Former FBI and CIA Director William H. Webster dies at 101

Washington – William H. Webster, former director of the FBI and the CIA, whose troubleshooting skills and integrity have helped restore public confidence in these federal agencies, died, his family announced on Friday. He was 101 years old.

Webster directed the FBI from 1978 to 1987 and the CIA from 1987 to 1991, the only person to guide the main agency for the application of the country’s law and its main information collection organization.

As he came to Washington, at the age of 53, Webster had been practicing the law for almost 20 years, had served a passage as a federal prosecutor and had spent almost nine years on the federal bench of his St. Louis Natal. Those who opposed him before the court or in disagreement with his decisions recognized that his honesty was indisputable.

“Each Director of the CIA or the FBI should be ready to resign in case he is asked to do something that he knows how to be bad,” said Webster after agreeing to run the spy agency.

President Jimmy Carter has selected Webster, a Republican, for a 10 -year term as the FBI chief while the office sought to improve an image tarnished by revelations of inner spy, internal corruption and other abuses of power. Demanding but just his agents, he was generally credited with having developed his ability to take up new challenges such as terrorism.

President Ronald Reagan chose Webster to replace the CIA chief William J. Casey, who had been criticized to be too political, ignoring the congress and playing a role in the weapons scandal for the hosts known as Iran-Contra.

Webster, in the role of outsider without a political program, quickly sought to alleviate tensions with the congress. He regularly reported CIA’s activities to the legislators responsible for monitoring intelligence and avoided the appearance of trying to shape the policy. Withdrawing from the federal service in 1991, he joined a Washington law firm but has always sat on a variety of advice and commissions related to policies.

In 2002, the Securities and Exchange Commission selected Webster, during a partisan vote, to lead a council created by the congress to supervise the accounting profession following scandals involving Enron and other companies.

Before the first meeting of the Board of Directors, however, Webster resigned in the midst of questions on his role as head of the audit committee of American technologies, a company herself accused of fraud. The controversy on his role in the appointment of Webster contributed to the resignation of the President of the SEC, Harvey Pitt.

William Hedgcock Webster was born on March 6, 1924 in St. Louis. He was raised in the suburbs of Webster Groves, Missouri, his father the owner of Ranch and Farm Land and the small businesses. He was a lieutenant of the Navy during the Second World War and returned to active service for two years during the Korean War. He graduated from Amherst College with a baccalaureate in 1947 and obtained a law degree from the Washington University Law School in St. Louis in 1949.

Webster exercised the law with a company in Saint-Louis until 1960, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed him an American lawyer for the Missouri Oriental District. He resigned the following year after the elections of President John F. Kennedy, then spent most of the 1960s in private practice. Appointed by President Richard Nixon to the American District Court of the Missouri Oriental District in 1971, Webster established a reputation as a moderate lawyer. Nixon raised webster at the 8th Circuit Court of Apèals in the United States in 1973.

“I consider myself an operating from a restraint but being ready to take the necessary judicial measures to reach the end of justice,” said Webster by closing his judicial career to join the FBI. Critics, however, reproached him for a tendency to promote the accusation in criminal affairs.

The Liberals and the Conservatives congratulated Webster for an impartial file on civil rights, even if it was a member of ST. Louis social organizations which excluded minorities. He argued that he did not belong to any club that actively practiced racism. As director of the FBI, he brought more blacks and women to the office. The replacement of Clarence Mr. Kelley, Webster has concentrated FBI efforts on organized crime, white passes and drug application.

The absence of attention to political corruption was the Abscam Sting, in which the officials offered bribes to office employees who pretended to be businessmen from the Middle East. Eleven people, including six members of the congress, were sentenced.

Webster has also intensified anti-terrorist and counterintelligence activities of FBI, which helped him prepare him for the CIA post. Some who questioned his appointment as central intelligence director argued that his lack of operational experience and experience in foreign affairs was damage.

Webster was recognized to build morale within the CIA and starting its passage from a position of Cold War. The agency was accused, some have unjustly affirmed, not to anticipate how speed the Soviet Union and its oriental block would collapse and do not do more before the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein in 1991.

Over a period of nine years which included the mandate of Webster, the CIA officer, Aldrich Ames, sold secrets to the Soviet Union and compromised dozens of operations before being arrested and sentenced to life prison without parole in 1994. Webster and other CIA leaders were criticized for not having detected Ames.

In retirement, Webster sat on a presidential panel on internal security after terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and was a member of a commission investigating the security tricks at the FBI.

Webster, a Christian scientist who has not smoked, rarely drank and liked to play tennis and reading history, married Drusilla Lane Webster in 1950; They raised two daughters and a son. After his death by cancer in 1984, he married Lynda Jo Clugston in 1990.

Webster is survived by his second wife, three children from her first marriage and their spouses, seven grandchildren and spouses and 12 great-grandchildren. A commemorative service will take place in Washington on September 18.