The FBI Under Fire
Abstract
By Charles S. Clark
How serious are the bureau's recent problems?
For decades, the FBI has ruffled feathers as it sought
to balance tough law enforcement with sensitivity toward
civil liberties. But today's bureau operates in a
climate vastly altered from the days when agents in J.
Edgar Hoover's virtually unchecked empire could
burglarize homes and keep files on political opponents.
With stepped-up scrutiny from Congress and the press,
the modern FBI under Louis Freeh has demonstrated new
willingnessto admit its mistakes. Currently, the bureau
is under fire for, among other things, alleged
misconduct in its famous forensics lab and possible
political favoritism toward the White House.The FBI's
defenders, nonetheless, say the agency's record-high
budgets are needed more than everto fight high-tech
criminals in globalized drug-running, terrorism,
espionage and organized crime.
FBI Director Louis J. Freeh (Photo Credit: Reuters)
Overview
“A whole generation of people like me grew up believing
the FBI could do no wrong,” Sen. Charles E. Grassley,
R-Iowa, declared in an impassioned speech on the Senate
floor recently. “Now, that confidence, that trust, has
been shaken.” [1]
The conservative lawmaker's wrath was triggered by the
steady drumbeat of allegations last winter of corruption
and mismanagement in the FBI's world-famous forensics
laboratory. Each year the 65-year-old lab helps police
departments and prosecutors from around the country to
analyze more than a half-million pieces of evidence -
from
paint chips to blood droplets and shoe prints. An
FBI lab analyst-turned- whistleblower has charged that
evaluations of evidence by the lab were subject to
manipulation by FBI officials. Critics deride the
secretive facility as “the last redoubt of Hooverism,”
after the bureau's iron- fisted founding director, J.
Edgar Hoover.
Controversy over the lab prompted the 63-year-old
Grassley to warn that the “integrity of the American
criminal justice system is at stake.” But it is not the
only problem that has beset the FBI in recent days.
Last June came revelations that the FBI acceded to
Clinton White House security officers when they
improperly sought and obtained FBI background files on
900 Republican former White House staffers. Then in
July, the FBI's investigation of a fatal bombing during
the Olympics in Atlanta was marred when security guard
Richard Jewell was identified to news media as the prime
suspect, only to be exonerated later.
Most recently, the politically neutral FBI became
embroiled with the White House in a clash of conflicting
statements over Chinese campaign donations.
The way the agency has handled the mud on its image says
much about today's FBI. During Hoover's 48-year reign,
the agency was loath to admit a mistake. Contrast that
with the mea culpas by Director Louis J. Freeh. Since he
took over the bureau in September 1993, he has continued
to answer for the FBI's conduct in, among other things,
the 1992 shootout at a tax-resister's isolated cabin in
Ruby Ridge, Idaho, which killed a federal agent, an
unarmed woman and her teenage son.
The FBI's performance was “terribly flawed,” Freeh told
a congressional panel in 1995, referring not only to the
deaths but also to slanted reports on the FBI's conduct
and his own “blind spot” in later promoting his friend
Larry Potts, who was criticized for his role in the
controversial affair. [2]
“I am not saying that I approve of ” the gunshot that
killed Vicky Weaver, Freeh told the lawmakers. “I am not
trying to justify it. . . . I am certainly not saying
that in a future similar set of circumstances, FBI
agents or law enforcement officers could take such a
shot. . . . But on careful balance,” he said, the shot
was “constitutional” under the circumstances.
Freeh also reminds his inquisitors of the FBI's recent
successes - the arrests of suspect Timothy McVeigh in
the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, of Unabomber suspect Ted
Kaczynski, of CIA spy Aldrich Ames and of the Muslim
terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993.
And there was last year's arrest of the Mountaineer
Militia, which was planning to blow up the FBI's
fingerprint analysis facility in West Virginia. [3]
But the FBI still takes heat for unsolved cases, such as
the still mysterious crash last summer of TWA Flight 800
into Long Island Sound and the terrorist bombing of the
U.S. Air Force barracks in Saudi Arabia. And the arrest
of Earl Edwin Pitts, the highest FBI official ever
accused of spying, sullied the bureau's image, though
the sting operation that nabbed him was praised.
During the Clinton administration, the FBI's annual
budget (currently $2.8 billion) has grown by 25 percent.
Freeh has persuaded Congress to pay for 3,600 new
employees (among them more than 1,000 agents), and he
has moved 500 agents out of headquarters and into the
field. He is beefing up the fingerprint operation
(recently criticized for being slow in performing
naturalization background checks). He is hiring staff to
trim the FBI's backlog of 16,000 Freedom of Information
Act requests. And he is setting up two new computer
systems intended to streamline the collection and
retrieval of nationwide information on crime.
Critics, however, see remnants of what they view as
arrogance from the Hoover era (nearly 6,200 current FBI
employees worked under Hoover). “Hoover was so focused
on protecting his own position in government that in a
funny way he actually had a rather narrow understanding
of what a police agency could do,” says Marcus Raskin, a
distinguished fellow at the left-leaning Institute for
Policy Studies. The forensics lab troubles and the FBI's
handling of the Olympic Park bombing case, he says,
“show that this new notion of a professionalized FBI
that has cleaned up its act is just not so.”
Other critics, who were tough on the FBI for domestic
civil liberties violations in the 1970s, argue that the
bureau's insensitivity toward privacy and free speech
has not changed, only its political targets. “Their
focus has shifted from left-wing groups to supporters of
right-wing militia, pro-lifers and Arab-Americans,” says
Kate Martin, director of the Center for National
Security Studies.
Indeed, the FBI's storming of the Branch Davidian cult's
compound near Waco, Texas, in 1993 has guaranteed an
ongoing barrage of accusations on talk radio and on the
Internet. Rightist critics such as the John Birch
Society claim that federal agents knew in advance of the
Oklahoma City bombing.
“This hostility toward the FBI and the government
nowadays is kind of a weird twist from the situation of
25 years ago,” when the bureau's targets were
anti-Vietnam War activists, says former Sen. George S.
McGovern, D-S.D., on whom Hoover opened a secret FBI
file after the one-time presidential nominee criticized
his firing of an agent. [4] “Hoover ran the FBI as sort
of a personal fiefdom, but the type of director we have
today is much better.”
Surveys indicate that most Americans actually backed the
FBI's handling of Waco. According to a Harris Poll, 71
percent believed that defiant religious leader David
Koresh was more to blame for the deaths than the FBI and
other federal agencies. [5]
FBI veterans say today's agents deserve all the respect
the country can muster. “The work they do is more
dangerous now,” says security consultant Sean McWeeney,
a 24-year FBI veteran. “I probably drew my gun about six
times in my whole career. But now agents are facing drug
traffickers in flak vests and all these street gangs and
Mafia from Colombia, Russia and Mexico who are armed to
the teeth.” [6]
Heroics aside, the controversy over the forensics lab
could seriously damage the FBI's worldwide reputation,
and possibly decide what happens to Freeh, who
prosecuted some of the cases being questioned.
“I doubt the lab was ever on the up-and-up,” says media
consultant John Kelly, who is writing a book on the lab.
“But under Freeh, the corruption and abuse have become
institutionalized.”
As scrutiny of the FBI continues, these are some of the
key questions being asked:
Does the FBI lab need major reforms?
The crime lab controversy reaches back to 1989, when
federal Judge Robert S. Vance was killed by a mail bomb
at his home in Birmingham, Ala. Walter Leroy Moody Jr.,
a scam artist and known bomb maker, was convicted in
Vance's death. The prosecutor in the highly publicized
case was future FBI Director Freeh, who used evidence
analyzed by the FBI lab.
Actually, the forensics lab had been under scrutiny
since a 1988 internal review (following a 1980 General
Accounting Office critique) had raised concerns about
lab methodology. There were charges of sloppy handling
of specimens, analytical procedures biased in favor of
prosecutors and pressure on analysts from higher-ups to
modify their findings.
One employee who shared such concerns was chemist
Frederic Whitehurst, who in June 1991 wrote a memo to
his superiors with the goal of documenting “fabrications
of evidence” in Moody's trial. Whitehurst wrote of the
“bullying ways” of his immediate superior (not Freeh)
that “circumvented the established protocols and
procedures of the FBI laboratory in order to get the
answer that he wanted for the residue analysis of the
explosive in the pipe” bomb used to kill the judge.
Whitehurst cited numerous other cases for which he felt
results were being manipulated.
Whitehurst's complaints did not become public until
after another internal review of the lab in 1994. Soon
after, an in-depth investigation by the Justice
Department's inspector general had gotten under way.
Having fed material to the I.G. and gone public with his
complaints, Whitehurst was abruptly suspended by the FBI
this January. Other lab employees who deny misconduct in
the lab have dismissed him as unstable. [7] The Justice
Department, however, found Whitehurst's statements
credible and possibly exculpatory enough to warrant
sending them to Moody, who sits on death row in Alabama.
Whitehurst was not the only lab employee to make
charges, as was indicated in excerpts from a draft of
the inspector general's report that were leaked to the
media in January. The FBI immediately transferred four
key employees out of the lab. In February, the Justice
Department made the startling announcement that
misconduct in the lab had jeopardized as many as 50
recent or pending cases - including the Oklahoma City,
Olympic Park and World Trade Center bombings and the
1989 impeachment of then-Judge Alcee Hastings, now a
Democratic House member from Florida. [8]
Criminal defense attorneys from around the country
immediately began planning new strategies to discredit
evidence used to convict their clients. They
unsuccessfully sought the inspector general's 500- page
draft report; the final report is expected to be
released this month.
To add to the mess, Freeh in mid-March had to back off
key statements he had made to skeptical members of
Congress when he said that he was on top of the lab
situation - that none of the transferred supervisors had
altered evidence and that his actions against lab
personnel had been in accordance with the inspector
general's wishes. [9] “Mr. Freeh totally rejects any
contention that he deliberately misled the Congress or
the public,” the FBI said in a March 17 statement.
Questions of Freeh's credibility, given his personal
stake in the cases, were followed by debate about the
overall purpose of the FBI lab: whether, for example, it
should be required to be more open about its
methodologies and whether defense attorneys should have
access to analyses currently available only to the
prosecution.
