“THE MOST DANGEROUS INSTITUTION”
(American Heritage, August 2002)
When American airlines flight 11 crashed into the north
tower of the World Trade Center on the morning of
September 11, 2001, the Federal Bureau of Investigation
director, Robert S. Mueller III, had been at his post for just
one week. Suddenly he found himself responsible for both
investigating the gravest crime in American history and for
preventing further attacks.
Mueller had faced a daunting job even before the terrorists
struck. He had been assigned to revamp a tradition-bound
bureaucracy of 27,000 employees, an organization that for
years had given the impression of lurching from one
blunder to the next. His goals were to bring effective
management to the Bureau, beef up its intelligence
capabilities, reorder its priorities, and force the insular
institution to cooperate with other agencies. He recognized
that he faced a pivotal moment in the history of what his
predecessor Louis Freeh had called “potentially... the most
dangerous institution in the United States.” The FBI had
long exemplified disciplined and effective professionalism,
handling threats from kidnapping to espionage, but it had
also assumed powers irreconcilable with democratic
government and shamed the nation with its extralegal
exploits.
Americans have always recoiled at the idea of a secret
police. In 1908, when Attorney General Charles Bonaparte
established what was called the Bureau of Investigation,
Congress worried that the government would set up a
“system of spying upon and espionage of the people, such
as has prevailed in Russia.” The country had had no
comprehensive police force on the federal level, and the
Justice Department itself had not existed until 1870. After
the turn of the century, Bonaparte had sought to expand
the department’s role in antitrust and other law
enforcement. Congress turned down his request for a band
of investigators, but President Theodore Roosevelt
authorized him to set up the squad anyway, and the
legislature went along. The Attorney General admitted to
“certain inherent dangers” but agreed with Congress that
he should use his 34 detectives only for “the detection and
prosecution of crimes against the United States.”
But the Bureau quickly strayed into exactly the kinds of
political intrigue that Bonaparte had eschewed and critics
had feared. The 1910 Mann Act, which forbade transporting
women across state lines for the purpose of prostitution,
became the impetus for sending Bureau men into the field
outside Washington, D.C., for the first time. Since the law
also covered “any other immoral purpose,” it proved a
handy tool for pursuing out-of-favor politicians and
troublemakers, ranging from the black boxing champion
Jack Johnson to a prominent leader of the Ku Klux Klan.
During World War I the agency was given responsibility for
curtailing saboteurs and spies, but it also used this power to
prosecute aliens, union leaders, and radicals. National
anxiety over the so-called Red menace came to a head in
1919, inflamed by the Russian Revolution and domestic
labor agitation. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, whose
own home had been bombed by anarchists, established
what would be named the General Intelligence Division
within the Bureau and put in charge a young Justice
Department lawyer named John Edgar Hoover. Hoover set
about creating and cross-indexing intelligence files on
anarchist leaders and groups. Within two years his directory
included 450,000 individuals, organizations, and
publications.
During the winter of 1919-20 Hoover, along with the Bureau
of Immigration’s head, Anthony Caminetti, directed a series
of raids that netted thousands of alleged Bolsheviks and
anarchists. What came to be known as the Palmer Raids
were initially applauded in the press. The Washington Post
declared, “There is no time for hairsplitting over
infringements of liberty.” When the details emerged,
though, they left a bad taste. Its own manpower limited, the
Bureau had relied on local police and vigilante groups.
Many of those apprehended were poor and illiterate, their
connections to anarchism tenuous. Citizens had been
hauled in along with foreigners. The dragnet’s failure to
uncover any bombs or stockpiles of weapons gave the lie to
the warnings of imminent revolution; warrantless arrests,
forced confessions, suspension of legal counsel, and
prisoners marched through the streets in shackles
awakened fears of a European-style secret police.
The corruption-ridden Harding years brought further
scandal, and by 1924 Coolidge’s Attorney General, Harlan
Fiske Stone, was determined to end the abuses. “... A
secret police may become a menace to free governments
and free institutions,” he stated.
He wanted a Bureau that was “not concerned with political
or other opinions of individuals....Only with their conduct
and then only with such conduct as is forbidden by the laws
of the United States.” Stone directed the 29-year-old
Hoover to clean house. In spite of his involvement in the
Palmer Raid abuses, or perhaps because of it, Hoover was
determined to make the agency incorruptible, tightly
controlled, and dedicated to law enforcement rather than
spying.
“The Bureau must be divorced from politics and not be a
catch-all for political hacks,” he insisted. He culled the bad
apples, recruited men of high character trained in
accounting or the law, and fired the organization with his
enthusiasm. For the next 10 years Hoover kept out of the
limelight. He cut back the number of agents and actually
returned budgeted funds that he hadn’t spent. He set up a
central fingerprint registry and a system to track crime
statistics. Later he would establish the National Police
Academy to train law enforcement officers.
Born in Washington, D.C., in 1895, Hoover had grown up in
a world of civil servants. He had begun his adult life as a
junior messenger at the Library of Congress, eventually
working with its card catalogue, all while attending law
school. Some biographers suggest that this led to his
lifelong obsession with accumulating information and
keeping lists: the Custodial Detention Index, the Rabble-
Rouser Index, the Key Activist Index.
Although he came to be a master manipulator of the
political system, Hoover scorned politics; he belonged to no
party and never voted. He consistently described his
enemies in moral terms—outlaws were “rats crawling from
their hide-outs to gnaw at the vitals of our civilization” —and
came to believe that perversity, not social conditions,
explained wrongdoing. Communism was not a flawed
economic and political system but “the latest form of the
eternal rebellion against authority.”
Hoover’s youth and energy helped him make the agency a
model of efficiency, and his genuine skills as a leader kept
him in the job for 48 years—too long, as it turned out.
Harlan Stone had tried to draw a clear line between the two
purposes of policing, law enforcement and intelligence
gathering, but the blurring of that distinction would trouble
the Bureau for years to come. Law enforcement brings to
justice those who break statutes, from Mafia chieftains to
venal politicians. In our society the process is open to public
view, governed by rules of evidence, overseen by courts,
and designed to affect only those reasonably suspected of
having committed offenses. By contrast, intelligence
gathering, aimed at preventing future threats, is not
necessarily tied to specific crimes; its targets can be
general: all anarchists, aliens, Communists, Middle Eastern
men. The rules of evidence don’t apply, and the methods
are necessarily secret, sometimes sinister.
During its first 10 years under Hoover’s direction, the
Bureau remained a minor player on the national stage.
Then two events in the mid-thirties transformed its mission
in both law enforcement and intelligence.
On the night of July 21, 1934, a group of FBI agents stood
sweating on a street on Chicago’s North Side as a man,
accompanied by two women, emerged from the Biograph
movie theater. At a signal, the agents closed in. When the
man began to run, a fusillade dropped him dead on the hot
pavement. The agents rushed to phone word of the
ambush to their director, who was waiting anxiously in
Washington. In minutes the news spread throughout the
country. FBI agents had killed John Dillinger, the man
newspapers had called the archcriminal of the age.
Decades later Hoover described the moment as his
greatest thrill.
