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Experience on side of inquiry staff director

Eleanor Hill has ''inside knowledge but a certain distance . . . to be objective,'' Sen. Bob Graham says.

By MARY JACOBY, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published June 19, 2002

WASHINGTON -- Eleanor Hill was not lawmakers' first choice to run the joint House-Senate investigation into Sept. 11 intelligence failures. Yet by all accounts, the soft-spoken but relentless former Tampa federal prosecutor should have been.

A former inspector general of the Defense Department with 15 years of experience working for Congress, the Florida State University graduate is one of the few people with the breadth of experience to handle this important but difficult job, observers say.

Her assignment: get to the bottom of the intelligence fiasco while juggling the political interests of the 37 members of the joint panel and directing a staff of 24 in a high-profile, high-pressure investigation.

"She has all the skills necessary to do the job," said Washington lawyer Joe DiGenova, who helped investigate the nation's intelligence agencies in the 1970s as counsel to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, then led by Idaho Democrat Frank Church.

"She's also going to face all the classic obstacles anyone faces in investigating the intelligence agencies: Are they going to tell you the truth? Are they going to accidentally lose documents? Are they going to hide people from you?" DiGenova said.

Hired by the inquiry's co-chairmen, Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., and Rep. Porter Goss, R-Sanibel, Hill in June replaced L. Britt Snider, a former inspector general of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Lawmakers forced Snider out in April after discovering he had hired a staff member who was under investigation at the CIA for failing a polygraph exam.

After more than two weeks of closed-door hearings, the panel could hold its first public session as early as next week.

Until then Hill will work behind the scenes. She declined a request for an interview.

But an aide to Sen. Richard Shelby, vice chairman of the Senate intelligence panel, said Shelby was impressed that Hill began taking witness depositions immediately after starting, a basic task her predecessor had neglected.

"She's tough as nails and came in and changed courses overnight," said Andrea Gray, a spokeswoman for the Alabama Republican.

Added Graham, "I think she has the benefit of inside knowledge but a certain distance from the agencies to be objective."

Hill, 51, is married with a nearly 10-year-old son. She was born in Miami Beach and grew up in Miami Shores. Her father's job as a lead forecaster at the National Hurricane Center in Miami brought the family to the state.

She graduated magna cum laude from Florida State University in 1972 and earned a law degree from FSU's College of Law two years later, making Law Review.

From 1975 to 1980 she worked as a federal prosecutor in Tampa, one of the few women in the profession at the time.

"The judges were from the old school, and at first they would be rather deferential to her, sort of Southern gentlemanly-like," said Terry Smiljanich, who served with Hill as an assistant U.S. attorney in Tampa. "But once they saw her in action cross-examining witnesses, they saw she was as tough as anyone else."

Another former colleague from the Tampa U.S. Attorney's Office, Bill James, remembers the time a prominent defense lawyer called her "honey" or "sweetie" during a conversation with the judge.

Hill objected, and the judge admonished the lawyer to use professional language, James said.

With a soft-spoken but methodical style, Hill never lost any of the approximately two dozen cases she tried in Tampa.

"She has a great command of facts in complex litigation and a great rapport with the judge and the jury," said Manuel Menendez, another former Tampa colleague who is now a circuit judge in Hillsborough County.

"She's got a memory like a steel trap, and she's very articulate, very well read, very well spoken," Menendez said.

Her most famous case involved a ring of arsonists. The lead defendant, Willie "The Torch" Noriega, was sentenced to five years in prison in 1978 for defrauding insurance companies.

The arson case set Hill on her Washington path. In 1978, the Senate Governmental Affairs permanent subcommittee on investigations asked her to come to Capitol Hill and testify about it.

The subcommittee wanted to hear from Hill because the investigation was "virtually the only major successful arson case ever prosecuted by the federal government," Sen. Charles Percy, R-Ill., said at the time.

Hill's appearance led to a job offer from Sen. Sam Nunn, the Georgia Democrat who chaired the subcommittee, a panel with rich historical significance.

In 1953 and 1954, Sen. Joseph McCarthy used his chairmanship of the investigations subcommittee to hold hearings into alleged Communist infiltration of the U.S. government. His chief counsel was Roy M. Cohn, who helped the Wisconsin Republican conduct what became known as one of the great witch hunts in U.S. history.

After the Senate formally censured McCarthy in 1954 and Democrats won control of the chamber in 1955, the chairmanship of the panel passed to Sen. John D. McClellan of Arkansas, who hired a young Robert F. Kennedy to replace Cohn as chief counsel.

Hill got the chief counsel job in 1987, when Nunn took back the chairmanship after a six-year hiatus while Republicans controlled the Senate.

In that job, Hill oversaw high-profile investigations into health insurance fraud, narcotics trafficking and organized crime and racketeering.

The post not only taught her how to run a congressional committee and draft legislation but also how to navigate politics.

In 1987, Hill served as Nunn's liaison to the Iran-Contra committee. She wrote questions for the senator to ask of people such as former National Security Council aide Lt. Col. Oliver North, his young secretary Fawn Hall, and White House adviser Rear Adm. John M. Poindexter.

In the 1990s, she ran several investigations for Nunn into fraud in the student loan and Pell Grant programs. Her challenge was to convince Sen. Claiborne Pell, D-R.I., and other lawmakers who created, funded and oversaw the programs that Nunn wasn't targeting them personally.

Her natural tact helped her succeed at that and other delicate tasks, observers say.

In 1995, President Clinton appointed Hill the inspector general of the Defense Department, in essence the military's top auditor.

After taking the job, Hill was surprised to learn she held rank equivalent to a four-star general, said her old friend, Smiljanich. And she was pleased but somewhat embarrassed when the Marine Corps told her that they wanted to honor her high rank with a parade.

"She wasn't sure what that meant, but she said okay. Next thing she knows, she was in front of the Iwo Jima memorial (in Arlington, Va.), and the whole Marine Corps was passing and saluting and everything. She was quite impressed," Smiljanich said.

At Defense, Hill oversaw the investigation of Army Maj. Gen. David Hale, who pleaded guilty in 1999 to military charges of adultery with the wives of four subordinates.

In the Sept. 11 investigation, success may depend on how willing lawmakers are to let Hill "do it right and ask the tough questions," as former Senate counsel DiGenova put it.

"When you have a joint investigation like this, compromises are made because you have to keep people happy," he said. "A lot of people don't want to look at this question because we're at war."

-- Times staff writer Bill Adair contributed to this report