FBI

Federal Bureau of Investigations, an American institution and law enforcement legend. The truth has emerged over the last few decades however, including FBI participation in murder such as the killings of JFK, Vince Foster, MLK, RFK and many other disgusting acts not least of which the destruction of the crime scenes in the 911 attacks. The FBI also has a legendary crime lab, now brought into disrepute having been repeatedly found to be manufacturing evidence or lying under oath in numerous Court cases, including cases of DNA identification.

History

For somewhat more than half of its history, the United States got along without a general purpose investigative agency . In 1908, over the objections of some members of Congress, Attorney General Charles Bonaparte, the grandson of the French emperor's brother, issued an executive order creating such an investigative force within the Justice Department.

The agency almost immediately became the subject of intense controversy. With the entry of the United States into World War One, the Bureau of Investigation became engaged in an embarrassing roundup of thousands of young men, only a handful of whom turned out to be genuine draft dodgers. Shortly after the war, the Bureau was the lead agency of an operation that became known as the Palmer Raids — the dragnet arrests of tens of thousands of alien radicals in 33 cities. Partly because most of the victims were arrested without a warrant, the majority were eventually released either before or after their prosecution. One of the supervisors of Palmer Raids was a young Justice Department lawyer named J. Edgar Hoover.

In 1924, following a round of additional scandals and the forced resignation of Attorney General Harry Daughterty, Hoover was selected to clean up the disgraced agency. In 1935, it was renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Hoover would remain the director of the FBI until his death in 1972. During the 1930s, with the help of an aggressive public relations program, the FBI won wide support from the American people for its capture of a handful of highly publicized gangsters. With the coming of World War Two and the Cold War against the Soviet Union, the FBI's reputation as the nation's premier enforcement agency continued to grow.

But with the 1971 theft of internal documents from an FBI office in Media, Pa., and the post-Watergate Congressional investigations in the mid-1970s, the FBI's national reputation plummeted. The documents and the investigations showed that under Hoover's direction the FBI had invested a growing part of its budget and staff for political, rather than enforcement, purposes. The FBI's Counter Intelligence Program — COINTEL — began as an effort to undermine the Communist Party. The Ku Klux Klan, black political activists such as Martin Luther King, student protesters against the Vietnam War and even some early leaders in the women's liberation movement ultimately were added as COINTEL projects.

Following this blackest time in FBI history, well-meaning FBI directors like Clarence Kelley and Judge William Webster worked hard to re-establish the bureau as the nation's leading investigative until In 1993, President Clinton appointed a former FBI agent, federal prosecutor as bureau director. During his term, the efforts of Kelley and Webster were marred by the development of a series of new problems, among them at Waco and Ruby Ridge. Another more systematic problem was serious short comings uncovered in the FBI's National Laboratory. Then came information raising numerous questions about the performance of the FBI in investigating individuals involved in the 9/11 attacks and the espionage conviction of a senior FBI intelligence agent named Robert Hansen.

On September 4, 2001 President Bush name Robert S. Mueller III as the bureau director. Since his appointment, Mueller — a highly respected former U.S. Attorney — has been faced with leading the bureau in the post 9/11 world. Central to this effort has been Mueller's effot to gradually shift the bureau from an agency mostly focused on the criminal prosecution of traditional crimes to an one where a sophisticated kind of counter intelligence is a much larger part of its work.

(From the FBI's own self-serving website) The Top Ten Myths in FBI History

For the past century, the FBI has been a vital player in American history, front and center in some of our country’s most high-profile national security and criminal issues. Not surprisingly, some myths and misunderstandings about the Bureau have evolved over that time, in part because of the complex and sometimes sensitive nature of our work. We’ve picked out what we think are the top ten myths down through the years, leaving aside ones that are so fanciful that they don’t deserve mention here…

In descending order, here they are:

Myth #10) The FBI has Nikola Tesla’s plans for a “death ray"!

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Nikola Tesla
Nikola Tesla
If you don’t know the name, Nikola Tesla was a prolific inventor and gifted physicist and engineer—most known for developing the basis for AC power—who was born in Croatia in 1856 and settled in the U.S. in 1884. When Tesla died in New York in January 1943, his papers—which were thought to include plans for a particle beam weapon, dubbed a “death ray” by the press—were temporarily seized by the Department of Justice Alien Property Custodian Office (“alien” in this case means “foreigner,” although Tesla was a U.S. citizen). Despite longstanding reports and rumors, the FBI was not involved in searching Tesla’s effects, and it never had possession of his papers or any microfilm that may have been made of those papers. Since 1943, we have told a consistent story to all who have asked. Reports to the contrary appear to be based on an initial confusion of FBI agents with other government officials—especially Alien Property Office personnel. These rumors have long been repeated in biographies and articles on Tesla without double-checking the facts as reported in our files.

Myth #9) The FBI has “X-Files.”