There was a reason the incident shone so brightly in his
memory. The “crime wave” of the mid-thirties, really a
handful of cases involving hit-and-run kidnappers and bank
robbers, shaped the modern FBI. Before 1934 the Bureau
was one of a number of federal investigative units. The
nation had comparably few federal criminal laws; agents
spent much of their time looking into antitrust violations and
police-corruption cases. They had no power to make
arrests, nor were they authorized to carry guns.
As far as the sketchy statistics of the period indicate, the
nation’s crime rate did not accelerate after World War I. The
problem was manufactured by a sensationalizing press,
fueled by the dislocation of the Depression, and exploited
by New Dealers looking to demonstrate the potency of the
federal government. The drumbeat for action began in
1932 with the abduction and murder of Charles Lindbergh’s
infant son. It picked up a year later when four Bureau men
transporting a prisoner ran into an ambush in Kansas City.
One agent, the prisoner, and three others died in the
“massacre,” and the public started to sense that the
government was losing its grip on order in the country.
Always quick with hyperbole, Hoover spoke of “a challenge
to law and order and civilization itself.”
Until Dillinger’s demise, Homer Cummings, Roosevelt’s
energetic Attorney General, had led the anti-crime effort.
He had pushed a package of legislation through Congress
making bank robbery, flight to avoid prosecution, interstate
racketeering, and other misdeeds federal crimes. The anti-
crime bills were “one of the most important, if least
recognized, New Deal reforms,” notes the historian Sanford
Ungar. The legislation gave the FBI real police powers,
setting it up as the most visible law-enforcement arm of the
Executive Branch.
When kidnappers grabbed Charles Urschel, an Oklahoma
oil magnate, in 1933, the Bureau’s meticulous methods had
paid off in the arrest of George ("Machine Gun") Kelly, one
of the kidnappers. Surrendering, Kelly was reported,
probably spuriously, to have pleaded, “Don’t shoot, G-
men.” This shorthand for “government men” became the
headline-friendly moniker for the members of a federal
agency that was about to gain national prominence.
With fewer than 400 agents in 1934, the FBI could hardly
police the whole country. That wasn’t the point. What FDR
wanted was theater, and Hoover obliged. He selected cases
that guaranteed publicity. The slaying of Dillinger and the
hunt for various “public enemies”—Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby
Face Nelson, the Barker gang—made the Bureau famous
(after several name changes, it finally became the Federal
Bureau of Investigation in 1935). As movies and magazines
trumpeted the G-man myth, newspapers proclaimed Hoover
“Public Hero Number One.”
Hoover continued to believe that the Bureau should be a
leader in law enforcement, but not a comprehensive federal
police force. The agency stayed out of the unpopular
business of Prohibition, and Hoover saw no role for it in
addressing strictly local crimes like gambling and labor
racketeering. Rather, the Bureau should remain an elite
agency guiding the nation’s police in modern crime-fighting
methods. “Before science all things must fall,” was one of
Hoover’s favorite mottoes.
Some New Deal aides had been pushing for the federal
government to take a preventive or social response to
wrongdoing—attacking problems like slums, poverty, and
unemployment that were seen as the roots of crime. The G-
man clamor drowned out their voices, touting instead a
strategy of prosecuting criminals. The policing philosophy
defined the FBI; and the Bureau actively promoted that
philosophy.
Two years after the Dillinger coup, as the “crime wave” that
had established the Bureau was sputtering out, an equally
momentous development in FBI history occurred, far from
the glare of publicity. The date was August 24,1936.
Concerned about the war clouds gathering in Europe and
Asia, President Roosevelt wanted an assessment of the
threats from both Communists and Fascists in the United
States. Organizations like the right-wing American Liberty
League, backed by powerful business executives, were in
fact mulling over plots to depose the President.
Because his appropriations did not cover such
investigations, Hoover suggested that his authority rely on a
1916 law authorizing the State Department to approve
intelligence operations against agents of foreign powers.
The next day Roosevelt had Secretary of State Cordell Hull
give the order—but Hull never put the man- date in writing.
In spite of the fact that the law was intended to authorize
surveillance only of foreign spies, the Bureau immediately
turned its attention to purely domestic groups. The verbal
directive, Hoover’s biographer Richard Gid Powers points
out, “provided Hoover with his basic authority for nearly
forty years of domestic intelligence operations.”
Both Hoover and FDR knew that domestic spying was a
political minefield, yet the director was eager to serve the
President, and the mission fitted his own inclination to get
the goods on suspected radicals. Abandoning his innate
caution, he steered the Bureau onto legal thin ice.
As war threatened to engulf Europe in June 1939,
Roosevelt issued an official but secret edict directing the
FBI to investigate domestic espionage and sabotage.
Hoover re-established the General Intelligence Division, the
spy unit that had been eliminated in the 1924 reforms; he
had conveniently saved its files. The Bureau’s intelligence
activities were carried out under the guise of national
security, but their targets were often political: Roosevelt
critics like Sen. Burton Wheeler; isolationists like Charles
Lindbergh; labor leaders like John L. Lewis.
During the war years the Bureau handled
counterintelligence efforts throughout the Western
Hemisphere and spoiled at least one German sabotage
attempt. Hoover opposed as both pointless and illegal the
policy of transporting everyone of Japanese descent on the
West Coast, including U.S. citizens, to camps far inland. But
he established a system of secret files that were not
included in the Bureau’s careful indexing system, hiding all
its illegal intelligence activity from scrutiny. Congress had
outlawed wiretapping in 1934, but Roosevelt decided the
ban didn’t apply to national security threats. The FBI
arranged for the delay and examination of Axis and Soviet
cables, the opening of mail to Axis diplomats, and break-ins
for espionage purposes. These activities were illegal, but
many continued after the war. When Attorney General
Francis Biddle found out about the Bureau’s Custodial
Detention Index, listing suspects who were to be rounded
up in an emergency, he labeled it “dangerous, illegal” and
ordered its end. Hoover simply changed its name to the
Security Index.
Had Americans known of the FBI’s clandestine ways during
this era, few would have questioned them. Such abuses of
power paled alongside the external threats the nation
faced, and the FBI’s civil liberties record was still better than
that of most local police agencies. Later the danger of
giving the Bureau ill-defined spy duties became clearer.
The FBI emerged from the war with some 4,000 agents and
a formidable intelligence capability. Hoover maneuvered to
maintain an FBI monopoly over domestic intelligence, and
Congress restricted the new Central Intelligence Agency to
overseas duty. Tension with a resurgent Soviet empire
convinced the Director that another war was imminent and
that the Bureau needed to be ready.
