NH Native Involved in FBI Investigation at Pentagon
WASHINGTON – On Sept. 11, FBI Special Agent Jeff Bedford watched the second jet airplane crash into the World Trade Center on a TV in his supervisor’s office in downtown Washington. Minutes later, his telephone rang, and he was told to get to New York City.
But the phone rang again a few minutes later, with orders for Bedford to head to the nearby Pentagon instead. And when he led 30 agents to the smoking building, Bedford, a former Manchester police officer and Exeter native, knew the disaster was going to be one of the worst he had ever investigated.
“Without even having seen it, I knew it was going to be days or weeks that we were out there,” Bedford said. “The scene was quite confusing, so people were just bringing us stuff they were finding as they were walking around the area. Firefighters were still putting out fires, so there was a lot of smoke. The impact on the building was pretty amazing in terms of the size of the hole and the debris that was hanging off the building.”
Bedford, 43, was a patrol officer in Manchester for three years before joining the FBI in 1989. He now gathers forensic data for investigations and also investigates crime scenes out of the FBI’s Washington field office. He is the leader of the office’s 10-member evidence response team, which collects evidence at crime scenes.
He has been on the scene of three other terrorist bombings, including the American Embassy bombing in Kenya and two in Saudi Arabia, investigated the case of former White House intern Monica Lewinsky and took information from missing Washington intern Chandra Levy’s computer. “I handled all evidence on the Lewinsky investigation,” he said, including her infamous stained blue dress. “That was big, and I thought that was my claim to fame, but this has impacted so many more lives.”
Bedford said the Pentagon investigation will be going on for years, but the evidence collection was completed on Sept. 28. He said he now has “15 to 20 people each day at a warehouse going through the evidence collected, seeing what’s valuable. It’s a huge warehouse, and it’s full of stuff.” Bedford said he likes working with evidence because it “doesn’t lie and it doesn’t change,” but in cases like the Pentagon disaster, it can also be disturbing, he added.
“It’s gross; there were body parts everywhere,” he said. “I didn’t go in the building to help with the recovery of bodies, but the rubble that came out of the building was brought to us in a different location. The smell was awful. I can’t get rid of the smell.”
Bedford said he could not see the plane that crashed into the Pentagon when he arrived on the scene at 10:30 that morning, but he did see many parts of the aircraft being taken from the building. He said he and his agents conducted a line search, in which they stand side by side in a line and walk forward, extracting whatever they can find from the ground. That is the most effective way to begin searching, he said.
“You get everything you think is relevant,” he said. “You really can’t make judgments on what you have until you have the time to take a breath and realize what’s there.”
He said that though he has the monumental task of sorting through the Pentagon evidence, he thinks the cleanup and investigation at the World Trade Center site is a larger and more intricate task.
“I can’t even imagine what they’re doing in New York,” he said. “That’s a whole different ball game.” Bedford said his work and the world have changed since he left the Manchester police department. “Being a cop in Manchester, you do plenty of motor vehicle accidents and car stops,” he said. “Back in those days, the violence wasn’t as rampant, drugs weren’t as rampant. It wasn’t the society that we have now. Everything was fairly quiet when I was a cop. I arrested plenty of people, but it wasn’t for anything big.”
Bedford said he learns something from each crime scene he works on, and after seeing the Pentagon, he thinks “the big picture is we didn’t expect this to happen this way. The big picture to me is being better prepared to predict what the terrorists do to infiltrate.”
“We’re going to do whatever we can to piece together a case on this in the event anybody can be arrested and tie up all the loose ends,” Bedford said. “This is a huge challenge, and I think we’re stepping up to the plate quite well. I think we’re going to pull all the pieces together on this one.”