“We think it is in the public interest to have lab
information available for academics, litigation, habeas
corpus appeals and preparing pending cases for
cross-examination,” says G. Jack King Jr., public
affairs director of the National Association of Criminal
Defense Lawyers. “The reason we wanted the draft report
was that we'd like to know who has done sloppy work or
shaded the truth, so that people can judge for
themselves or use exculpatory evidence to reopen their
cases. The people best qualified to judge are the
defendant and his lawyer, not the prosecutors,” he adds.
“It saddens me to think that the Justice Department is
more concerned with the FBI's image than with innocent
people who might be in prison.”
To James E. Starrs, a professor of forensic sciences and
law at George Washington University - Hoover's alma
mater - and a longtime critic of the FBI lab, “There is
no doubt that Whitehurst is onto something; the only
question is whether the problems are deliberate or
reckless. The real issue is the lab's mind-boggling
secrecy. In a sample report on, say,
paint analysis, there is no method identified. There
are vague, uncertain conclusions, but no indicator of
who did the tests,” he says. “The FBI might say a
certain fingerprint is less than a month old, when in
fact there is no science that says that. The FBI waits
until it is challenged, and if it is not challenged, it
doesn't have to do the necessary research and get the
supportive data. And it doesn't ever back down.”
In general, Starrs adds, “the more secrecy, the less
reliability and integrity. The FBI puts itself on a
pedestal with its untouchable forensic science. The
requirements for scientific candor don't apply because
these cops in lab coats generally favor prosecuting.”
Some in the FBI resist the notion of an FBI lab that
could be used equally by defense attorneys. The ideal
lab specialist “stands in the shoes of the investigator
in the field, whom he is serving,” said John J.
McDermott, a senior FBI official. [10] Defenders also
argue that lab analysts have no incentive to cook their
conclusions because they often know very little about
the case surrounding the piece of evidence they're
handling.
“Obviously,” says former special agent McWeeney, “if the
lab has specific problems, they should be fixed - and
perhaps the lab should be opened up. I'm not a guy who
says 'Hey, the FBI's perfect.' But hundreds of men and
women work in the lab, and only a handful work in that
bombing analysis area where there are questions. And
Whitehurst, from what I've seen on TV, doesn't seem very
sharp to me.”
In response to the lab furor, Freeh released a statement
on Jan. 27 outlining recent changes the bureau had made
to improve performance. By 2000, the lab will have moved
from Washington to a larger facility at Quantico, Va. A
new director, possibly an outside expert, is being
sought. A panel of experts - including a British
specialist on terrorism in Northern Ireland - has been
assembled to review lab methodology. Some $30 million
will be spent on technological improvements. For the
first time, the lab will seek accreditation with the
American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors.
Finally, Freeh recused himself from deciding the fate of
Whitehurst and other whistleblowers, given his own stake
in the cases. “I pledge to you,” he told a House
Appropriations subcommittee on March 5, “that I will do
everything in my power to ensure that the FBI lab
remains, as I believe it is, the foremost forensic
laboratory in the world.”
Meanwhile, members of a violent paramilitary group went
on trial in February in Seattle, Wash., marking the
first case in which evidence from the FBI lab has
actually been questioned in court. [11] “It's time the
bureau stopped its narcissistic infatuation with its own
image,” thundered Sen. Grassley.
“It's time to stop selling an inferior product with
false advertising. The American people deserve from
[their] chief law enforcement agency a product with
integrity. . . . This is an issue of leadership.”
Can the FBI be trusted with expanded powers?
“To my amazement, there are voices that . . . claim
repression by government - and fear of government,”
Freeh said in May 1995. He was immediately pounced on by
libertarian author James Bovard, who wrote: “It is
especially ludicrous for an FBI chief to express
amazement at people's fear of the government when the
FBI itself trampled many citizens' rights in the 1950s
and '60s with burglaries, illegal wiretaps, character
assassination and intimidation.” [12]
Right-wingers' smoldering resentment of the FBI's role
in the 1993 Waco tragedy is revisited in a new book, No
More Wacos: What's Wrong With Federal Law Enforcement
and How to Fix It. The authors argue that the FBI lied
when it said it didn't expect Branch Davidian cult
members to commit suicide, and that bureau agents
tricked Attorney General Janet Reno about the lack of
progress of negotiations to win approval for a gas
attack. [13]
From the left, Martin of the Center for National
Security Studies expresses concern over how the FBI in
the Clinton era has accelerated its efforts to win new
powers. In the name of investigating terrorism, it has
been reinterpreting and loosening the Justice
Department's guidelines (handed down in 1976 and
modified in the early 1980s) for determining when it is
appropriate to conduct surveillance on a domestic group.
During debate on the 1994 crime bill and the 1996
anti-terrorism bill, Martin says, the Democrats, who
long opposed such powers, were “mushy, and have been
rolling over ever since the 1993 World Trade Center
bombing. Now the FBI can break in and photograph all
your papers and replicate everything on your computer,
and you won't know it unless you were later indicted.”
Civil libertarians on the right continue objecting to
the FBI's success in molding the 1994 Communications
Assistance in Law Enforcement Act. The so-called
“digital telephony law” is designed to prevent the
telephone industry from making technological
improvements that block the FBI's capacity to install
wiretaps.
Barry Steinhardt, associate director of the American
Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in New York City, warns
that current FBI proposals for implementing the law pose
an unprecedented burden on a national industry,
tantamount to “requiring all home builders to include an
electronic bug in every new home.” There is also a fear
that the FBI, which so infamously wiretapped civil
rights leader the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the
1960s, will misuse information gleaned serendipitously
during authorized wiretaps to pursue other
investigations.
“Wiretapping is the worst sort of general search,
precisely what the Fourth Amendment was intended to
prevent,” Steinhardt told a March conference at the Cato
Institute. The FBI, he says, has only a 17 percent
efficiency rate in using wiretaps to convict criminals,
and yet wiretapping has reached record highs under the
Clinton administration. The question, he said, “is
whether we can trust the FBI not to abuse these powers.”
The ACLU and Martin's group also object to the FBI's
longstanding practice of keeping files on the political
activities of Americans suspected of disloyalty. For
decades, FBI files have been the subject of countless
investigations, legal battles and rumors. (Excerpts from
the FBI's once confidential files on former Beatle John
Lennon and the late poet Allen Ginsberg can be found on
the World Wide Web.) “Are we now to assume that an FBI
file doesn't constitute an invasion of privacy, that
having an FBI file is somehow part of civic life, like
having a driver's license?” columnist Andrew Cockburn
asked during the White House files controversy. [14]
Last December, however, the District of Columbia Circuit
Court affirmed the FBI's right to determine on its own
whether it should keep files on a domestic group or
individual under suspicion. The case, brought in 1988 by
the Center for National Security Studies, was prompted
by a Freedom of Information Act request the group had
made for FBI files on an academic named Lance Lindbloom,
then president of the Chicago-based J. Roderick
MacArthur Foundation. Citing national security concerns,
the FBI had refused to release its complete files on
Lindbloom, who had met several times with South Korean
dissident Kim Dae Jung and accompanied Kim, along with a
member of Congress and former State Department
officials, when he returned to South Korea from exile in
1985.
One group with particular reasons to fear the FBI is
Arab- Americans, many of whom received visits from FBI
agents during the 1991 Gulf War. According to James
Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, “the
FBI sent out a press release saying they had questioned
200 Arab leaders. Many were longtime city council
members, small-town mayors or state senators. It was a
nightmare until we got support from the editorial pages
of about 50 newspapers that condemned it.”
Zogby describes the FBI's interviews as “harassment,” in
which Arab-Americans were questioned in front of their
employers or customers or neighbors. His own experience
with the bureau began as far back as 1980, when the FBI
interrogated fellow members of a church-based group
called the Palestinian Human Rights Campaign after it
had been firebombed. “The FBI was using the occasion to
find out about the Arab community, which was just
getting organized, in order to create a political chill
by saying, 'We're watching you,' ” he says.
FBI spokesmen emphasize that the bureau's law
enforcement powers are determined by the checks and
balances in the Constitution, Congress and the Supreme
Court. Alan McDonald, general counsel for the FBI's
Information Resources Division, says wiretaps are always
used in accordance with the amended 1968 electronic
surveillance law. It requires police to obtain
court-ordered warrants before tapping a criminal
suspect's phone, and warrants can only be obtained when
police have “probable cause” and specific suspicions.
Further, the number of wiretaps must be tabulated and
reported annually to Congress.
Wiretaps are executed “in a surgical fashion,” McDonald
says, in only about 1 percent of investigations. “The
FBI and prosecutors must convince courts that other
means are not available or are too dangerous. The
situation is far from some tantalizing prospect of a
pervasive Big Brother.” Wiretaps are not used against
political dissidents or those with unpopular opinions.
In fact, 70 percent of them are against people suspected
of dealing illegal drugs, he says. “But the
high-quality, unbiased evidence that wiretaps furnish
can allow law enforcement to react promptly to head off
heinous crimes.”
As for secret files, McWeeney points out that agents are
constantly receiving information from multiple sources,
and the procedure is to write it up for a file in case
the subject is later investigated. “But just because
there's a file doesn't mean there's an active
investigation,” he says. “If someone calls in and says a
certain guy is in the Mafia, we document it.”
Background
The world's most famous law enforcement agency was
created in 1908, the brainchild of Charles Joseph
Bonaparte, who was attorney general during the
administration of Theodore Roosevelt. A descendent of
Emperor Napoleon of France, Bonaparte had authority
under the 1870 act that created the Justice Department
to launch a new federal investigative unit - and he
would need that authority. Many in Congress steadfastly
opposed the idea, warning that any sort of federal
police force would degenerate into a “secret police”
operation like the one that terrorized czarist Russia.
[16]
Bonaparte was undaunted, and the following year his plan
to switch 10 Secret Service agents from Treasury to join
several others from elsewhere at Justice was implemented
in the Taft administration by Attorney General George W.