Well, first off, the FBI is NOT on point to investigate the supernatural as Scully and Mulder did on the X-Files TV show. Yes, we do have files on some unusual phenomena—like cattle mutilation, UFOs, and Roswell—but generally only because people reported something and we made a note of it. Some of the files do involve cases involving a potential violation of federal law under our jurisdiction that we did investigate. One example is Operation Majestic 12, the supposedly secret group of government officials tasked by President Truman to study the Roswell incident. When what appeared to be a top secret document about the formation of the Majestic 12 surfaced in the 1980s, we were asked to investigate a possible breach of classified information. The Bureau concluded that the document was a fake. So, bottom line: while FBI agents chasing aliens and other supernatural creatures may make good entertainment, it’s not part of our job description, and we don’t have a secret collection of “X-Files” squirreled away somewhere.

Myth #8) Elliot Ness was an FBI agent.

No, actually he never was. But he did work briefly under Director J. Edgar Hoover and applied at one point to be a Bureau agent. It’s a fairly complicated story, and you can read all about it and check out our public files on Ness on this website.
Machine Gun Kelly's mug
"Machine Gun" Kelly

Myth #7) Machine Gun Kelly gave FBI agents their “G-Men” nickname.

It’s somewhat of a legend now that FBI agents were named “G-Men” when a scared and tired gangster named George “Machine Gun” Kelly stumbled out of his hiding place, arms held high, surrounded by lawmen, yelling “Don’t shoot, G-Men, don’t shoot.” But in reality, Kelly may have never uttered these words. A bit of editorial license on the part of the press likely crept in…and the catchphrase ended up capturing the public’s imagination. Read a story on the nickname and hear FBI Historian Dr. John Fox’s take on it.

Myth #6) The FBI prosecutes cases.

We are investigators, not prosecutors. Our job is to gather the facts and evidence and present the results to the local U.S. Attorney in the Department of Justice, who decides whether or not to bring the case to trial. Because we developed the facts, we may be asked to present or discuss our findings in court.
James Amos
James Amos

Myth #5) There were no minority agents during the Hoover years.

The FBI was hardly way ahead of its time in providing equal career opportunities to all Americans, but it is not true that the FBI was unwilling to hire minorities during Hoover’s tenure…or (as one variation of the myth goes) was reluctant to hire minority agents until ordered to do so by President Kennedy in the early 1960s. The fact is, many minority special agents worked in the FBI from the early 1920s forward. An African-American agent named James Amos, for example, investigated major cases in New York from 1921 to 1953, while the Striders—an African-American father/son agent team in Los Angeles—served with distinction from the 1940s through the early 1970s. Hispanic Agent Manuel Sorola served in a number of our western offices from the 1920s through the 1940s, and Filipino-born Agent Flaviano Guerrerro served ably in the 1940s. All told, there were dozens of minority special agents on our rolls before Hoover died in 1972.

Myth #4) The Bureau routinely spies on the American people.

Absolutely not. We are governed by and carefully follow a well-defined set of laws, regulations, and guidelines—honed over a century of practical experience—that spell out how we can and should conduct our investigations. It’s always been a delicate balance between harnessing the tools at our disposal to solve crimes and prevent attacks and upholding the civil liberties of all Americans. Over the course of a century, we’ve made some mistakes, but they’ve been few and far between compared to the vast amount of work we do every day. While some have long predicted that the FBI would turn into a big-brother-like secret police force, that scenario simply hasn’t happened. After all, we live and work in our communities and cherish our country’s rights and freedoms like everyone else!

Myth #3) The FBI doesn’t cooperate with other agencies.

You’d think from the news media and the entertainment industry that we do everything from routinely stiffing our partners…to hogging all the credit in big cases…to simply not getting along with our colleagues. If you worked for the Bureau—and saw the close relationships and even friendships that exist between us and our partners across the country and around the globe—you’d realize that nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, there is an occasional conflict or issue (we are all humans, after all), but relationships have been exceptional over the years and improved even more since 9/11. Read some recent stories about our partnerships.

Myth #2) The FBI has files on every American.
FBI crime files

Some people think that the FBI has a vast range of files on all the bad things they’ve ever done. Not true! We keep investigative files on serious violations of federal law and major threats to our national security. We won’t have a “file” on you unless you’re a spy or terrorist or criminal or are suspected of being one (and we use the word “file” loosely, as we generally organize materials by cases, not individuals). Some people do appear in our files if they’ve provided us with information or were a victim in a case…or because an authorized third party requested information about them—but this kind of information is held under strict laws and for a legally specified period of time. For more details, see our Freedom of Information Act file fact sheet.

Myth #1) The FBI can’t or shouldn’t do intelligence.

It’s an old saw that has been oft-repeated since 9/11. But a century of history says differently. From our earliest moments we’ve used intelligence (under the laws and guidelines of the day) to get our arms around major threats and disable them—from gangsters to mobsters, from yesterday’s Soviet spies to today’s terrorists. The fact is, the FBI has always been both an intelligence agency and a law enforcement/national security organization…and like our police and intelligence community counterparts, gathering and sharing and acting on intelligence is part of what we do on a daily basis. We’ve certainly gotten better at it since 9/11, and you can bet that we’ll keep improving in the days ahead. Read our new centennial history book and our recent stories for some telling examples.