The Smith Act, passed in 1940, had made it a crime to
advocate, or to belong to a group that advocated, the
overthrow of the government by force. It provided a potent
weapon against radicals during the Cold War. The Bureau
targeted and won convictions of top leaders of the
American Communist movement in 1948 and 1949, and
additional party members went to trial over the next five
years. The FBI also solved what Hoover at the time called
the “crime of the century,” the theft of America’s atomic
bomb secrets. With the help of meticulous code breaking,
agents were able to alert British authorities to the spy Klaus
Fuchs and to apprehend his U.S. contacts and
coconspirators, including Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
After the war President Truman renewed his predecessor’s
order permitting wiretaps for intelligence purposes. Hoover
latched on to accusations against purported Communists in
government and assigned 300 agents to investigate the
former State Department aide Alger Hiss, one of the highest
government officials accused of Communist-party
involvement. Hiss was convicted of perjury in January of
1950 and jailed. Convinced that the Truman administration
was not doing enough to counter the Red threat, Hoover
fed FBI data to the House Un-American Activities
Committee, letting representatives attack with innuendo
citizens whom the Bureau lacked the evidence to prosecute.
In addition, Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s Senate subcommittee
on investigations employed ex-FBI agents as sleuths and
made liberal use of information from Bureau files (although
when the senator began to make accusations against the
Eisenhower administration itself, Hoover backed off).
The Bureau set up a Responsibilities Program under which
numerous schoolteachers, college professors, and state
government workers lost their jobs. Suspicions multiplied.
Writers, reporters, and entertainers came under FBI
scrutiny. The Bureau kept files on Leonard Bernstein and
Pete Seeger, on Charlie Chaplin and Ernest Hemingway. It
had drifted far from its law enforcement duties. It was about
to stray even farther.
In the early 1960s, as the nation experienced a serious
increase in crime, the Kennedy administration, searching
for solutions, finally began to look at possible social causes
of criminal behavior. But with Hoover still blaming crime on
the moral failings of wrongdoers, the FBI continued to lobby
for heftier Bureau appropriations with which to lock up more
criminals. The agency had always been the nemesis of
bank robbers, kidnappers, and car thieves, whose cases
could be solved with relative ease and offered high
conviction rates. For decades, however, it had failed to
pursue organized crime. Hoover had labeled the notion of a
national crime syndicate “baloney.”
During the 1930s urban gangs had used the clout and cash
they gained during Prohibition to move into extortion,
gambling, narcotics, and other rackets. Mysteries, some
salacious, have been spun about Hoover’s reluctance to go
after gangsters, but several straightforward explanations
suggest themselves. Mob cases required tedious legwork
and involved the danger that gangsters might corrupt
agents. Organized crime’s intractability warned Hoover
away from a potential quagmire. During the postwar period
an all-out attack on gangsters would have taken Bureau
resources away from the anti-Red crusade. As late as 1959
the FBI’s New York office had 400 agents chasing
“subversives,” but only 4 investigating organized crime.
The discovery of a “crime convention” in the upstate New
York hamlet of Apalachin in 1957 by two state troopers and
two U.S. Treasury agents embarrassed the Bureau, which
had to admit it knew nothing of the conclave. The headlines
sparked public concern about the extent of organized crime,
forcing Hoover to begin moving against the mob. Under his
Top Hoodlums program, wiretaps and bugs proved effective
in garnering intelligence about gangsters, but because the
methods were illegal, the information could not be used as
evidence in court.
In 1968 Congress finally gave the FBI its long-sought legal
authorization to carry out court-approved eavesdropping.
The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations
(RICO) provision of the Organized Crime Control Act of
1970 allowed entire criminal enterprises to be indicted, and
the gangster tide began to recede. The FBI gathered
evidence that led to 2,500 convictions between 1981 and
1983, successfully hauled eight members of the Mafia
“Commission” into court in 1986, and continued to hammer
mob bosses through the 1990s.
Civil rights was another area where the FBI initially feared to
tread. The Bureau was criticized for standing by in the face
of provocations like the violence against the Freedom
Riders in 1961 and Alabama’s official defiance of the
integration of its state university in 1963. But under
pressure from President Johnson the Bureau finally came to
play a significant role in suppressing the violent reaction to
the civil rights movement in the South.
Throughout the fifties and sixties, as Hoover maintained the
FBI’s emphasis on intelligence activities, his vigilance about
domestic Communism approached paranoia. The fact was,
the Communist threat at home had largely evaporated. The
Smith Act trials had decapitated the party in the United
States, and revelations of Stalin’s crimes, combined with the
Soviet suppression of the 1956 Hungarian revolt, had
seriously sapped party morale. By the end of 1957 the
party claimed fewer than 4,000 members, many of them FBI
informants. Nevertheless, hoping to obliterate the menace
once and for all, the Bureau began the most serious
intrusion ever of police power into the American political
process. It was to be one of the FBI’s deepest secrets, with
all actions personally approved by the Director. It became
known as it COINTELPRO, for “counterintelligence
program.”
Not content with investigation, Hoover now ordered his men
to infiltrate and disrupt the activities of suspected
organizations. The point was not to prosecute criminals but
to hamstring political activities. Agents made anonymous
phone calls and wrote letters denouncing targets in sexual
terms. They contacted neighbors, employers, and friends to
spread the word that a person was disloyal. They
encouraged informants to sow discord, which sometimes led
to violence. They arranged for targeted tax audits, and put
“snitch jackets” on people, planting false rumors that they
were cooperating with authorities.
The tactics were so effective that they spawned, over the
next 15 years, additional COINTELPROs, targeting the
Socialist Workers party, white hate groups, black militants,
the “New Left,” and others. The Communist-party
COINTELPRO, though unauthorized, had tenuous
justification in the Communist Control Act of 1954, which
had outlawed the party. But with each subsequent program
the agency moved farther away from any mooring to legality.
The FBI’s most notorious abuses were directed at Martin
Luther King, Jr., who became the focus of the Bureau’s
interest as early as 1958. He thrice transgressed: He was
black, Hoover thought he had Communist ties, and he had
the temerity to criticize the Bureau. In spite of the fact that
its own studies had shown few connections between
Communists and civil rights groups, the FBI tapped phones
and hid microphones in King’s hotel rooms. It distributed
tapes and reports from these sources as part of a vigorous
campaign to demoralize the civil rights leader and
undermine his reputation. Hoover held a press conference
on November 18,1964, in which he called King “one of the
lowest characters in the country.” But by the mid-1960s
these Redbaiting techniques had begun to lose their
potency; Hoover was falling out of sync with the temper of
the times.
Once the FBI entered the business of combating political
opinions, it became a criminal conspiracy itself. In March
1971 a group called the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate
the FBI burglarized a Bureau office in Media, Pennsylvania,
and made off with heaps of secret files. The burglary
prompted Hoover to shut down his most egregious domestic
spy operations. While the security breach barely made
news, the designation COINTELPRO on one of the stolen
documents, which the group sent to newspaper and
television reporters, proved critical. No one at the time knew
what the term meant, but the NBC News reporter Carl Stern
made Freedom of Information Act filings that gradually
helped reveal a long history of illegal activity. The Media
break-in proved to be, in the words of one Bureau official,
the “turning point in the FBI image,” forever tarnishing the
G-man myth. By the time all the facts emerged, Hoover was
dead and Watergate had darkened the national mood.
In 1976 Attorney General Edward Levi moved to re-
establish Justice Department control over the FBI. His
guidelines, echoing the sentiments of Attorney General
Stone 52 years earlier, set limits on operations not
specifically directed at criminal activity. They also required
the Bureau to clear its investigations in advance with the
Justice Department. Congress had already limited the
director’s term to 10 years, with Senate confirmation of his
appointment.