Wickersham. The new Bureau of Investigation was to
pursue crimes on the high seas, violations of neutrality
laws, crimes on Indian reservations, narcotics
trafficking, violations of anti-peonage (slave labor)
law and violations of antitrust laws. Within a year,
Congress passed the Mann Act, making it a federal crime
to transport women across state lines for immoral
purposes. [17]
For the next decade and a half, the bureau would confirm
the fears of its congressional detractors. Headed by
William Burns, whom many saw as a self-aggrandizing
union-buster obsessed with wiretapping, the bureau
focused on ferreting out Bolsheviks, anarchists and
German sympathizers during World War I. Congressional
hearings at the time, one historian notes, revealed that
the bureau had found suspects “in all walks of American
life.” Among those guilty of pro-Germanism, the public
learned, were members of the Senate, judges, mayors and
former Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan. [18]
The bureau ended this era of its history, says former
FBI Assistant Director Ray Wannall, as “a dumping ground
for political hacks, alcoholics, ex-cons and procurers
of women.”
The Young Hoover
By 1924, the situation had moved Attorney General Harlan
Fiske Stone to action. He had noticed J. Edgar Hoover,
then a 29-year-old assistant attorney general who had
been active in the Justice Department's “Red Scare”
raids. Stone charged him with reinvigorating the bureau.
A devout Presbyterian, Hoover was the son and grandson
of civil servants and still lived with his mother.
Hoover set out to retrain the bureau's 650 employees in
order to “merit the respect of the public.” That meant
no foul language, and everyone clean-shaven and wearing
a white shirt. Hoover encouraged citizens to “refrain
from making private investigations” but to “report the
information you have [to the bureau] and leave the
checking of data to trained investigators.” [19] It was
Hoover's professionalization, says veteran McWeeney,
that led the bureau to “memorialize information in
reports instead of just jotting it on the back of
matchbooks.”
As Prohibition and the Depression enveloped America, the
rise of notorious gangsters - such as Al Capone, Bonnie
and Clyde and Baby Face Nelson - gave Hoover's bureau
its big chance. “Racketeering has got to a point where
the government [must] stamp out this underworld army,”
declared Attorney General Homer S. Cummings soon after
Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration came to power. On
July 30, 1933, Cummings tapped Hoover to head a new unit
combining the Justice Department's Prohibition Bureau,
Bureau of Identification and Bureau of Investigation. He
was handed 226 new agents and vast amounts of publicity,
partly as psychological warfare against the famous
criminals he was up against. Hoover's appearances on
multiple magazine covers made him a household name. [20]
In 1935, the rejuvenated agency was renamed the Federal
Bureau of Investigation. Congress throughout the 1930s
would expand its charter with new laws making federal
crimes of such offenses as kidnapping, while Secretary
of State Cordell Hull authorized Hoover to investigate
fascists and communists within the U.S.
Hoover responded with many crime-fighting coups, notably
his agents' shooting of murderer and bank robber John
Dillinger in 1934 as he emerged from a Chicago cinema.
Hoover also made a big splash that year by helping to
collar kidnapper Alvin Karpis, “Public Enemy No. 1,”
following criticism that Hoover himself had never made
an arrest.
But as FBI agents who became disgruntled with Hoover
would later reveal, many of the successes were
exaggerated. Former agent William W. Turner charged that
the famous “Lady in Red” who betrayed Dillinger was
actually working with the private Hargrave Secret
Service, not the FBI. The 1934 capture of Lindbergh baby
kidnapper Bruno Richard Hauptmann was accomplished by
Treasury agents rather than the FBI, and the German
saboteurs who landed in the U.S. by submarine in the
early 1940s were betrayed by one of their own, not
nabbed by the FBI. [21]
In fact, the FBI agent who shot Dillinger, Melvin
Purvis, saw his career dead-end, apparently because
Hoover was jealous of the credit he received, and he
later committed suicide. [22]
Hoover loyalists chalk up much of the myth-busting to
the resentment of disgraced agents. “Hoover was a
staunch disciplinarian,” Wannall recalls. “Some agents
couldn't live with that so they became dissidents. We
who stayed recognized that the head of law enforcement
and intelligence has to rule with a pretty strong hand.”
Making Enemies
By the early 1940s, Hoover had assembled a staff of
13,000, including 4,000 agents, and the power to go
after foreign spies and draft evaders. All the while, he
put out word of steadily worsening crime statistics,
warning once of “a horde larger than any of the
barbarian hosts that overran Europe and Asia in ancient
times.” [23]
But the rapid growth was not always welcomed by local
law enforcement, who viewed the FBI as stingy in sharing
information and too eager to take over their cases.
“Despite a public facade of normality, relations between
the FBI and local police departments have also been
tense for years,” wrote ex-agent Turner. “It is only
natural that the police seethe under the bureau's air of
superiority and the way the bureau is pampered by
Congress and the public.” [24]
Others faulted the bureau for emphasizing statistics at
the expense of selectivity in tackling the crime
problem. “When I came into the bureau, we used to go to
the Metropolitan Police Department [in Washington] every
day and check the stolen-car list,” said one ex- agent.
“If the car was recovered, we took credit; if it was
stolen in Washington and recovered in Maryland, we would
claim that as a stat, interstate theft.” [25]
Still, Hoover continued building on his status as an
American hero. His most famous book, a 1958
anti-communist tract called Masters of Deceit, is said
to have been ghostwritten on government time, and the
bureau also had a hand in Don Whitehead's 1956
celebratory chronicle The FBI Story. Through the 1950s
and '60s, Hoover's byline was familiar in Reader's
Digest, Sunday supplements and PTA magazines, in the
later period warning of the impending corruption of
youth by a new type of “conspiracy” characterized by
“non-conformity in dress and speech, even by obscene
language, rather than by formal membership in a specific
organization.” [26]
Hoover's Secrets
Only now was the public learning about Hoover as a
master bureaucrat who was often able to hide his actual
budget from prying congressional oversight. “One of
Hoover's regular practices was to turn off many [FBI
wiretaps] just before his annual appearance in front of
the House Appropriations Committee, to avoid . . .
having to lie to Congress about the huge number of
illicit taps that were in place,” one historian wrote.
[29]
It emerged that Hoover had not only wiretapped Martin
Luther King Jr.'s phones (with authorization from
Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy) because he suspected
him of being a communist, but that he had amassed secret
files on celebrities and politicians, such as Marilyn
Monroe and John F. Kennedy. The story is told of how the
aging Hoover blackmailed Kennedy into reappointing him
by flaunting his evidence of Kennedy's extramarital
affairs. (“You don't fire God,” Kennedy would say. [30]
)
Histories being published in the 1990s have revealed
more detail about Hoover's special files, some of which
were marked “Personal and Confidential” and others
“Official and Confidential” and kept in Hoover's own
office so that ordinary FBI clerks would not have
access. Some of these files are said to contain
information on the bureau's illegal domestic burglaries,
and others reputedly are filled with surveillance data
on sexual deviancy. [31] Many are thought to have been
destroyed by his secretary, Helen Gandy, or other aides.
Former Assistant Director Wannall says all the talk
about secret files is overdone. “I have 85 pages of
them, and any member of the public can get them,” he
says. “Most of the files kept in his office were
personal correspondence about his investments in oil.
One file was simply a survey of what electronic
equipment the FBI owned at the time. We agents had
access to the files in Hoover's office. We just went to
Miss Gandy.”
Domestic Surveillance
The most controversial Hoover secret to emerge in the
1970s was the bureau's 14-year counterintelligence
program to monitor the political activities of leftists
and anti-Vietnam War protesters. COINTELPRO, as it was
known, was launched in 1956 when the FBI was instructed
to go after the Communist Party USA, and ended in 1970,
when activists calling themselves the Citizens Committee
to Investigate the FBI stole documents from the FBI
office in Media, Pa., and leaked them to the press. [32]
The exposure of COINTELPRO prompted Ford administration
Attorney General Edward H. Levi to issue guidelines as
to when the FBI can infiltrate or conduct surveillance
on domestic groups. Litigation against the FBI for civil
liberties abuses went on into the 1980s, and two top
bureau officials, Mark Felt and Edward S. Miller, were
convicted of ordering illegal burglaries. The Society of
Former Special Agents of the FBI raised more than $1
million to defend them and others; Felt and Miller were
pardoned by President Ronald Reagan in 1981.
Wannall, who testified before Congress in defense of
COINTELPRO, says the program was fully authorized by the
presidents and attorneys general of each administration.
“Lyndon Johnson spoke to the nation on July 24, 1967, at
the time of the race riots in Detroit, saying that we
must use 'every means at our command' and that 'no
American has the right to loot,' ” he says. “Johnson
made it clear that we couldn't do business in our usual
way, that he expected more than what was being done.”
When bombs started to go off on American college
campuses a few years later, Wannall continues, “there
were real American people looking to their government
and the FBI to protect their rights and property.”
Post-Hoover Era
Hoover's death in 1972 (he was the first civil servant
to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda), heralded a new
era for the FBI. The 1968 crime bill had already
required future FBI directors to be confirmed by the
Senate and limited their terms to 10 years. For the
first time, amid considerable unease, black and female
agents were recruited. Training was updated to emphasize
“quality over quantity,” as a director put it, to place
less emphasis on mere statistics. The FBI also began
taking advantage of undercover techniques. It enjoyed
great successes against organized crime in New York,
Cleveland and other cities, McWeeney notes.
Under Acting Director L. Patrick Gray and later under
former Kansas City Police Chief Clarence Kelley, the FBI
also demonstrated the kind of political neutrality that
the public expected. Gray, despite his desire to
ingratiate himself with President Richard M. Nixon to
win a permanent appointment, refused to conduct
wiretapping and break-ins against White House enemies,
and wouldn't help Nixon cover up the Watergate scandal.
Indeed, FBI agents took pride in ferreting out White
House misdeeds committed during Watergate, staying a
couple of months ahead of Washington Post reporters Bob
Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who got the credit. [33]
Under the firm leadership of Judge William H. Webster,
who became director in 1978, the bureau took on the
international Mafia, foreign counterintelligence, world
terrorism and white-collar crime, such as the savings
and loan abuses.
