CURBING THE FBI

FOR DECADES, FBI agents grabbed up informants like frantic shoppers in a
bargain basement store, knowing they would be rewarded for quantity more
than quality. This week, the US Justice Department issued new national
guidelines aimed at improving accountability in the FBI, Drug Enforcement
Administration, and other federal law enforcement agencies.

Some of the reforms, such as requiring that federal agents share information
on informants with federal prosecutors, including suspected criminal
activity, grew out of the murky corners of the Boston office of the FBI. It
was there that mobsters James ''Whitey'' Bulger and Stephen Flemmi thrived
with the protection of their FBI handlers while allegedly killing 19 and 10
people respectively during the 1970s and 1980s.

Just last week, a Superior Court judge freed a Medford man, Peter Limone,
who had served 33 years for murder. Justice Department officials had learned
that the FBI covered up evidence that Limone and three others were wrongly
convicted in order to protect FBI informants. This is unconscionable.

Guidelines, even solid ones, do not automatically safeguard the public or
the integrity of the agency. Instructions on the relationship between the
FBI and Justice Department attorneys were in place in 1976, including a
provision that ''under no circumstances shall the FBI take any action to
conceal a crime by one of its informants.'' US District Judge Mark Wolf, who
conducted lengthy hearings on the links between Bulger and the FBI in 1998,
concluded that the FBI routinely disregarded the directive.

US Attorney Donald Stern, who worked on the update of informant guidelines,
notes that the Boston FBI office of today ''bears no relationship to what
was happening in the 1960s and 1970s.'' But the public shouldn't rest easy.

The modern FBI was created in 1924 when officials became concerned that its
predecessor, the Bureau of Investigation, resembled a secret police force
with few controls, external or internal. But that problem is still with us.
Wen Ho Lee, a nuclear scientist at Los Alamos who was indicted in 1999 on 59
felony counts, was later found to be a victim of false testimony by the
FBI's lead agent in the case. But Lee was lucky. He walked out of solitary
confinement. In Boston, the evidence is compelling that FBI misconduct led
to the deaths of two of their own informants at the hands of the Bulger
crew.

Even with strong safeguards, the FBI guidelines are only as good as an
agent's willingness to follow them and the agency's ability to recognize
that the ambiguities of law enforcement are never an excuse to rub out the
rule of law.