Seven years later President Reagan’s attorney general
William French Smith rescinded Levi’s orders, once again
letting the Bureau dig into the affairs of persons or groups
that “advocate criminal activity.” The FBI had only to notify
the Justice Department, not seek permission from it, when
initiating a domestic-security probe.
One aftereffect of Watergate was the passage of the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, an effort to
bring legal order to the intelligence realm. FISA set up a
secret court to handle requests for investigations of alleged
agents of foreign powers. Warrants for wiretaps for
intelligence gathering rather than law enforcement needed
no probable cause. The law recognized that the Bureau
would have to continue to pursue intelligence in national
security cases but attempted to contain its methods by
limiting them to use against foreign agents.
The scandals of the 1970s and the resulting legislative
restrictions temporarily damped the Bureau’s domestic
intelligence activity and brought law enforcement back to
the fore. Organized crime, white-collar crime, and tracking
down foreign spies became top priorities. The Bureau
introduced new methods like psychological profiling and,
during the 1980s, DNA analysis. It also opened its ranks to
minorities and women.
In the 1978-80 ABSCAM investigations, agents
impersonating the representatives of a fictitious Arab sheik
caught a U.S. senator, six representatives, and several
others taking bribes. Operations against corrupt local
government officials followed. Political malfeasance had
long been a Bureau responsibility but one that it had
approached gingerly.
By 1982 terrorism had emerged as a prominent focus of
Bureau attention, and with it came a renewal of intelligence
operations. The FBI prevented a reported 131 terrorist
attacks between 1981 and 2000. It foiled a 1999 plot to
blow up a Sacramento gas tank that could have killed
12,000 people. It helped to stymie a wave of planned
millennium terror attacks on the West Coast. It solved the
1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in a matter of
weeks and pursued the case to successful convictions,
heading off additional attacks in the process. The
perpetrator of the Oklahoma City bombing two years later
was also quickly apprehended, but the incident further
emphasized the need for effective preventive intelligence. In
the meantime the CIA was chagrined by the discovery of the
double agent Aldrich Ames, and in 1994 President Clinton
gave the FBI more counterintelligence responsibility,
making it the lead agency for combating terror and crime
worldwide. The Bureau began to expand its presence
overseas; by last year it operated 44 offices in foreign
countries.
In 1994 the Bureau’s director, Louis Freeh, warned that the
nation needed to exercise “constant vigilance” against
terrorism. Two years later Congress chimed in by
authorizing the Attorney General to investigate U.S. citizens
suspected of supporting terrorist groups. It also lifted
restrictions that had forbidden the FBI to spy on a citizen
solely because he or she had taken actions protected by
the First Amendment. The Bureau began for the first time to
feed intelligence data into the National Crime Information
Center system, which had been limited to criminal records.
In 1996 the FBI set up a counterterrorism center to
coordinate the efforts of analysts from 16 agencies and
local police forces, and the number of agents assigned to
intelligence grew from 224 in 1992 to 1,025 by the end of
the decade. In 2000 counterintelligence and the fight
against terrorism were designated the Bureau’s top
priorities.
The stepped-up intelligence effort required a difficult
adjustment in FBI culture. Law enforcement had always
been the path by which agents advanced. Solving cases led
to promotion, while poring over scholarly journals and
foreign newspapers, the legwork of intelligence gathering,
was nobody’s dream of glory. Data analysis was a long-
standing FBI weakness. Moreover, now the Bureau had to
work closely with other agencies, something it had
traditionally resisted. ”... No one institution is strong enough
to tackle the challenge of terrorism alone,” Director Mueller
emphasized. “Law enforcement, quite simply, is only as
good as its relationships.”
If inappropriate domestic spying had earlier been the
principal complaint against the Bureau, mismanagement
became the dominant charge during the 1990s. In 1993 the
FBI failed to resolve a confrontation with religious fanatics in
Waco, Texas, and the standoff ended in the incineration of
80 people, 25 of them children. The “shoot on sight” order
issued during the siege of a militant’s home in Ruby Ridge,
Idaho, in 1992 had also cost innocent lives. However, the
Bureau did learn from these incidents, and it handled a
1996 Montana showdown involving the group that called
itself the Freemen with patient and ultimately successful
restraint.
During the same period even the Bureau’s vaunted crime
lab suffered from mismanagement. The spy Robert
Hanssen was revealed to have operated undetected within
the Bureau’s own counterintelligence section for 21 years.
And the handling of the case of the atomic scientist and
onetime suspected spy Wen Ho Lee “embarrassed this
entire nation,” a district court judge said.
Critics noted that part of the problem lay in the ever-
widening scope of FBI responsibility. Some enforcement
efforts are by nature federal; they include corruption among
government officials; civil rights violations; and national or
international crime conspiracies. But Congress may have
turned to the FBI for solutions too many times. It made car-
jacking a federal crime. Telemarketing fraud, child
pornography, and money laundering were added to its list,
as was economic espionage. Parents who neglected to pay
child support became FBI targets. Drug trafficking grew to
account for nearly 26 percent of the Bureau’s convictions
by 1998 and as many as 80 percent in some districts.
Last fall’s terrorist attacks have prompted Director Mueller
to take another look at some of these duties. Agents have
been shifted from drug enforcement, white-collar fraud, and
violent crime to the anti-terror beat. Even bank robbery,
long a source of Bureau glory, may in some cases be left to
local police.
The crisis has given both focus and urgency to Mueller’s
mission to overhaul the agency he heads. Some reforms
address long-standing weaknesses: He has proposed new
sections devoted to cybercrime and to the Bureau’s own
internal security. An Office of Law Enforcement
Coordination will help the FBI better mesh with local police.
Bringing the Bureau’s computers up to speed has become
a priority.
In May, Mueller announced a further reorganization that he
asserted will result in a “redesigned and refocused FBI.” A
Justice Department official described the shifts as “turning
the ship 180 degrees from prosecution of crimes as our
main focus to the prevention of terrorist acts.” At the same
time, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that he
was loosening restrictions on FBI investigations, thereby
broadening the Bureau’s ability to conduct domestic
intelligence surveillance unrelated to criminal activity.
Preventing terror, the Bureau’s number one priority, will now
be the focus of 2,600 agents, more than double the number
who worked in the area before September 11. Hundreds of
newly hired analysts, linguists, and computer experts will
labor to make sense of the data compiled by agents. CIA
personnel will work directly with the FBI in the Bureau’s new
Office of Intelligence.
Some critics have asked whether the shakeup goes far
enough. Others question the wisdom of encouraging the
Bureau to increase its domestic spying given that its
intelligence failures before the September attacks were
related more to bureaucratic bungling than to inadequate
information-gathering authority.
In the end, the questions facing Mueller, and the nation
itself, are those that have hung over the FBI since its
earliest days: What kind of federal police force do we want?
What portion of our freedom and privacy will we relinquish
in exchange for security? Can we trust our government with
the secret and sometimes dirty tools of intelligence? The
Bureau’s history serves as a cautionary backdrop for the
changes that lie ahead.