It was under Webster and Reagan Attorney General William
French Smith that Justice Department guidelines for
domestic surveillance were relaxed in the hope that the
bureau would “anticipate crime.” What occurred, however,
was considered by many as another FBI abuse.
From 1984-86, the FBI conducted extensive surveillance
against leftist opponents of U.S. policy toward El
Salvador. The primary target was the Committee in
Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES),
whose associates included such “subversives” as former
U.S. Ambassador Robert White, musician Jackson Browne,
actor Charlie Sheen and 10 members of Congress. When
media attention forced the project's demise, new FBI
Director William S. Sessions was required to apologize
for a policy he called “an unfortunate aligning of
mistakes . . . of which the FBI is not proud.” [34]
Though Sessions had merely inherited the CISPES policy,
it may have been a factor in President Clinton's
decision in 1993 to fire him following a series of
controversies over his reported misuse of government
perks and the alleged involvement of his wife in policy
matters.
Standoff at Waco
The Clinton era began with the FBI's botched standoff
against the Branch Davidian cultists outside Waco. An
official post-mortem criticized the bureau after the
deadly tank assault, tear gassing and fire on April 19,
1993, that killed 75 adults and children. The bureau was
faulted for being impatient in negotiations with the
religious group; for employing dangerous CS gas of which
it had little understanding; and for failing to
adequately consult religious experts concerning the
potential for mass suicide.
In addition, recalls Alan Stone, the Harvard University
law and psychiatry professor who headed the review, “The
FBI and the Justice Department did not help our panel to
get the necessary information until I made a terrible
fuss and insisted. Then, after we filed the report, the
FBI condemned it.” (The FBI insisted it did consult
experts, and several months after Waco the FBI's Active
Agents Association issued a special award to hostage
rescue team members.)
After Republicans took control of Congress in 1995, they
conducted new hearings on the Waco and Ruby Ridge
episodes and reiterated the critiques. “FBI officials on
the ground had effectively ruled out a negotiated end
long before April 19, and had closed minds when
presented with evidence of a possible negotiated end
following completion of Koresh's work on interpreting
the Seven Seals of the Bible,” a House report said. [35]
Stone says he was impressed with the FBI's successful,
non-violent resolution of the 1996 standoff in Jordan,
Mont., against the anti- government Freemen group. “The
FBI has taken the criticism to heart,” he says. “I wrote
letters of congratulation to both Louis Freeh and Janet
Reno. I have great respect for Freeh.”
Chronology
1900s-1940s
First federal anti-crime unit focuses on anarchists and
Bolsheviks, then expands to deal with gangsters during
the Great Depression.
July 26, 1908
Bureau of Investigation created within Justice
Department.
1924
Young J. Edgar Hoover appointed head of bureau.
1930
Bureau begins publishing national crime statistics.
1932
Bureau's forensics laboratory created.
1933
Hoover named to head expanded bureau.
1935
Bureau renamed FBI. National Academy created to train
law enforcement personnel.
1940
Wartime federal law gives FBI authority to investigate
domestic subversives.
1950s-1960s
FBI focuses on anti-Communism, corruption of American
youth.
1968
Congress passes crime bill limiting FBI directors to 10
years and requiring Senate confirmation.
1970s
FBI criticized for civil liberties violations.
1970
Passage of Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt
Organizations (RICO) law, giving FBI more power to
investigate organized crime.
1972
Hoover dies; L. Patrick Gray named acting director.
1973
Kansas City Police Chief Clarence Kelley named FBI
director.
1975
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities
exposes FBI civil liberties abuses.
1976
Attorney General Edward Levi issues guidelines on FBI
surveillance.
1978
William H. Webster becomes director.
1980s
FBI focuses on drugs, white-collar crime and
international terrorism.
1980
FBI's ABSCAM undercover operation convicts 12 public
officials of bribery.
1987
William S. Sessions named director.
1988
Revelation that FBI inappropriately targeted domestic
activists on human rights in El Salvador.
1990s
FBI acknowledges mistakes.
August 1992
FBI involved in shootout at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in which
an unarmed woman and her teenage son are killed.
April 19, 1993
FBI assault on the Branch Davidian complex near Waco,
Texas, leaves 75 adults and children dead.
Sept. 1, 1993
Louis J. Freeh becomes director.
1994
Congress passes communications law preserving FBI
wiretap capabilities.
1995
FBI chemist Frederic Whitehurst sets off inquiry by
complaining of sloppiness and misbehavior in FBI lab.
April 24, 1996
Congress passes Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death
Penalty Act broadening FBI powers.
June 1996
FBI captures anti-government “Freeman” after three-month
standoff in Montana.
Feb. 28, 1997
FBI agent Earl Edwin Pitts pleads guilty to spying for
Moscow.
March 1997
FBI and White House clash over investigation of Chinese
efforts to influence U.S. elections.
Current Situation
“I don't see how Louis Freeh can survive this
confrontation with the president,” newsman Sam Donaldson
said March 16 on ABC's “This Week.” He was referring to
the clash between the FBI and the White House over what
the White House said was the FBI's failure to tell
Clinton that the FBI was investigating whether the
Chinese government was funneling money illegally into
Democratic campaigns. Though Attorney General Reno
subsequently attributed the conflict to a
“misunderstanding,” it later emerged that Freeh may have
been withholding information on his 30-agent probe into
Chinese funding because of earlier charges that the FBI
was too cozy with the White House. [36]
The situation only dramatizes the political tightrope
Freeh must walk these days. For nearly two years,
Republicans have been blasting the FBI for, among other
things, allegedly allowing itself to be used by the
White House after Clinton aides fired White House travel
office employees in 1993, and then sought an FBI probe
to prove their criminality. [37]
Last year, the bureau's counsel was criticized for
providing the White House with an advance copy of former
special agent Gary Aldrich's titillating memoir,
Unlimited Access: An FBI Agent at the White House. And
last month, Rep. Charles H. Taylor, R-N.C., told Freeh
at a hearing that “it seems like the FBI is acting like
Stepin Fetchit for the White House and giving up its
role as a respected law enforcement agency.” Moreover,
Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., who is chairing a major probe
into Clinton fund-raising improprieties, dismissed as “a
blatant political move” the report that he had become
the target of an FBI investigation into charges that he
shook down a Democratic lobbyist for campaign cash.
Freeh has replied to the Republicans by citing the pride
he takes in the fact that his identity as either a
Republican or Democrat has never been made public. He
said his only conditions for accepting Clinton's offer
to elevate him from federal judge to FBI director was
that there be no White House interference with his work.
[38]
Freeh also said that he takes “full responsibility” for
the problems on his watch, noting that he has introduced
new procedures to avoid a repeat of allowing partisan
White House staffers to obtain FBI files on political
opponents. “I did not call it an administrative snafu,”
he said. “I called it an egregious violation of privacy,
and I said it was the result of the abdication of
management responsibility in the FBI.”
Freeh is not a pawn of the White House, McWeeney says.
“Those charges are just the Republicans trying out their
own political agenda. Freeh is a decent man with
integrity who is now faced with issues in the media
spotlight that years ago would have been kept quiet.”
The Jewell Case
An area where Freeh has also been promising action is
the FBI's investigation of the Olympic Games bombing, in
which someone, apparently in law enforcement, leaked the
name of security guard Richard Jewell as a suspect, and
the FBI may have tricked Jewell into giving interviews
under the guise of coming to help make a training video.
In March, senior FBI official David Tubbs and others
were reported to be facing disciplinary action in the
Jewell affair.
Freeh said he has “zero tolerance” for leaks by agents,
but he noted that “over 500 FBI agents, local detectives
and other people” knew [Jewell's] identity. “They
reported up 10 organizational chains. It was much too
many people to be aware of a subject's identity in a
case where you had 15,000 reporters in town.” [39]
Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence
in Journalism, says “the press in this case was used by
the FBI to try to squeeze Jewell. This violates the
first tenet of journalism, which is don't become an arm
of government.” The press in the future should return to
the old code of waiting until a suspect has been
officially charged to report his name, and to require
the police to offer evidence as to why someone is a
suspect, he says. “The FBI's reliability has been
tarnished, too, and perhaps that's good, because the
press had gotten too cozy with it.” Jewell later sued
several news organizations for naming him as a suspect.
Freedom of Information
Last summer's “Filegate” controversy at the White House
produced a surge in requests from journalists,
academics, prison inmates and average citizens for FBI
files under the Freedom of Information Act. [40] Kevin
O'Brien, chief of the FBI's FOIA and Privacy Acts
section, last June reminded Congress that “FBI files
contain very sensitive information, and [reviewing
requests] is necessarily time-consuming, and the
analysis cannot be done properly if it is done in haste.
We are critically understaffed.” [41]
In February, the FBI began sending letters to all
requesters explaining the backlog. “If we do not receive
a response within 30 days of the date of this
communication,” it said, “we will conclude that you are
no longer interested and close your request (s)
administratively.”
The FBI generally handles FOIA requests on a first-come,
first- served basis, though it does have a special track
for requests that can be filled in one day. In balancing
citizen rights against the FBI's need to protect
national security and confidential sources, courts have
ruled that action on FOIA requests must be accelerated
if their topics are newsworthy, or if they involve
possible government misconduct.
Recent court rulings have backed the FBI's right to keep
certain information (such as the file on murdered
Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa) secret if officials judge
that the case could still be reopened. Courts have also
ruled that the FBI may not withhold documents if they
have already been reviewed for other FOIA requests. FBI
exemptions from FOIA requirements must be justified case
by case.
Harry Hammitt, editor-publisher of Access Reports, a
biweekly on the FOIA, says that the FBI receives far
more FOIA requests than other agencies. “The law and
intelligence agencies have the worst time because they
are overly cautious, and the reviews are labor-
intensive,” he says. But the common notion that most
requests are from outraged average citizens seeking
suspected files on themselves is overblown. “There are
an awful lot of people in jail or in the justice system
who make requests, as well as reporters and researchers
and public interest groups,” he says. “I'll bet the FBI
doesn't think it's being too secretive, but I say they
apply too much caution, and that more could be
disclosed. They spend huge amounts of time and money in
court defending their policies.” In the FBI's defense, a
single request from a journalist can amount to 3,000
pages, he adds, and require a staff of 60 to handle.
