had been circulating for years.
In Washington, the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs held a private meeting and voted to form a special investigative subcommittee that would look into the allegations. Senator DeConcini was selected to lead the subcommittee. He was joined by Arizona’s other senator, the Republican John McCain, and by Tom Daschle, the Democrat from South Dakota.
What resulted was one of the most far-reaching investigations of its kind. DeConcini and his counterparts decided to investigate major oil companies, the BIA, local Indian schools, and even the tribal authorities themselves. DeConcini knew that he would need a top-notch investigator to run the effort. He would need someone who could manage a large team of lawyers and field agents like Jim Elroy, and someone who could oversee a sprawling and complicated chain of evidence that would be developed.
Luckily for DeConcini, there was a young lawyer who had recently gone on the job market named Ken Ballen. Ballen was on the job market because he had been a lead investigator for the Iran-Contra hearings, a nationally watched investigation of covert US arms sales to Iran. When the investigation wrapped up, Ballen was looking for a new challenge. And he was about to get it.
* * *
In the spring of 1988, Ken Ballen walked down a tree-lined sidewalk near Capitol Hill, on the way to his new job. He walked past a strip of low-slung brick buildings that were built back in Washington, DC’s earliest days, when it was not much more than a sleepy little town that seemed to shut down when the legislature was not in session. Just across from these quaint buildings was the imposing nine-story structure where Ballen was headed, an edifice that evoked the new age of Washington and all of its power. This was the Hart Senate Office Building, where Ballen had just recently started work as the lead investigator for the Senate’s investigation into potential criminal conduct on Indian reservations.
The front of the Hart Building was a grid of rectangular, black windows, bordered by a façade of white marble. This was the face of the Senate bureaucracy. Ballen hustled into the main entrance of the Hart Building along with the usual crowd of Washington workers. While it is nondescript from the outside, the interior of the Hart Building is magnificent. It’s the kind of place that makes a person feel important, even powerful, just by the mere fact of working there every day. Even in the bathrooms, the partitions between urinals are made from slabs of white marble, giving every corner of the space a feeling of quiet authority.
Ballen certainly had considerable authority in his new position. He oversaw a large team of investigators who had recently been given full reign over the ninth floor of the Hart Building, the top story that contained a warren of cubicles and offices. He was just thirty-three years old in 1988 and not too long out of law school. But even at that young age, he had already played a major role in one of the biggest investigations in the US Senate. That’s how he caught the eye of Senator DeConcini. Ballen took the job when DeConcini offered it because he believed that the new subcommittee was dedicated to uncovering the truth and, just as importantly, because the Senate would be willing to give him the resources he needed. Ballen wasn’t disappointed on this front. As he entered the Hart Building and took an elevator to the ninth floor, he walked into an entire suite of offices that were now dedicated to his effort.
Early in the investigation, Ballen knew that he needed a lead investigator in the field, and the Senate turned to the FBI to find one. The request was sent to Oliver “Buck” Revell, who, at that time, was the FBI’s associate deputy director in charge of all investigative operations. When Revell got the request, he only had one agent in mind: Jim Elroy. Revell had worked with Elroy back when the two of them were based in Oklahoma, and he thought Elroy would be the perfect agent to head a complex and difficult investigation. “I think Jim’s the best investigator I ever ran into at the FBI. And I ran into thousands,” Revell said many years later.
Elroy agreed to take the assignment, and soon he and Ballen were talking back and forth about Elroy’s plans to lead the fieldwork out in Indian Country. One of the first items of business was dealing with the oil