# # #
(American Heritage, August 2002)
When American airlines flight 11 crashed into the north
tower of the World Trade Center on the morning of
September 11, 2001, the Federal Bureau of Investigation
director, Robert S. Mueller III, had been at his post for just
one week. Suddenly he found himself responsible for both
investigating the gravest crime in American history and for
preventing further attacks.
Mueller had faced a daunting job even before the terrorists
struck. He had been assigned to revamp a tradition-bound
bureaucracy of 27,000 employees, an organization that for
years had given the impression of lurching from one
blunder to the next. His goals were to bring effective
management to the Bureau, beef up its intelligence
capabilities, reorder its priorities, and force the insular
institution to cooperate with other agencies. He recognized
that he faced a pivotal moment in the history of what his
predecessor Louis Freeh had called “potentially... the most
dangerous institution in the United States.” The FBI had
long exemplified disciplined and effective professionalism,
handling threats from kidnapping to espionage, but it had
also assumed powers irreconcilable with democratic
government and shamed the nation with its extralegal
exploits.
Americans have always recoiled at the idea of a secret
police. In 1908, when Attorney General Charles Bonaparte
established what was called the Bureau of Investigation,
Congress worried that the government would set up a
“system of spying upon and espionage of the people, such
as has prevailed in Russia.” The country had had no
comprehensive police force on the federal level, and the
Justice Department itself had not existed until 1870. After
the turn of the century, Bonaparte had sought to expand
the department’s role in antitrust and other law
enforcement. Congress turned down his request for a band
of investigators, but President Theodore Roosevelt
authorized him to set up the squad anyway, and the
legislature went along. The Attorney General admitted to
“certain inherent dangers” but agreed with Congress that
he should use his 34 detectives only for “the detection and
prosecution of crimes against the United States.”
But the Bureau quickly strayed into exactly the kinds of
political intrigue that Bonaparte had eschewed and critics
had feared. The 1910 Mann Act, which forbade transporting
women across state lines for the purpose of prostitution,
became the impetus for sending Bureau men into the field
outside Washington, D.C., for the first time. Since the law
also covered “any other immoral purpose,” it proved a
handy tool for pursuing out-of-favor politicians and
troublemakers, ranging from the black boxing champion
Jack Johnson to a prominent leader of the Ku Klux Klan.
During World War I the agency was given responsibility for
curtailing saboteurs and spies, but it also used this power to
prosecute aliens, union leaders, and radicals. National
anxiety over the so-called Red menace came to a head in
1919, inflamed by the Russian Revolution and domestic
labor agitation. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, whose
own home had been bombed by anarchists, established
what would be named the General Intelligence Division
within the Bureau and put in charge a young Justice
Department lawyer named John Edgar Hoover. Hoover set
about creating and cross-indexing intelligence files on
anarchist leaders and groups. Within two years his directory
included 450,000 individuals, organizations, and
publications.
During the winter of 1919-20 Hoover, along with the Bureau
of Immigration’s head, Anthony Caminetti, directed a series
of raids that netted thousands of alleged Bolsheviks and
anarchists. What came to be known as the Palmer Raids
were initially applauded in the press. The Washington Post
declared, “There is no time for hairsplitting over
infringements of liberty.” When the details emerged,
though, they left a bad taste. Its own manpower limited, the
Bureau had relied on local police and vigilante groups.
Many of those apprehended were poor and illiterate, their
connections to anarchism tenuous. Citizens had been
hauled in along with foreigners. The dragnet’s failure to
uncover any bombs or stockpiles of weapons gave the lie to
the warnings of imminent revolution; warrantless arrests,
forced confessions, suspension of legal counsel, and
prisoners marched through the streets in shackles
awakened fears of a European-style secret police.
The corruption-ridden Harding years brought further
scandal, and by 1924 Coolidge’s Attorney General, Harlan
Fiske Stone, was determined to end the abuses. “... A
secret police may become a menace to free governments
and free institutions,” he stated.
He wanted a Bureau that was “not concerned with political
or other opinions of individuals....Only with their conduct
and then only with such conduct as is forbidden by the laws
of the United States.” Stone directed the 29-year-old
Hoover to clean house. In spite of his involvement in the
Palmer Raid abuses, or perhaps because of it, Hoover was
determined to make the agency incorruptible, tightly
controlled, and dedicated to law enforcement rather than
spying.
“The Bureau must be divorced from politics and not be a
catch-all for political hacks,” he insisted. He culled the bad
apples, recruited men of high character trained in
accounting or the law, and fired the organization with his
enthusiasm. For the next 10 years Hoover kept out of the
limelight. He cut back the number of agents and actually
returned budgeted funds that he hadn’t spent. He set up a
central fingerprint registry and a system to track crime
statistics. Later he would establish the National Police
Academy to train law enforcement officers.
Born in Washington, D.C., in 1895, Hoover had grown up in
a world of civil servants. He had begun his adult life as a
junior messenger at the Library of Congress, eventually
working with its card catalogue, all while attending law
school. Some biographers suggest that this led to his
lifelong obsession with accumulating information and
keeping lists: the Custodial Detention Index, the Rabble-
Rouser Index, the Key Activist Index.
Although he came to be a master manipulator of the
political system, Hoover scorned politics; he belonged to no
party and never voted. He consistently described his
enemies in moral terms—outlaws were “rats crawling from
their hide-outs to gnaw at the vitals of our civilization” —and
came to believe that perversity, not social conditions,
explained wrongdoing. Communism was not a flawed
economic and political system but “the latest form of the
eternal rebellion against authority.”
Hoover’s youth and energy helped him make the agency a
model of efficiency, and his genuine skills as a leader kept
him in the job for 48 years—too long, as it turned out.
Harlan Stone had tried to draw a clear line between the two
purposes of policing, law enforcement and intelligence
gathering, but the blurring of that distinction would trouble
the Bureau for years to come. Law enforcement brings to
justice those who break statutes, from Mafia chieftains to
venal politicians. In our society the process is open to public
view, governed by rules of evidence, overseen by courts,
and designed to affect only those reasonably suspected of
having committed offenses. By contrast, intelligence
gathering, aimed at preventing future threats, is not
necessarily tied to specific crimes; its targets can be
general: all anarchists, aliens, Communists, Middle Eastern
men. The rules of evidence don’t apply, and the methods
are necessarily secret, sometimes sinister.
During its first 10 years under Hoover’s direction, the
Bureau remained a minor player on the national stage.
Then two events in the mid-thirties transformed its mission
in both law enforcement and intelligence.
On the night of July 21, 1934, a group of FBI agents stood
sweating on a street on Chicago’s North Side as a man,
accompanied by two women, emerged from the Biograph
movie theater. At a signal, the agents closed in. When the
man began to run, a fusillade dropped him dead on the hot
pavement. The agents rushed to phone word of the
ambush to their director, who was waiting anxiously in
Washington. In minutes the news spread throughout the
country. FBI agents had killed John Dillinger, the man
newspapers had called the archcriminal of the age.
Decades later Hoover described the moment as his
greatest thrill.