[42]
By 1999, the bureau plans to have an electronic imaging
system installed at FBI headquarters and at all field
offices for the tracking and processing of information
requested under the FOIA and the Privacy Acts. [43] The
FBI's track record on new computer systems in general,
however, has been flagging. There have been delays and
cost overruns in its effort to upgrade its National
Crime Information Center, a computerized system designed
to handle 100,000 inquiries a day from law enforcement
officials. The bureau's planned Integrated Automated
Fingerprint Identification System, which will allow
police in squad cars to check fingerprints via portable
computers, is also behind schedule. [44]
“The bureau has not delivered vital law enforcement
systems . . . anywhere near within budget or on time,”
House Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice,
State and Judiciary Chairman Harold Rogers, R-Ky, told
Freeh recently. [45]
Pro/Con
Is the FBI forensics laboratory too secretive?
James E. Starrs
Professor of law and forensic sciences, George
Washington University,
From “Uninvited and Unwelcome Guests: Biases in the
House of Forensic Sciences,” Speech presented to
American Academy of Sciences, Feb. 20, 1997.
Forensic scientists are expected to keep abreast of the
times, especially when the times are changing under the
impetus of judicial decisions and statutory revisions.
As the front-runner in the field of forensic science,
the FBI lab could be expected to take the lead in
accommodating the old ways to the new rules.
Ruefully, that has not been the policy at the FBI lab.
Change resulting in more open and reviewable practices .
. . seems to cut against the establishment mentality of
the FBI laboratory. The hidebound attitude at the FBI
laboratory seems to be saying out with the new and on
with the old.
In this regard, the FBI lab suffers from a very acute
case of mural dyslexia, by which I mean it has failed to
see the handwriting on the wall. It is no wonder that it
is steeped in controversy at the present time. To be
hidebound is no guarantee that the slings and arrows of
criticism will be aimed elsewhere. Quite to the
contrary.
Closed doors, I would submit, lead to closed minds, and
closed minds are a substantial opening to inefficiency
and ineptitude and possibly worse . . . .
External proficiency testing is the norm for responsible
and accredited laboratories, but not for the FBI lab.
Its internal proficiency testing best serves its
fixation with bolting its doors to the peer review of
outsiders, even outsiders who are preeminent in their
scientific fields.
The studied refusal of the FBI lab . . . to countenance
a second opinion is indicative of the FBI's negative
posture toward peer review. Of course, it could be said
that the FBI's unwillingness to accept evidence that has
been or will be analyzed elsewhere is just a matter of
sensible conservation of its resources. In light,
however, of the determined refusal of the FBI lab to
stand the criticism of peer review in other
circumstances, it would appear that resource
conservation is a secondary motive against second
opinions of, or at, the FBI lab. . . .
Everything in the FBI lab is being played by the
adversarial book. All disclosures are made grudgingly,
and only when and in the terms required by the rules.
The forensic scientists at the FBI lab seem to be more
scrupulously lawyerlike in their close-to-the-vest view
of pretrial discovery than even lawyers would be. All
the better to squelch peer review and to advance the
cause of the prosecution, which, from every viewpoint,
seem to be the dual purposes of the FBI lab.
David Fisher
Author, Hard Evidence: Inside the FBI Sci-Crime Lab,
From “FBI Crime Lab Receives Unfair Criticism From
Whistle-Blower,” Contra Costa Times, March 5, 1997.
For some of us who naturally believe whistle-blowers, it
was a source of great confusion to read allegations by
FBI Special Agent Fred Whitehurst that the bureau's
criminal laboratory had mishandled or fabricated
evidence in many cases.
Whitehurst's loud whistle led to a Justice Department
investigation, and parts of the resulting inspector
general's report recently leaked to the media seemed to
support some of his complaints.
Newspaper headlines criticized the lab and stated that
hundreds of cases might have been reopened. On
“Nightline,” Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, suggested
that work done by the lab was so poor that the lab could
not even be accredited by forensic organizations . . . .
Having spent more than six months inside the FBI lab,
where I conducted more than 180 hours of interviews,
Whitehurst's claims made little sense to me. And, while
it is certainly possible that there are serious problems
inside the lab about which I know nothing, the evidence
thus far made public has confirmed my belief that this
story is only slightly more accurate than recent news
coverage of Richard Jewell in Atlanta and Michael Irvin
in Dallas. . . .
Grassley is correct that the FBI lab has not been
accredited. But not because, as the senator seems to
suggest, the work done there is substandard. The FBI lab
established the American Society of Crime Lab Directors,
the parent of the accrediting organization, many years
ago to standardize procedures used by crime labs.
Smaller state and local labs had little difficulty
conforming to these standards, but problems faced by the
bureau are considerably different. Until recently, for
example, the bureau's lab has not been a restricted
facility, which is mandatory for accreditation; that the
entire building was a restricted facility was not
acceptable.
Most of the reasons the lab has not been accredited . .
. are structural or mechanical, rather than
quality-based, and will be resolved when the lab moves
to a new facility. . . .
There simply is no reason for FBI agents to falsify
data. In many cases their tests simply provide lead
information, rather than trial evidence. Examiners and
technicians rarely know any more than is necessary about
the materials they are examining, and most often never
learn how an investigation or trial ended. . . .
Unlike J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, where the publicity was
far greater than its accomplishments, in this instance
the crime lab is much better than these headlines.
Outlook
Working for the FBI, makes for a stressful life, and the
bureau employs two full-time counselors to work with
troubled agents. Despite the danger and frequent travel,
some 10,000 men and women apply to become agents every
year; 400 are chosen. About 10 percent drop out during
the tough training course at the FBI Academy, where
Freeh recently added new courses in ethics.
To further bolster the agency's moral fiber, Freeh
announced in March that he was creating an expanded and
newly independent Office of Professional Responsibility
to investigate and adjudicate internal misconduct
allegations. To speed up the handling of cases, Freeh
said he had doubled the number of employees assigned to
internal investigations.
For some, the decades-old fear of the FBI has not
disappeared. In March, attorneys in Northern California
revived a lawsuit on behalf of Judi Bari, a member of
the radical environmental group Earth First!, who was
injured in a 1990 car bombing in Oakland, Calif. Police
arrested her and accused her of carrying the bomb, while
she accused the FBI of portraying her as a suspect to
smear her group. The suit on behalf of Bari, who
recently died of cancer, is another one likely to
challenge the credibility of the FBI's forensics lab.
The influence of J. Edgar Hoover persists at the modern
bureau, Wannall says. “His policies haven't changed,”
even if there are people at the FBI now who get in
situations that require them to apologize for mistakes.
Hoover loyalists were especially irked at the bizarre
reports by a British journalist in 1993 asserting that
Hoover and his top aide, Clyde Tolson, were gay lovers,
that Hoover had been seen in the late 1950s wearing a
dress and makeup, and that the Mafia used its knowledge
of these hypocritical behaviors to prevent Hoover from
going after the mob. [46]
There is “no cogent evidence” that such stories are
true, says A.J. McFall, executive director of the former
special agents society. The source for them, he notes,
is Susan Rosenstiel (no relation to Tom Rosenstiel), the
ex-wife of a wealthy former bootlegger with contacts
both in the mob and the FBI. “She had gone through a
divorce and was bitter at the property settlement, and
she blamed the former FBI agents that her ex-husband had
hired as private eyes,” McFall says. “FBI agents who
worked with Hoover every day were pretty straight types,
and if Hoover had done anything like this, someone would
have come forward,” McFall adds. “To say that Hoover and
Tolson were anything more than professional and above
board is absolute slander.”
Global Reach
Efforts by Freeh and the FBI to become more active
overseas have raised some concerns. Last winter, Freeh
traveled to Jordan to discuss the extradition of a
Muslim militant wanted in Israel. He also recently
traveled to Saudi Arabia in connection with the U.S.
barracks bombing. “It seems that Mr. Freeh and Ms. Reno
hadn't bothered to consult the Clinton foreign policy
team before rattling around in one of Washington's most
sensitive bilateral relationships,” complained columnist
George Melloan. [47]
Martin of the Center for National Security Studies
worries about new powers the FBI acquired under last
year's intelligence appropriations bill. In the course
of going after terrorists overseas, the FBI will now be
allowed to be guided by intelligence-gathering rules
that apply to the CIA, which are looser about protecting
civil liberties than the rules for law enforcement.
“There used to be a wall between the two which Congress
used to protect civil liberties,” she says. [48]
The FBI is expected to continue seeking expanded powers
for “roving” wiretaps using satellite technology, and to
require airlines, courier services and hotels to give
the FBI information it seeks. Such new capabilities are
needed as a matter of survival, says former agent
McWeeney. “You have to grow with the criminal element
with all these state-of-the-art digital telephones and
wire transfers. If the FBI doesn't keep up with the bad
guys, who will?”
“We're living now in a society of surveillance,” says
Raskin of the Institute for Policy Studies. “You must
show a picture ID when you enter a government or
corporate building, or when you board an airplane. The
police and the FBI are one piece of this apparatus, and
it's a very scary picture.”
Zogby of the Arab American Institute says the FBI has
become a bit more sensitive to the hurt caused by some
of its investigations of ethnic Americans, particularly
after years of surveillance that reached almost comic
proportions have yielded so little in crime fighting.
“But the FBI is still more feared than trusted because
of what happened in the 1970s and '80s,” he says.
“Perhaps they could make an affirmative effort at
confidence building, and say they are sorry for what
happened during the Gulf War.”
“The American public trusts the FBI,” says FBI counsel
McDonald, “when they look at what it has done and not
what it has been accused of doing. It hasn't been
running afoul of the law. It has a good record.”
Moreover, the old feeling that the FBI runs over local
law enforcement is no longer the case, says Daniel N.
Rosenblatt, executive director of the International
Association of Chiefs of Police. “The cooperation today
is stellar. Freeh has the right kind of attitude. He's a
courageous man who has made no secret about the problems
of the FBI, which he's trying to address. The evaluation
of an agency head is not whether he's free of problems
but what he is doing about the problems.”
