Four F.B.I. agents invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination today, refusing to testify before a Senate panel about a deadly 1992 standoff in Idaho after the field commander of the operation testified that the bureau’s investigation of the incident amounted to a cover-up.
The commander, Special Agent Eugene F. Glenn, testified that he had been made a scapegoat for the events at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, where the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s special Hostage Rescue Team had been dispatched to arrest Randy Weaver, a white separatist wanted on a weapons charge.
Mr. Glenn’s version of events starkly contradicted statements given under oath to investigators by Larry Potts, who as a senior bureau official supervised the Ruby Ridge operation from Washington.
Mr. Glenn said he believed he had been harshly disciplined by bureau Director Louis J. Freeh to prevent investigators from moving on to higher level officials, especially Mr. Potts, a longtime friend of the director.
Instead of searching for facts in an internal F.B.I. inquiry last year, Mr. Glenn said, the bureau “twisted” its investigative machinery to answer one question: “Who do we blame?”
Mr. Glenn’s accusations and the spectacle of bureau agents refusing to testify made the session a striking embarrassment to the F.B.I. on a subject that has provoked the deepest crisis during Mr. Freeh’s leadership. The events of Ruby Ridge have come to symbolize to both conservatives and liberals the excesses of Federal law enforcement.
Fact Freeh 