There was a reason the incident shone so brightly in his
memory. The “crime wave” of the mid-thirties, really a
handful of cases involving hit-and-run kidnappers and bank
robbers, shaped the modern FBI. Before 1934 the Bureau
was one of a number of federal investigative units. The
nation had comparably few federal criminal laws; agents
spent much of their time looking into antitrust violations and
police-corruption cases. They had no power to make
arrests, nor were they authorized to carry guns.
As far as the sketchy statistics of the period indicate, the
nation’s crime rate did not accelerate after World War I. The
problem was manufactured by a sensationalizing press,
fueled by the dislocation of the Depression, and exploited
by New Dealers looking to demonstrate the potency of the
federal government. The drumbeat for action began in
1932 with the abduction and murder of Charles Lindbergh’s
infant son. It picked up a year later when four Bureau men
transporting a prisoner ran into an ambush in Kansas City.
One agent, the prisoner, and three others died in the
“massacre,” and the public started to sense that the
government was losing its grip on order in the country.
Always quick with hyperbole, Hoover spoke of “a challenge
to law and order and civilization itself.”
Until Dillinger’s demise, Homer Cummings, Roosevelt’s
energetic Attorney General, had led the anti-crime effort.
He had pushed a package of legislation through Congress
making bank robbery, flight to avoid prosecution, interstate
racketeering, and other misdeeds federal crimes. The anti-
crime bills were “one of the most important, if least
recognized, New Deal reforms,” notes the historian Sanford
Ungar. The legislation gave the FBI real police powers,
setting it up as the most visible law-enforcement arm of the
Executive Branch.
When kidnappers grabbed Charles Urschel, an Oklahoma
oil magnate, in 1933, the Bureau’s meticulous methods had
paid off in the arrest of George ("Machine Gun") Kelly, one
of the kidnappers. Surrendering, Kelly was reported,
probably spuriously, to have pleaded, “Don’t shoot, G-
men.” This shorthand for “government men” became the
headline-friendly moniker for the members of a federal
agency that was about to gain national prominence.
With fewer than 400 agents in 1934, the FBI could hardly
police the whole country. That wasn’t the point. What FDR
wanted was theater, and Hoover obliged. He selected cases
that guaranteed publicity. The slaying of Dillinger and the
hunt for various “public enemies”—Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby
Face Nelson, the Barker gang—made the Bureau famous
(after several name changes, it finally became the Federal
Bureau of Investigation in 1935). As movies and magazines
trumpeted the G-man myth, newspapers proclaimed Hoover
“Public Hero Number One.”
Hoover continued to believe that the Bureau should be a
leader in law enforcement, but not a comprehensive federal
police force. The agency stayed out of the unpopular
business of Prohibition, and Hoover saw no role for it in
addressing strictly local crimes like gambling and labor
racketeering. Rather, the Bureau should remain an elite
agency guiding the nation’s police in modern crime-fighting
methods. “Before science all things must fall,” was one of
Hoover’s favorite mottoes.
Some New Deal aides had been pushing for the federal
government to take a preventive or social response to
wrongdoing—attacking problems like slums, poverty, and
unemployment that were seen as the roots of crime. The G-
man clamor drowned out their voices, touting instead a
strategy of prosecuting criminals. The policing philosophy
defined the FBI; and the Bureau actively promoted that
philosophy.
Two years after the Dillinger coup, as the “crime wave” that
had established the Bureau was sputtering out, an equally
momentous development in FBI history occurred, far from
the glare of publicity. The date was August 24,1936.
Concerned about the war clouds gathering in Europe and
Asia, President Roosevelt wanted an assessment of the
threats from both Communists and Fascists in the United
States. Organizations like the right-wing American Liberty
League, backed by powerful business executives, were in
fact mulling over plots to depose the President.
Because his appropriations did not cover such
investigations, Hoover suggested that his authority rely on a
1916 law authorizing the State Department to approve
intelligence operations against agents of foreign powers.
The next day Roosevelt had Secretary of State Cordell Hull
give the order—but Hull never put the man- date in writing.
In spite of the fact that the law was intended to authorize
surveillance only of foreign spies, the Bureau immediately
turned its attention to purely domestic groups. The verbal
directive, Hoover’s biographer Richard Gid Powers points
out, “provided Hoover with his basic authority for nearly
forty years of domestic intelligence operations.”
Both Hoover and FDR knew that domestic spying was a
political minefield, yet the director was eager to serve the
President, and the mission fitted his own inclination to get
the goods on suspected radicals. Abandoning his innate
caution, he steered the Bureau onto legal thin ice.
As war threatened to engulf Europe in June 1939,
Roosevelt issued an official but secret edict directing the
FBI to investigate domestic espionage and sabotage.
Hoover re-established the General Intelligence Division, the
spy unit that had been eliminated in the 1924 reforms; he
had conveniently saved its files. The Bureau’s intelligence
activities were carried out under the guise of national
security, but their targets were often political: Roosevelt
critics like Sen. Burton Wheeler; isolationists like Charles
Lindbergh; labor leaders like John L. Lewis.
During the war years the Bureau handled
counterintelligence efforts throughout the Western
Hemisphere and spoiled at least one German sabotage
attempt. Hoover opposed as both pointless and illegal the
policy of transporting everyone of Japanese descent on the
West Coast, including U.S. citizens, to camps far inland. But
he established a system of secret files that were not
included in the Bureau’s careful indexing system, hiding all
its illegal intelligence activity from scrutiny. Congress had
outlawed wiretapping in 1934, but Roosevelt decided the
ban didn’t apply to national security threats. The FBI
arranged for the delay and examination of Axis and Soviet
cables, the opening of mail to Axis diplomats, and break-ins
for espionage purposes. These activities were illegal, but
many continued after the war. When Attorney General
Francis Biddle found out about the Bureau’s Custodial
Detention Index, listing suspects who were to be rounded
up in an emergency, he labeled it “dangerous, illegal” and
ordered its end. Hoover simply changed its name to the
Security Index.
Had Americans known of the FBI’s clandestine ways during
this era, few would have questioned them. Such abuses of
power paled alongside the external threats the nation
faced, and the FBI’s civil liberties record was still better than
that of most local police agencies. Later the danger of
giving the Bureau ill-defined spy duties became clearer.
The FBI emerged from the war with some 4,000 agents and
a formidable intelligence capability. Hoover maneuvered to
maintain an FBI monopoly over domestic intelligence, and
Congress restricted the new Central Intelligence Agency to
overseas duty. Tension with a resurgent Soviet empire
convinced the Director that another war was imminent and
that the Bureau needed to be ready.
The Smith Act, passed in 1940, had made it a crime to
advocate, or to belong to a group that advocated, the
overthrow of the government by force. It provided a potent
weapon against radicals during the Cold War. The Bureau
targeted and won convictions of top leaders of the
American Communist movement in 1948 and 1949, and
additional party members went to trial over the next five
years. The FBI also solved what Hoover at the time called
the “crime of the century,” the theft of America’s atomic
bomb secrets. With the help of meticulous code breaking,
agents were able to alert British authorities to the spy Klaus
Fuchs and to apprehend his U.S. contacts and
coconspirators, including Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
After the war President Truman renewed his predecessor’s
order permitting wiretaps for intelligence purposes. Hoover
latched on to accusations against purported Communists in
government and assigned 300 agents to investigate the
former State Department aide Alger Hiss, one of the highest
government officials accused of Communist-party
involvement. Hiss was convicted of perjury in January of
1950 and jailed. Convinced that the Truman administration
was not doing enough to counter the Red threat, Hoover
fed FBI data to the House Un-American Activities
Committee, letting representatives attack with innuendo
citizens whom the Bureau lacked the evidence to prosecute.