But Freeh's days at the FBI may be numbered. “I have
wondered about leaving,” he says in the current issue of
Newsweek. The magazine also quoted friends saying they
have heard Freeh wonder aloud, “Am I hurting the FBI?”
[49]
Footnotes
[1] Congressional Record, Feb. 25, 1997, p. S1547.
[2] The Washington Post, Oct. 20, 1995.
[3] See “Combating Terrorism,” The CQ Researcher, July
21, 1995, pp. 633-656.
[4] Athan Theoharis, From the Secret Files of J. Edgar
Hoover (1991), p. 80.
[5] See “Cults in America,” The CQ Researcher, May 7,
1993, pp. 385- 408.
[6] See “Mafia Crackdown,” The CQ Researcher, March 27,
1992, pp. 265-288.
[7] The Washington Post, Feb. 15, 1997.
[8] The Washington Post, Feb. 14, 1997.
[9] Los Angeles Times [Washington edition] , March 18,
1997.
[10] Quoted in The Washington Post, Feb. 14, 1997.
[11] The New York Times, Feb. 13. 1997.
[12] James Bovard, “The New J. Edgar Hoover,” The
American Spectator, August 1995.
[13] David B. Kopen and Paul H. Blackman, No More Wacos:
What's Wrong with Federal Law Enforcement and How to Fix
It (1997).
[14] Los Angeles Times [Washington edition] , June 28,
1996.
[15] James Q. Wilson, Time, May 1, 1995, p. 73.
[16] Max Lowenthal, The Federal Bureau of Investigation
(1950), p. 3.
[17] Harry and Bonaro Overstreet, The FBI in Our Open
Society (1969), p. 73.
[18] Lowenthal, op. cit., p. 36.
[19] Overstreet, op. cit., p. 37.
[20] Richard Gid Powers, G-Men: Hoover's FBI in Popular
Culture (1983), p. 97.
[21] Pat Watters and Stephen Gillers (eds.),
Investigating the FBI (1973), p. 88.
[22] Diarmuid Jeffreys, The Bureau: Inside the Modern
FBI (1995), pp. 61-62.
[23] Max Lowenthal, The Federal Bureau of Investigation
(1950), p. 394.
[24] Watters and Gillers, op. cit., p. 118.
[25] Ronald Kessler, The FBI (1993), p. 2.
[26] Powers, op. cit., p. 265.
[27] Overstreet, op. cit., p. 354.
[28] Gentry, op. cit., p. 544.
[29] Jeffreys, op. cit., p. 200.
[30] Gentry, op. cit., p. 472.
[31] Athan Theoharis, From the Secret Files of J. Edgar
Hoover (1991), p. 7.
[32] Jeffreys, op. cit., p. 67.
[33] Kessler op. cit., p. 269.
[34] Jeffreys, op. cit., p. 267.
[35] House Judiciary and Government Reform and Oversight
committees, “Investigation into the Activities of
Federal Law Enforcement Agencies Toward the Branch
Davidians,” Aug. 2, 1996.
[36] The New York Times, March 25, 1997; The Washington
Post, April 9, 1997.
[37] House Government Reform and Oversight Committee,
“Investigation of the White House Travel Office Firings
and Related Matters,” Sept. 26, 1996.
[38] Testimony before House Appropriations Subcommittee
on Commerce, Justice, State and Judiciary, March 5,
1997.
[39] Ibid.
[40] Privacy Times, Oct. 17, 1996, p. 10.
[41] Insight, Aug. 19, 1996, p. 20.
[42] See Carl Stern, “Journalists Could do a Lot to Make
Their Requests Easier to Fill,” The American Editor,
July-August 1995, p. 14.
[43] FOIA Update, winter 1996, p. 1.
[44] The Washington Post, March 16, 1997.
[45] The Washington Post, March 16, 1997.
[46] Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The
Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover (1993), p. 248.
[47] “Is the FBI Making Foreign Policy?” The Wall Street
Journal, Feb. 3, 1997.
[48] See “Reforming the CIA,” The CQ Researcher, Feb. 2,
1996, pp. 97- 120.
[49] Newsweek, April 14, 1997.
Bibliography
Books
Gentry, Curt, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets,
Penguin, 1991. An author of popular works of American
history produced this less-than-flattering biography of
the legendary FBI director using newly released
classified documents and more than 300 interviews.
Jeffreys, Diarmuid, The Bureau: Inside the Modern FBI,
Houghton Mifflin, 1995. A British television producer
and author offers an in-depth portrait of today's FBI
and its longstanding “myths” based on dozens of
interviews with current and former employees.
Kessler, Ronald, The FBI: Inside the World's Most
Powerful Law Enforcement Agency - by the Award-Winning
Journalist Whose Investigation Brought Down FBI Director
William S. Sessions, Simon and Schuster, 1993. A former
Washington Post reporter produced this thorough history
and profile of the FBI's successes and failures, with an
emphasis on the bureau's internal culture and its
interface with Washington politics.
Lowenthal, Max, The Federal Bureau of Investigation,
William Sloane Associates, 1950. In one of the earliest
full-length works to critique the FBI, Lowenthal
explores the bureau's early failures and successes, with
a special emphasis on its role in countering espionage.
The FBI in Our Open Society, W.W. Norton, 1969. Two
authors of popular psychology works trace the history of
the FBI with an emphasis on the bureau's chartered
powers and its clashes with critics.
Powers, Richard Gid, G-Men: Hoover's FBI in American
Popular Culture, Southern Illinois University Press,
1983. A cultural historian at the College of Staten
Island traces the history of the FBI with an emphasis on
its public relations efforts and its portrayal in film,
television and popular press.
Summers, Anthony, Official and Confidential: The Secret
Life of J. Edgar Hoover, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1993. A
British author and television correspondent made
worldwide headlines with this biography's assertion that
Hoover was a homosexual transvestite who allowed the
Mafia to blackmail him.
Theoharis, Athan, From the Secret Files of J. Edgar
Hoover, Ivan R. Dee, 1991. An author specializing in
intelligence and security issues filed numerous Freedom
of Information Act requests to produce these annotated
selections from FBI personal files on such notables as
President John F. Kennedy, Attorney General Robert F.
Kennedy and Sen. George S. McGovern.
Stephen Gillers, Investigating the FBI, Doubleday, 1973.
These proceedings from a 1971 Princeton University
conference on the FBI in American life contain some of
the most critical commentary on the bureau's conduct in
such areas as domestic surveillance, budgetary
gamesmanship and public-image manipulation.
Articles
Bovard, James, “The New J. Edgar Hoover,” The American
Spectator, August 1995. Bovard writes that FBI Director
Louis J. Freeh runs an agency “inclined to destroy
evidence of its botched investigations.”
“FBI's Freeh: About to bolt?” National Journal, July 20,
1996, p. 1563. Rumors are circulating that FBI Director
Louis J. Freeh may leave his position. Sources say a law
firm has offered Freeh an $800,000-a-year salary.
Evan Thomas, “The FBI: The Victim of His Virtues,”
Newsweek, April 14, 1997. The authors argue that FBI
Director Louis J. Freeh's biggest problem may be his
pride.
Next Step
Periodical Abstracts Database (for further research)
Campaign Finance Investigations
Bob Woodward, “FBI Probes China-Linked Contributions;
Task Force Examines Influence on Congress,” The
Washington Post, Feb. 28, 1997, p. A1. A witness
interviewed by FBI agents assigned to the task force
said he was told that one focus of the Justice
Department inquiry is to determine whether members of
both parties in Congress had been improperly influenced
by Chinese representatives who may have made illegal
payments to them.
Duffy, Brian, “Senator Says FBI Warned of Chinese
Influence-Buying Plans in 1995,” The Washington Post,
March 17, 1997, p. A6. The FBI told the State
Department, the CIA, the Justice Department and some
members of Congress in 1995 that China as planning to
make illegal campaign contributions to members of
Congress, Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, R-Utah, said March 16,
1997.
Mathis, Nancy, “Clinton Says He Should've Been Told of
Briefing/ FBI Denies Agents Demanded Confidentiality on
China Probe,” Houston Chronicle, March 11, 1997, p. A1.
In a stunning public spat between the White House and
the FBI, President Clinton said Monday he should have
been informed last June of the agency's suspicions that
China wanted to influence congressional elections. The
White House told reporters that FBI agents provided two
National Security Council staff members with information
on China's interest in political races, but insisted
that no one else be told. White House spokesman Mike
McCurry stood by his earlier account of the June
meeting, maintaining the FBI was “in error.”
Civil Liberties
“A Reasonable Response to Terror,” The New York Times,
July 30, 1996, p. A16. An editorial urges that Congress
not give in to pressure in the wake of the terrorist
bombing in Atlanta, Ga., in considering the
anti-terrorism bill. The editorial argues that a plan to
make explosives easier to trace should have been
approved long ago, but the proposal to extend the
government's wiretapping authority is excessive, given
the “proven need” to watch the FBI for invasion of civil
liberties.
McGee, Jim, “Heightened Tensions Over Digital Taps,” The
Washington Post, Oct. 27, 1996, p. H1. Tensions between
the FBI and the U.S. telecommunications industry came to
a boil in late 1996 because of new efforts by the FBI
and other intelligence agencies to monitor cellular
telephones and other mobile communications systems.
Civil liberties groups contend the surveillance is too
broad.
Newton, Jim, “ACLU Seeks Review of Pepper Spray,” Los
Angeles Times, Feb. 29, 1996, p. A3. The American Civil
Liberties Union asked state and federal officials to
overhaul methods of testing police weapons and to stop
using a brand of pepper spray in the wake of FBI Special
Agent Thomas Ward's admission that he took $57,500 from
the spray's manufacturer as he conducted research that
eventually endorsed its use.
“World-Wide: The FBI Suspended,” The Wall Street
Journal, Jan 28, 1997, p. A1. The FBI suspended a crime
laboratory supervisor who in 1995, alleged that
pro-prosecution bias and mishandling of evidence may
have tainted testimony in several big cases, including
the World Trade Center and Oklahoma City bombings.
“Filegate”
“Filegate Flap,” Houston Chronicle, July 14, 1996, p.
