda Clugston in 1990.
In addition to his wife, survivors include three children from his first marriage, Drusilla Patterson, William H. Webster jnr, and Katherine Roessle; seven grandchildren; and 12 great-grandchildren.
Webster made a flurry of news in February 2019, when his role in a reverse sting operation was publicised. He and his wife became targets of a Jamaica-based phone scammer who became increasingly threatening and did not realise he was dealing with the former director of the FBI and the CIA.
Working with law enforcement, Webster captured the man on tape trying to extort money and helped ensure he received a long prison term.