(4 of 7)
On July 29, only two days after the bombing, the FBI had already set about secretly taping a conversation between Jewell and a friend. Tim Attaway, an officer with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, had got to know Jewell in the course of their work at Centennial Park. Attaway had not been there on the day of the attack, so he asked Jewell to tell him all about what happened. He went over to Jewell's mother's house for a lasagna dinner, and for nearly two hours, with barely a break, Jewell recounted the whole affair. He did not know that Attaway, at the request of the FBI, was wearing a wire. Whether it was legal or not, Jewell's lawyers maintain that it was underhanded.
More deception was in the offing. Jewell claims, and FBI sources confirm, that before his name had been leaked to the press as a suspect, agents persuaded Jewell to submit to a voluntary filmed interview by telling him they were making a training video. Officials at the Justice Department say neither they nor FBI Director Louis Freeh knew about the ruse until September. Immediately, say these sources, Justice and Freeh launched an investigation by the Office of Professional Responsibility. So far, the officials in Washington seem to agree with the opinion of Jewell attorney Jack Martin that the use of this tactic, often called a pretext interview, was "legal but sleazy."
A much more serious charge is that the agents conducting the pretext interview tried to trick Jewell into waiving his Miranda rights (the right to remain silent, to have an attorney present during questioning and so on). Jewell's lawyers say that as part of the playacting for the training video, an agent asked Jewell to sign such a waiver. Martin has released what he claims is a transcript of the interrogation that quotes an agent as saying to Jewell, "See, what I'm going to do 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 ... a professional interview. O.K.? And then, uh, I'll just ask you a couple of questions as far as to advise you of your rights. O.K.? Do you understand that?"
If an agent did try to fool Jewell in this way, it would unquestionably have been unlawful and improper. But there are reasons to doubt that the incident really took place. "Why in the world would you try to trick someone if you were taping it?" asks an official. "You'd have to be insane to do it with the tape running."