C2. An editorial comments on the “Filegate” controversy
in which White House security personnel have been caught
with hundreds of confidential FBI files on various
persons of the opposite political persuasion, and
asserts that no matter to whatever degree misuse of the
files eventually is proved, the mere fact that the files
were there is cause for public outrage.
“Filegate Scandal Begins to Develop a Strong Odor,”
Atlanta Journal, July 9, 1996, p. A6. An editorial
opines that of all the scandals and reports of scandals
that have touched the Clinton administration, the most
troubling is the still-developing story of official
snooping into the personal FBI files of potential
enemies.
McGrory, Brian, “FBI Report Condemns File Requests,” The
Boston Globe, June 15, 1996, p. 1. FBI officials on June
14, 1996, condemned the Clinton administration's
acquisition of bureau background files as “egregious
violations of privacy,” while FBI Director Louis J.
Freeh ordered strict new controls over access to the
agency's files.
McGrory, Brian, “Panetta Apologizes on FBI Files,” The
Boston Globe, June 10, 1996, p. 1. White House Chief of
Staff Leon Panetta issued a formal and blanket apology
on June 9, 1996, to the hundreds of people, including
many former Republican officials, whose classified FBI
personnel files were obtained by the Clinton
administration and reviewed by an Army security officer.
Forensics Lab
“Is the FBI Going Downhill?” The Washington Post, Jan.
30, 1997, p. A18. The FBI's world-renowned crime
laboratory is less than the reliable operation it was
once thought to be. Indications of evidence mishandling
have turned up in dozens of cases, according to the
Justice Department's inspector general. That may not
seem like many for a laboratory that conducts hundreds
of thousands of evidence examinations a year. But
hundreds of state and federal courts annually rely on
the testimony of FBI experts.
David G. Savage, “FBI Warns of Possible Flaws in Lab
Evidence; Courts, Prosecutors, Defense Counsel
Nationwide Are Told of Potential Problems Due to Alleged
Misconduct,” Los Angeles Times, Jan. 31, 1997, p. A1.
Fearing that an undetermined number of federal
prosecutions could be put in jeopardy, Justice
Department officials said Thursday that they have been
telling prosecutors and defense attorneys across the
country in recent weeks about potential flaws in
evidence caused by serious problems at the FBI crime
laboratory here.
Serrano, Richard A., “Workers Portray FBI Lab as a
Shoddy Shop; Probe: Some Current, Former Employees Tell
Investigators of Shortcomings, Including Possible
Contamination of Tests by Tour Groups,” Los Angeles
Times, Jan. 31, 1997, p. A16. Public tour groups filed
through a hallway, kicking up dust, as delicate
experiments were conducted nearby. Agents, fresh from
the FBI's gun range or bomb unit, passed through -
perhaps unwittingly spreading residue that could
jeopardize tests. Lab technicians sometimes ignored or
violated scientific protocols, some examiners were
unqualified to issue test reports and, in one case, an
analyst enhanced his scientific knowledge by “viewing
videos.” Throughout the history of the FBI, the lab on
the third floor of the J. Edgar Hoover Building here has
enjoyed a reputation for precision and expertise. But
for more than a year now, the Justice Department's
inspector general has been reviewing widespread
allegations of abuse and shortcomings at the lab.
Serrano, Richard A., “FBI Lab Hasn't Jeopardized Cases,
Freeh Tells Panel,” Los Angeles Times, March 6, 1997, p.
A1. FBI Director Louis J. Freeh testified Wednesday that
no criminal cases will be jeopardized by widespread
reports of sloppy and incompetent work at the bureau's
crime laboratory in Washington, D.C. Freeh's comments to
a House Appropriations subcommittee suggested that the
government's high-profile cases against the Oklahoma
City bombing defendants and the accused Unabomber, plus
as many as 50 other criminal cases, had not been
compromised.
Pierre Thomas, “FBI Lab Woes Put 50 Cases in Jeopardy,”
The Washington Post, Feb. 14, 1997, p. A1. The Justice
Department has identified at least 50 criminal cases
where evidentiary problems created by questionable
forensic analysis at the FBI laboratory may have
resulted in improper prosecutions, Deputy Attorney
General Jamie S. Gorelick said yesterday, acknowledging
that the number of problem cases could go higher.
Louis J. Freeh
Robert A. Rankin, “FBI Curbs White House Access to
Personal Files,” Detroit News & Free Press, June 15,
1996, p. A6. FBI Director Louis J. Freeh on June 14,
1996, ordered new measures to protect sensitive agency
background files from White House misuse while also
disclosing that the White House wrongly obtained 408
files, more than was previously known.
“More Trouble at the FBI,” The Washington Post, Dec. 20,
1996, p. A26. An editorial states that FBI Director
Louis J. Freeh needs to do some hard introspection in
relation to the number of scandals that have involved
the agency in1996.
Nelson, Jack, “Memo by Freeh Denies Rumors He'll Quit
FBI,” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 26, 1996, p. A27. FBI
Director Louis J. Freeh, battered by a cross-fire of
partisan politics and widely rumored to be planning to
resign, has sent a memorandum to bureau employees
assuring them that he intends to remain on the job.
Nichols, Bill, “FBI Enters Travel Office Controversy,”
USA Today, June 6, 1996, p. A1. FBI Director Louis J.
Freeh on June 5, 1996, ordered an inquiry into who at
the White House asked the FBI for travel office chief
Billy Dale's background file seven months after Dale was
fired along with six other White House travel office
workers in 1993. The request stated Dale was being
considered for renewed White House access, but Dale said
he had not sought the access.
Suro, Roberto, “FBI Chief Finds Himself Under
Microscope,” The Washington Post, Nov. 18, 1996, p. A1.
FBI Director Louis J. Freeh's judgments in several
high-profile episodes, such as the deadly 1992 Ruby
Ridge standoff, are coming under increased scrutiny that
is likely to escalate as 1996 comes to a close.
Montana Freemen
Freemantle, Tony, “After Waco Tragedy, FBI Stays Low-Key
in Montana Case,” Houston Chronicle, April 3, 1996, p.
A1. The FBI is staying low-key in the case of the
Montana Freemen after the disastrous confrontations
between federal law enforcement teams and members of
extremist groups at Ruby Ridge in Idaho and the Branch
Davidian compound near Waco, Texas. The Freemen have
been holed up since March 25, 1996.
George Lardner, “FBI Ponders Mediation Offer in Montana
Standoff,” The Washington Post, March 31, 1996, p. A10.
The FBI is considering whether to accept an offer from
Randy Weaver, whose wife was killed by an FBI agent in
1992 in a bloody standoff near Ruby Ridge, Idaho, to
mediate an end to the siege with anti-government Freemen
holed up on a remote ranch in Jordan, Mont., officials
said March 30, 1996.
Smith, Wes, “Militants Test FBI's Resolve,” Chicago
Tribune, March 31, 1996, p. 1. The 1,500 residents of
Jordan, Mont., have asked the FBI to rid their town of
the anti-government group known as Freemen. The problems
facing the government officials, remembering the Waco,
Texas, fiasco, are noted.
Olympics Bombing Incident
“FBI Ends Surveillance of Jewell,” Chicago Tribune, Oct.
8, 1996, Sec. EVENING, p. 1. The FBI questioned former
security guard Richard Jewell over the Oct. 5, 1996,
weekend and has dropped the surveillance it started
after the Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta, Ga., his
lawyer said on Oct. 8. All of Jewell's private property
that had been seized by bombing investigators has been
returned.
“Hyde Vows Probe of FBI, Jewell Leak,” Atlanta
Constitution, Dec. 27, 1996, p. E2. U.S. Rep. Henry J.
Hyde, R-Ill., says his House Judiciary Committee will
scrutinize the FBI, including its handling of a news
leak in the 1996 Olympic bombing in Atlanta, Ga., after
the new Congress convenes in January 1997.
“Jewell Has His Say About the FBI, Media,” Houston
Chronicle, Oct. 29, 1996, p. A1. Leveling a blistering
attack on the FBI and the news media on Oct. 28, 1996,
Richard Jewell held an emotional news conference that
laid the groundwork for lawsuits against those who
portrayed him as the leading suspect in the bombing at
Centennial Olympic Park in July 1996
Gary Fields, “Jewell Investigation Unmasks FBI
'Tricks',” USA Today, Nov. 8, 1996, p. A13. The FBI
investigation of Richard Jewell in the July 1996,
bombing of the Atlanta Centennial Park in Georgia is
examined in light of the Justice Dept.'s investigation
of whether the FBI's treatment of Jewell crossed the
line.
Ruby Ridge
Jackson, Robert L., “FBI Official Pleads Guilty in Ruby
Ridge Case,” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 31, 1996, p. A16.
Suspended FBI official E. Michael Kahoe pleaded guilty
on Oct. 30, 1996, to obstructing justice by destroying a
critical report on the ill-fated shoot-out at Ruby
Ridge, Idaho. Kahoe pledged to cooperate in the
continuing investigation into an alleged cover-up of FBI
actions in the 1992 incident.
“The FBI Tries to Clean Its Tarnished Reputation,” San
Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 4, 1996, p. A24. An editorial
comments on the tarnished image that the FBI suffered
the week of Oct. 28, 1996, with the announcement that a
senior FBI official, E. Michael Kahoe, has pleaded
guilty to obstructing justice in the 1992 Ruby Ridge
siege and the disclosure of possible misconduct in the
agency's investigation of Richard Jewell as a possible
suspect in the July 1996 bombing at Olympic Park in
Atlanta, Ga.
Potok, Mark, “Ruby Ridge: FBI Official Charged,” USA
Today, Oct. 23, 1996, p. A1. Ranking FBI agent E.
Michael Kahoe was charged Oct. 22, 1996, with
obstructing justice amid indications he'll testify
against others in a probe of a cover-up of events
surrounding the deadly siege at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in
1992. Kahoe is charged in a one-count criminal
information filed by federal prosecutors in Washington,
D.C.