In addition, Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s Senate subcommittee
on investigations employed ex-FBI agents as sleuths and
made liberal use of information from Bureau files (although
when the senator began to make accusations against the
Eisenhower administration itself, Hoover backed off).
The Bureau set up a Responsibilities Program under which
numerous schoolteachers, college professors, and state
government workers lost their jobs. Suspicions multiplied.
Writers, reporters, and entertainers came under FBI
scrutiny. The Bureau kept files on Leonard Bernstein and
Pete Seeger, on Charlie Chaplin and Ernest Hemingway. It
had drifted far from its law enforcement duties. It was about
to stray even farther.
In the early 1960s, as the nation experienced a serious
increase in crime, the Kennedy administration, searching
for solutions, finally began to look at possible social causes
of criminal behavior. But with Hoover still blaming crime on
the moral failings of wrongdoers, the FBI continued to lobby
for heftier Bureau appropriations with which to lock up more
criminals. The agency had always been the nemesis of
bank robbers, kidnappers, and car thieves, whose cases
could be solved with relative ease and offered high
conviction rates. For decades, however, it had failed to
pursue organized crime. Hoover had labeled the notion of a
national crime syndicate “baloney.”
During the 1930s urban gangs had used the clout and cash
they gained during Prohibition to move into extortion,
gambling, narcotics, and other rackets. Mysteries, some
salacious, have been spun about Hoover’s reluctance to go
after gangsters, but several straightforward explanations
suggest themselves. Mob cases required tedious legwork
and involved the danger that gangsters might corrupt
agents. Organized crime’s intractability warned Hoover
away from a potential quagmire. During the postwar period
an all-out attack on gangsters would have taken Bureau
resources away from the anti-Red crusade. As late as 1959
the FBI’s New York office had 400 agents chasing
“subversives,” but only 4 investigating organized crime.
The discovery of a “crime convention” in the upstate New
York hamlet of Apalachin in 1957 by two state troopers and
two U.S. Treasury agents embarrassed the Bureau, which
had to admit it knew nothing of the conclave. The headlines
sparked public concern about the extent of organized crime,
forcing Hoover to begin moving against the mob. Under his
Top Hoodlums program, wiretaps and bugs proved effective
in garnering intelligence about gangsters, but because the
methods were illegal, the information could not be used as
evidence in court.
In 1968 Congress finally gave the FBI its long-sought legal
authorization to carry out court-approved eavesdropping.
The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations
(RICO) provision of the Organized Crime Control Act of
1970 allowed entire criminal enterprises to be indicted, and
the gangster tide began to recede. The FBI gathered
evidence that led to 2,500 convictions between 1981 and
1983, successfully hauled eight members of the Mafia
“Commission” into court in 1986, and continued to hammer
mob bosses through the 1990s.
Civil rights was another area where the FBI initially feared to
tread. The Bureau was criticized for standing by in the face
of provocations like the violence against the Freedom
Riders in 1961 and Alabama’s official defiance of the
integration of its state university in 1963. But under
pressure from President Johnson the Bureau finally came to
play a significant role in suppressing the violent reaction to
the civil rights movement in the South.
Throughout the fifties and sixties, as Hoover maintained the
FBI’s emphasis on intelligence activities, his vigilance about
domestic Communism approached paranoia. The fact was,
the Communist threat at home had largely evaporated. The
Smith Act trials had decapitated the party in the United
States, and revelations of Stalin’s crimes, combined with the
Soviet suppression of the 1956 Hungarian revolt, had
seriously sapped party morale. By the end of 1957 the
party claimed fewer than 4,000 members, many of them FBI
informants. Nevertheless, hoping to obliterate the menace
once and for all, the Bureau began the most serious
intrusion ever of police power into the American political
process. It was to be one of the FBI’s deepest secrets, with
all actions personally approved by the Director. It became
known as it COINTELPRO, for “counterintelligence
program.”
Not content with investigation, Hoover now ordered his men
to infiltrate and disrupt the activities of suspected
organizations. The point was not to prosecute criminals but
to hamstring political activities. Agents made anonymous
phone calls and wrote letters denouncing targets in sexual
terms. They contacted neighbors, employers, and friends to
spread the word that a person was disloyal. They
encouraged informants to sow discord, which sometimes led
to violence. They arranged for targeted tax audits, and put
“snitch jackets” on people, planting false rumors that they
were cooperating with authorities.
The tactics were so effective that they spawned, over the
next 15 years, additional COINTELPROs, targeting the
Socialist Workers party, white hate groups, black militants,
the “New Left,” and others. The Communist-party
COINTELPRO, though unauthorized, had tenuous
justification in the Communist Control Act of 1954, which
had outlawed the party. But with each subsequent program
the agency moved farther away from any mooring to legality.
The FBI’s most notorious abuses were directed at Martin
Luther King, Jr., who became the focus of the Bureau’s
interest as early as 1958. He thrice transgressed: He was
black, Hoover thought he had Communist ties, and he had
the temerity to criticize the Bureau. In spite of the fact that
its own studies had shown few connections between
Communists and civil rights groups, the FBI tapped phones
and hid microphones in King’s hotel rooms. It distributed
tapes and reports from these sources as part of a vigorous
campaign to demoralize the civil rights leader and
undermine his reputation. Hoover held a press conference
on November 18,1964, in which he called King “one of the
lowest characters in the country.” But by the mid-1960s
these Redbaiting techniques had begun to lose their
potency; Hoover was falling out of sync with the temper of
the times.
Once the FBI entered the business of combating political
opinions, it became a criminal conspiracy itself. In March
1971 a group called the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate
the FBI burglarized a Bureau office in Media, Pennsylvania,
and made off with heaps of secret files. The burglary
prompted Hoover to shut down his most egregious domestic
spy operations. While the security breach barely made
news, the designation COINTELPRO on one of the stolen
documents, which the group sent to newspaper and
television reporters, proved critical. No one at the time knew
what the term meant, but the NBC News reporter Carl Stern
made Freedom of Information Act filings that gradually
helped reveal a long history of illegal activity. The Media
break-in proved to be, in the words of one Bureau official,
the “turning point in the FBI image,” forever tarnishing the
G-man myth. By the time all the facts emerged, Hoover was
dead and Watergate had darkened the national mood.
In 1976 Attorney General Edward Levi moved to re-
establish Justice Department control over the FBI. His
guidelines, echoing the sentiments of Attorney General
Stone 52 years earlier, set limits on operations not
specifically directed at criminal activity. They also required
the Bureau to clear its investigations in advance with the
Justice Department. Congress had already limited the
director’s term to 10 years, with Senate confirmation of his
appointment.