Fumbling, bumbling FBI

The anthrax case may be the latest in a string of botched investigations by the bureau

By Gabriel Schoenfeld
August 7, 2008

The FBI's investigation of the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks was the most complex and important in the bureau's history. Immense resources were invested in the search for the perpetrator, whose actions killed five people, sickened 17 others, sowed panic in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and caused taxpayers to spend extraordinary sums on a crash program to protect the nation against the danger of biological terrorism.

Yet for all that, the "Amerithrax" investigation, as the FBI dubbed the case, dragged on for seven years and, until quite recently, got nowhere. If Bruce E. Ivins, the Fort Detrick microbiologist who died in an apparent suicide last week, was indeed the perpetrator, the prime suspect was directly under the FBI's nose for years, practically sporting a scarlet A on his forehead. If he was not the perpetrator, as many of his fellow scientists at Fort Detrick have insisted, we're back at square one.

The investigation is sure to be scrutinized in depth by Congress, but its difficulties cannot be understood without a sense of the institutional context in which it began. The anthrax attacks came before the bureau at a moment when it was still quivering from a string of breathtaking debacles.

First, in September 2000, came the culmination of the Wen Ho Lee espionage case. All the charges against the Taiwan-born scientist, who had been accused of stealing the crown jewels of American nuclear secrets and passing them to China, were dropped that month, except one minor charge. An official Justice Department postmortem of the FBI's investigation called it "deeply and fundamentally flawed" in "virtually every material respect." It "suffered from neglect, faulty judgment, bad personnel choices, inept investigation and the inadequate supervision of that inept investigation," among other things.

That grave embarrassment was followed by the stunning revelation, in February 2001, that Robert P. Hanssen, the FBI agent in charge of Soviet/Russian counterintelligence, was a Russian mole. As far back as 1990, Mr. Hanssen's brother-in-law, himself an FBI agent, had informed his superiors that Mr. Hanssen had a lot of unexplained extra cash on hand and of his belief that his in-law was spying for Moscow. At that juncture, the FBI could easily have apprehended Mr. Hanssen with some basic sleuthing. Instead, it did nothing except continue to promote him.

The internal shock over the Hanssen case had not worn off by 9/11. And only weeks later came news of the botched investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui, the al-Qaida operative detained by the FBI in August 2001 while trying to learn how to fly a Boeing 747. After Mr. Moussaoui's detention, FBI field agents tried frantically to obtain a warrant to look at the contents of his laptop. But supervisors in Washington found groundless reason after reason to balk, until the crashing of planes into New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon interrupted their reveries.

The Amerithrax investigation, vitally important for reasons obvious to all, was thus, from the FBI's point of view, an opportunity to rehabilitate the bureau's standing. With a great deal of publicity, it threw itself into the fray. Hundreds of thousands of hours were devoted to the investigation. More than 9,100 people were interviewed, 6,000 subpoenas were issued and 67 searches were undertaken by "dedicated investigators who … worked tirelessly on this case, day-in and day-out … to go the extra mile," according to the FBI.

But all to no avail. Drawing in part on a psychological-behavioral profile of the likely perpetrator, the FBI focused initially on Steven J. Hatfill, a biowarfare expert also at Fort Detrick, named as a "person of interest" by former Attorney General John Ashcroft back in 2002. But after hounding Mr. Hatfill for years, this probe proved to be a dead end. In June, Mr. Hatfill was effectively exonerated when he collected $5.8 million from the government to settle a lawsuit.

Only over the last year and a half did the bureau begin to focus on Mr. Ivins. Why it took the agency years to look in his direction is a central mystery. In late 2001, Mr. Ivins had been involved in an "accident" involving a spill of anthrax spores in his lab. He neither reported the breach nor reported his unauthorized cleanup. According to the recent court testimony of his psychotherapist, Mr. Ivins had a decades-long history of making homicidal "threats, actions, plans."

The Justice Department yesterday released documents related to the case, including evidence that Mr. Ivins sent e-mails with wording sometimes identical to the language used in anthrax-laced letters, and noting that he was the sole custodian of the strain of anthrax used in the attacks.

With every Fort Detrick researcher on the list of suspects merely by virtue of his or her ready access to anthrax, it is baffling that the FBI missed any or all of this. But whether Mr. Ivins is conclusively shown to be the perpetrator or whether he was an innocent man hounded by intrusive surveillance and public humiliation into suicide, questions about the FBI's performance will remain.

Gabriel Schoenfeld is the senior editor of Commentary magazine. This article originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.

Questions

ARE the FBI incompetent? It doesn't seem so. What it really looks like is that they are and have always been the American equivalent of the Gestapo, briefed and carrying out disgusting secret police activities of oppression, murder, concealment of crime, and propaganda.