Waco
Pankratz, Howard, “FBI Avoided Waco's Pitfalls,” Denver
Post, June 16, 1996, p. A11. According to U.S. Deputy
Attorney General Philip B. Heyman's lengthy report
assessing the Waco tragedy, the multiple deaths of
federal agents limited what negotiators could do with
David Koresh and the Branch Davidians while the Freemen
standoff in Jordan, Mont., presented the FBI with
considerably more options.
Nealon, Patricia, “Critic of Waco Praises 'Landmark' FBI
Effort,” The Boston Globe, June 15, 1996, p. 8. Harvard
Professor Alan Stone, who sharply criticized the FBI for
its tactics after the deadly Waco, Texas, Branch
Davidian standoff, said on June 14, 1996, that the FBI
should be congratulated for orchestrating the peaceful
surrender of the anti-government Freemen at their
Montana ranch.
Contacts
Center for National Security Studies
Gelman Library, Suite 701, 2130 H St. N.W., Washington,
D.C. 20037
(202) 994-7060
Sponsored by the Fund for Peace, the center conducts
research and performs legislative and legal advocacy to
ensure that civil liberties and human rights are not
eroded in the name of national security.
Federal Bureau of Investigation
10th St. and Pennsylvania Ave. N.W., Washington, D.C.
20535
(202) 324-2614
The FBI maintains a headquarters in Washington as well
as 56 field offices nationwide, 400 smaller local
offices and 23 overseas offices.
Freedom of Information Center
127 Neff Annex, University of Missouri, Columbia, Mo.
65211
(573) 882-4856
Founded in 1958, this nonprofit group maintains files
that document actions by government, media and society
affecting the flow and content of information. It
monitors FBI policy on Freedom of Information Act
requests.
Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI Inc. P.O.
Box 1027
Building 715, Quantico, Va., 22134
(800) 527-7372
Founded in 1937, the 8,000-member group holds annual
conferences and social events, maintains a memorial to
slain agents and raises funds for scholarships, members'
families in need and agents' legal fees.
Special Focus
New Thriller Reveals Love-Hate Relations . .
.
etween
he
BI
nd
ollywood
After watching the new hit movie “Donnie Brasco,” a
retired FBI official wrote an angry letter to FBI
Director Louis J. Freeh. “The film is disgraceful,” said
security consultant Sean McWeeney, a 24- year veteran of
the FBI's organized crime and anti-drug divisions.
Many FBI employees were also upset, McWeeney adds, by
the scene in which “Brasco,” the undercover agent,
offers $300,000 to the Mafia hitman he befriended “so he
can get on a boat and sail off into the sunset. That's a
figment of Hollywood's imagination,” McWeeney says, “yet
my [teenage] son saw 'Brasco' and asked me whether the
FBI really did those things.”
There is some irony in complaints from FBI loyalists
about the bureau's treatment by the entertainment media.
That's because the FBI's reputation for crime-fighting
heroics was built with sizable assistance from popular
portrayals (some of them FBI-instigated) in radio, film,
comic books, magazines and television.
Beginning in the early 1930s, before the young FBI
Director J. Edgar Hoover had become a household name,
the bureau's success stories were dramatized on the
popular radio program “The Lucky Strike Hour.”
[2]“”“”“”“”“”“”“” [3]
According to former FBI Assistant Director Ray Wannall,
who appeared in the 1952 espionage movie “Walk East on
Beacon,” Hoover “had been critical of Hollywood for
glorifying gangsters, so our Los Angeles office had
someone go over to the studios to make sure the
filmmakers got it right. Hoover had influence on
Hollywood, and Hollywood in turn had an influence on the
public.”
Historians disagree over whether it was Hoover, Hoover's
boss in the 1930s (Attorney General Homer Cummings), or
a public relations man he hired named Henry Suydam who
did the most to shine a spotlight on Hoover and his
G-Men. What was clear, though, was the explosion of
Hoover appearances on magazine covers and in newsreels
and FBI- orchestrated movies. They were justified, as a
pair of criminologists wrote, because “public opinion is
a strong deterrent, and when you have the public
conscience and public opinion well-organized, there is
bound to be progress.” [4]
Yet even then, the Hollywood image of the FBI was at
variance with the prosaic reality. “Pop culture creates
audience identification with action heroes like the
G-Man by using them as embodiments of the public's most
cherished cultural fantasies: absolute freedom,
irresistible power, total self-reliance,” cultural
critic Richard Gid Powers wrote. “On the contrary, the
special agent in the FBI formula was the antithesis of
the action hero. He was faceless and anonymous, and
repelled the sort of projective fantasies that the G-Man
formula encouraged.” [5]
The FBI's efforts to mold its reputation through
entertainment reached their peak in 1965, when the
bureau created and supervised what became the popular TV
show “The FBI,” starring Efram Zimbalist Jr. (It was
followed in 1981 by a short-lived imitation, “Today's
FBI.”)
But by the early 1970s, the rise of a counterculture and
revelations about FBI abuses of domestic civil liberties
made the popular image of the stout-hearted G-Man passe.
The Hoover long revered as every boy's role model was
caricatured by a black actress in Woody Allen's movie
“Bananas.” The 1980s and '90s would offer the public
idiosyncratic FBI agents in surreal TV shows such as
“Twin Peaks” and “The X-Files.”
FBI officials today are as conscious as ever of the
power of popular media. They cooperated extensively to
show off the bureau's serial-killer profiling operations
for the 1991 hit movie “The Silence of the Lambs.” They
cooperate regularly with producers of reality crime
shows such as the Fox network's “America's Most Wanted”
and NBC's “Unsolved Mysteries.” They also work closely
with the producers of ABC's fictionalized “The FBI: The
Untold Stories.”
But the most common portrayals can be offensive to FBI
veterans such as McWeeney. The ABC drama “NYPD Blue”
showed an FBI agent “so frightened he urinated in his
pants, which is disgraceful,” McWeeney says. “What is
the media's problem with the bureau? Real agents are out
there being killed, and yet Hollywood is portraying
agents as either nerdy stiffs or turf-grabbing
bureaucrats. It drives me insane.”
[1] Pistone was profiled in The Washington Post, Feb.
28, 1997.
[2] Ronald Kessler, The FBI (1993), p. 363.
[3] Diarmuid Jeffreys, The Bureau: Inside the Modern FBI
(1995), p. 60.
[4] Richard Gid Powers, G-Men: Hoover's FBI in Popular
Culture (1983), p. 110.
[5] Ibid., p. 112.
FBI Tours End With a Bang
“Inside the FBI” is a snappy phrase for a reporter's
expose. It is also a ready-made boast for postcards sent
by the tourists who flock to FBI headquarters - a
half-million every year.
The thousands who line up daily to tour the J. Edgar
Hoover FBI Building on Washington's Pennsylvania Avenue
were anticipated when the imposing building - detractors
describe the architectural style as “fascist” - opened
in 1975. Visitors wait in a comfortable lounge before
being guided around the building's two lowest floors on
a tour designed by Disney to avoid disrupting the
facility's 7,300 employees.
Observers have suggested that the tourist-friendly
layout is just another of the FBI's Hoover-era public
relations techniques. But former Assistant Director Ray
Wannall points out that Hoover was already dead when the
building was under construction in the early 1970s and
that there was little room to splurge on tourists. He
recalls how pressed they were for space when the
employees first moved in, and how concerned his
colleagues were that the open access to the first two
floors would permit an intruder to plant a bomb.
Engraved in the courtyard is a quotation from Hoover:
“The most effective weapon against crime is
cooperation.” A gift from the Society of Former Special
Agents of the FBI, the engraving was actually a second
choice. They had originally proposed this Hooverism:
“Law and order are the pillars of democracy on which our
safety and welfare rest,” but then-FBI Director William
H. Webster thought it too militant. [1]
Walls along the FBI tour are covered with portraits of
past directors as well as Attorney General Janet Reno.
There are posters promoting the many movies made with
the FBI's blessing, among them “G- Men” and “Federal
Agent at Large.” Also on display is a blow-up of the FBI
seal, with its motto of “fidelity, bravery, integrity.”
Visitors are told that the FBI employs 10,089 agents, of
whom 1,500 are women. Only 611 agents work at
headquarters, where the majority of employees are civil
servants toiling in administrative services, criminal
justice information services, technical services,
criminal investigations, the laboratory and training.
To enforce the laws against more than 250 categories of
federal crimes, the bureau maintains 56 field offices
and 400 smaller satellite offices, as well as 23 offices
overseas. It has a total work force of 25,750.
The FBI maintains a fingerprint facility near
Clarksburg, W. Va., and its famous training academy 35
miles south of Washington, in Quantico, Va. Along with a
police academy on the same grounds, the FBI participates
in the training of some 14,000 law enforcement personnel
annually.
The headquarters tour emphasizes the FBI's successes. A
series of photos shows the 1994 arrest of CIA spy
Aldrich Ames near his Arlington, Va., home. A display of
the FBI's 10 Most Wanted criminals reports that 446
names have been on the list since it was started in
1950, and that 418 fugitives have been caught. Ten of
those arrests were made following appeals on the TV show
“America's Most Wanted,” two came after their cases were
dramatized on “Unsolved Mysteries” and one arrest, last
year, was made after a fugitive's picture appeared on
the FBI's Internet home page.
The tour includes a stop at the memorial to agents who
have died in the line of duty: 33 from gunfire and 13
others in automobile or training accidents. Signs
discussing the FBI's mission explain that anti-terrorism
efforts were made a priority in 1982, along with illegal
drugs. [2]
Visitors can also get a glimpse of the FBI's 5,000-piece
firearms reference collection, which contains samples of
every known firearm used by criminals in this country as
well as 12,000 specimens of test- fired ammunition.
There also is an exhibit of the bureau's National DNA
Index, which preserves semen samples from each of the
country's released sex offenders, in case one is again
suspected of an offense.
Following an agent's ear-splitting demonstration of
three different firearms at the shooting range -
including a vintage tommy gun - the tour ends with a
visit to the gift store, which offers T- Shirts, hats
and mugs celebrating the FBI.
[1] Ronald Kessler, The FBI (1993), p. 30.
[2] See “War on Drugs,” The CQ Researcher, March 19,
1993, pp. 241-264.
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