Seven years later President Reagan’s attorney general
William French Smith rescinded Levi’s orders, once again
letting the Bureau dig into the affairs of persons or groups
that “advocate criminal activity.” The FBI had only to notify
the Justice Department, not seek permission from it, when
initiating a domestic-security probe.
One aftereffect of Watergate was the passage of the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, an effort to
bring legal order to the intelligence realm. FISA set up a
secret court to handle requests for investigations of alleged
agents of foreign powers. Warrants for wiretaps for
intelligence gathering rather than law enforcement needed
no probable cause. The law recognized that the Bureau
would have to continue to pursue intelligence in national
security cases but attempted to contain its methods by
limiting them to use against foreign agents.
The scandals of the 1970s and the resulting legislative
restrictions temporarily damped the Bureau’s domestic
intelligence activity and brought law enforcement back to
the fore. Organized crime, white-collar crime, and tracking
down foreign spies became top priorities. The Bureau
introduced new methods like psychological profiling and,
during the 1980s, DNA analysis. It also opened its ranks to
minorities and women.
In the 1978-80 ABSCAM investigations, agents
impersonating the representatives of a fictitious Arab sheik
caught a U.S. senator, six representatives, and several
others taking bribes. Operations against corrupt local
government officials followed. Political malfeasance had
long been a Bureau responsibility but one that it had
approached gingerly.
By 1982 terrorism had emerged as a prominent focus of
Bureau attention, and with it came a renewal of intelligence
operations. The FBI prevented a reported 131 terrorist
attacks between 1981 and 2000. It foiled a 1999 plot to
blow up a Sacramento gas tank that could have killed
12,000 people. It helped to stymie a wave of planned
millennium terror attacks on the West Coast. It solved the
1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in a matter of
weeks and pursued the case to successful convictions,
heading off additional attacks in the process. The
perpetrator of the Oklahoma City bombing two years later
was also quickly apprehended, but the incident further
emphasized the need for effective preventive intelligence. In
the meantime the CIA was chagrined by the discovery of the
double agent Aldrich Ames, and in 1994 President Clinton
gave the FBI more counterintelligence responsibility,
making it the lead agency for combating terror and crime
worldwide. The Bureau began to expand its presence
overseas; by last year it operated 44 offices in foreign
countries.
In 1994 the Bureau’s director, Louis Freeh, warned that the
nation needed to exercise “constant vigilance” against
terrorism. Two years later Congress chimed in by
authorizing the Attorney General to investigate U.S. citizens
suspected of supporting terrorist groups. It also lifted
restrictions that had forbidden the FBI to spy on a citizen
solely because he or she had taken actions protected by
the First Amendment. The Bureau began for the first time to
feed intelligence data into the National Crime Information
Center system, which had been limited to criminal records.
In 1996 the FBI set up a counterterrorism center to
coordinate the efforts of analysts from 16 agencies and
local police forces, and the number of agents assigned to
intelligence grew from 224 in 1992 to 1,025 by the end of
the decade. In 2000 counterintelligence and the fight
against terrorism were designated the Bureau’s top
priorities.
The stepped-up intelligence effort required a difficult
adjustment in FBI culture. Law enforcement had always
been the path by which agents advanced. Solving cases led
to promotion, while poring over scholarly journals and
foreign newspapers, the legwork of intelligence gathering,
was nobody’s dream of glory. Data analysis was a long-
standing FBI weakness. Moreover, now the Bureau had to
work closely with other agencies, something it had
traditionally resisted. ”... No one institution is strong enough
to tackle the challenge of terrorism alone,” Director Mueller
emphasized. “Law enforcement, quite simply, is only as
good as its relationships.”
If inappropriate domestic spying had earlier been the
principal complaint against the Bureau, mismanagement
became the dominant charge during the 1990s. In 1993 the
FBI failed to resolve a confrontation with religious fanatics in
Waco, Texas, and the standoff ended in the incineration of
80 people, 25 of them children. The “shoot on sight” order
issued during the siege of a militant’s home in Ruby Ridge,
Idaho, in 1992 had also cost innocent lives. However, the
Bureau did learn from these incidents, and it handled a
1996 Montana showdown involving the group that called
itself the Freemen with patient and ultimately successful
restraint.
During the same period even the Bureau’s vaunted crime
lab suffered from mismanagement. The spy Robert
Hanssen was revealed to have operated undetected within
the Bureau’s own counterintelligence section for 21 years.
And the handling of the case of the atomic scientist and
onetime suspected spy Wen Ho Lee “embarrassed this
entire nation,” a district court judge said.
Critics noted that part of the problem lay in the ever-
widening scope of FBI responsibility. Some enforcement
efforts are by nature federal; they include corruption among
government officials; civil rights violations; and national or
international crime conspiracies. But Congress may have
turned to the FBI for solutions too many times. It made car-
jacking a federal crime. Telemarketing fraud, child
pornography, and money laundering were added to its list,
as was economic espionage. Parents who neglected to pay
child support became FBI targets. Drug trafficking grew to
account for nearly 26 percent of the Bureau’s convictions
by 1998 and as many as 80 percent in some districts.
Last fall’s terrorist attacks have prompted Director Mueller
to take another look at some of these duties. Agents have
been shifted from drug enforcement, white-collar fraud, and
violent crime to the anti-terror beat. Even bank robbery,
long a source of Bureau glory, may in some cases be left to
local police.
The crisis has given both focus and urgency to Mueller’s
mission to overhaul the agency he heads. Some reforms
address long-standing weaknesses: He has proposed new
sections devoted to cybercrime and to the Bureau’s own
internal security. An Office of Law Enforcement
Coordination will help the FBI better mesh with local police.
Bringing the Bureau’s computers up to speed has become
a priority.
In May, Mueller announced a further reorganization that he
asserted will result in a “redesigned and refocused FBI.” A
Justice Department official described the shifts as “turning
the ship 180 degrees from prosecution of crimes as our
main focus to the prevention of terrorist acts.” At the same
time, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that he
was loosening restrictions on FBI investigations, thereby
broadening the Bureau’s ability to conduct domestic
intelligence surveillance unrelated to criminal activity.
Preventing terror, the Bureau’s number one priority, will now
be the focus of 2,600 agents, more than double the number
who worked in the area before September 11. Hundreds of
newly hired analysts, linguists, and computer experts will
labor to make sense of the data compiled by agents. CIA
personnel will work directly with the FBI in the Bureau’s new
Office of Intelligence.
Some critics have asked whether the shakeup goes far
enough. Others question the wisdom of encouraging the
Bureau to increase its domestic spying given that its
intelligence failures before the September attacks were
related more to bureaucratic bungling than to inadequate
information-gathering authority.
In the end, the questions facing Mueller, and the nation
itself, are those that have hung over the FBI since its
earliest days: What kind of federal police force do we want?
What portion of our freedom and privacy will we relinquish
in exchange for security? Can we trust our government with
the secret and sometimes dirty tools of intelligence? The
Bureau’s history serves as a cautionary backdrop for the
changes that lie ahead.
# # #
Jack Kelly writer
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