The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
By 1908, the time was right for a new kind of agency to protect America. The United States was, well, united, with its borders stretching from coast to coast and only two landlocked states left to officially join the union. Inventions like the telephone, the telegraph, and the railroad had seemed to shrink its vast distances even as the country had spread west. After years of industrializing, America was wealthier than ever, too, and a new world power on the block, thanks to its naval victory over Spain. But there were dark clouds on the horizon.
The country’s cities had grown enormously by 1908—there were more than 100 with populations over 50,000—and understandably, crime had grown right along with them. In these big cities, with their many overcrowded tenements filled with the poor and disillusioned and with all the ethnic tensions of an increasingly immigrant nation stirred in for good measure, tempers often flared. Clashes between striking workers and their factory bosses were turning increasingly violent.
And though no one knew it at the time, America’s cities and towns were also fast becoming breeding grounds for a future generation of professional lawbreakers. In Brooklyn, a nine-year-old Al Capone would soon start his life of crime. In Indianapolis, a five-year-old John Dillinger was growing up on his family farm. And in Chicago, a young child christened Lester Joseph Gillis—later to morph into the vicious killer “Baby Face” Nelson—would greet the world by year’s end.
But violence was just the tip of the criminal iceberg. Corruption was rampant nationwide—especially in local politics, with crooked political machines like Tammany Hall in full flower. Big business had its share of sleaze, too, from the shoddy, even criminal, conditions in meat packaging plants and factories (as muckrakers like Upton Sinclair had so artfully exposed) to the illegal monopolies threatening to control entire industries.
The technological revolution was contributing to crime as well. 1908 was the year that Henry Ford’s Model T first began rolling off assembly lines in Motor City, making automobiles affordable to the masses and attractive commodities for thugs and hoodlums, who would soon begin buying or stealing them to elude authorities and move about the country on violent crime sprees. Twenty-two years later, on a dusty Texas back road, Bonnie and Clyde—“Romeo and Juliet in a Getaway Car,” as one journalist put it—would meet their end in a bullet-ridden Ford.
Just around the corner, too, was the world’s first major global war—compelling America to protect its homeland from both domestic subversion and international espionage and sabotage. America’s approach to national security, once the province of cannons and warships, would never be the same again.
Despite it all, in the year 1908 there was hardly any systematic way of enforcing the law across this now broad landscape of America. Local communities and even some states had their own police forces, but at that time they were typically poorly trained, politically appointed, and underpaid. And nationally, there were few federal criminal laws and likewise only a few thinly staffed federal agencies like the Secret Service in place to tackle national crime and security issues. (Link: https://www.fbi.gov/history/brief-history/the-nation-calls)
The “war to end all wars” was over, but a new one was just beginning—on the streets of America. It wasn’t much of a fight, really—at least at the start. On the one side was a rising tide of professional criminals, made richer and bolder by Prohibition, which had turned the nation “dry” in 1920. In one big city alone— Chicago—an estimated 1,300 gangs had spread like a deadly virus by the mid-1920s. There was no easy cure. With wallets bursting from bootlegging profits, gangs outfitted themselves with “Tommy” guns and operated with impunity by paying off politicians and police alike. Rival gangs led by the powerful Al “Scarface” Capone and the hot-headed George “Bugs” Moran turned the city streets into a virtual war zone with their gangland clashes. By 1926, more than 12,000 murders were taking place every year across America.
On the other side was law enforcement, which was outgunned (literally) and ill-prepared at this point in history to take on the surging national crime wave. Dealing with the bootlegging and speakeasies was challenging enough, but the “Roaring Twenties” also saw bank robbery, kidnapping, auto theft, gambling, and drug trafficking become increasingly common crimes. More often than not, local police forces were hobbled by the lack of modern tools and training. And their jurisdictions stopped abruptly at their borders.
In the young Bureau of Investigation, things were not much better. In the early twenties, the agency was no model of efficiency. It had a growing reputation for politicized investigations. In 1923, in the midst of the Teapot Dome scandal that rocked the Harding Administration, the nation learned that Department of Justice officials had sent Bureau agents to spy on members of Congress who had opposed its policies. Not long after the news of these secret activities broke, President Calvin Coolidge fired Harding’s Attorney General Harry Daugherty, naming Harlan Fiske Stone as his successor in 1924.
A good housecleaning was in order for the Bureau, and it came at the hands of a young lawyer by the name of J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover had joined the Department of Justice in 1917 and had quickly risen through its ranks. In 1921, he was named Assistant Director of the Bureau. Three years later, Stone named him Director. Hoover would go on to serve for nearly another half century.
At the outset, the 29-year-old Hoover was determined to reform the Bureau, quickly and thoroughly, to make it a model of professionalism. He did so by weeding out the “political hacks” and incompetents, laying down a strict code of conduct for agents, and instituting regular inspections of Headquarters and field operations. He insisted on rigorous hiring criteria, including background checks, interviews, and physical tests for all special agent applicants, and in January 1928, he launched the first formal training for incoming agents, a two-month course of instruction and practical exercises in Washington, D.C. Under Hoover’s direction, new agents were also required to be 25 to 35 years old, preferably with experience in law or accounting.
When Hoover took over in 1924, the Bureau had about 650 employees, including 441 special agents. In five years, with the rash of firings it had just 339 special agents and less than 600 total employees. But it was beginning to become the organized, professional, and effective force that Hoover envisioned.
One important step in that direction came during Hoover’s first year at the helm, when the Bureau was given the responsibility of consolidating the nation’s two major collections of fingerprint files. In the summer of 1924, Hoover quickly created an Identification Division (informally called “Ident” in the organization for many years to come) to gather prints from police agencies nationwide and to search them upon request for matches to criminals and crime evidence.
It was a vital new tool for all of law enforcement—the first major building block in Hoover’s growing quest to bring the discipline of science to Bureau investigations and scientific services to law enforcement nationwide. Combined with its identification orders, or IOs—early wanted posters that included fingerprints and all manner of details about criminal suspects on the run—the Bureau was fast becoming a national hub for crime records. In the late 1920s, the Bureau began exchanging fingerprints with Canada and added more friendly foreign governments in 1932; the following year, it created a corresponding civil fingerprint file for non-criminal cases. By 1936, the agency had a total reservoir of 100,000 fingerprint cards; by 1946, that number had swelled to 100 million.
From the 1920s on, Director Hoover had been actively interested in scientific analysis, and by 1930 he had authorized the use of outside experts on a case-by-case basis in identification and evidence examination matters. Then, over a two-year period, the first true “technical” laboratory functions began to take shape. When all these functions moved into Room 802 of the Old Southern Railway Building in Washington, D.C., it seemed appropriate to recognize that a true lab had been born.
It was Special Agent Charles Appel (pictured) who was its midwife. He had served as an aviator in World War I before joining the Bureau in 1924—and right from the start he focused on meticulous investigations based on scientific detection.
Appel was an extraordinary man with extraordinary vision, fully backed by Director Hoover with the necessary resources. He took courses to further his knowledge of state-of-the-art techniques, and by 1931, he began seeking expert opinion on starting a crime lab. In July 1932, when he proposed “a separate division for the handling of so-called crime prevention work” under which “the criminological research laboratory could be placed,” he got an immediate endorsement. By September, Room 802 in the Old Southern Railway building was fully equipped. By November 24, it was in business.
The new lab was pretty sophisticated by 1932 standards. It included a brand new ultra-violet light machine; a microscope, on loan from Bausch and Lomb until the requisition for its purchase could be finalized; moulage kits (for taking impressions); photographic supplies; and chemical sets. A machine to examine the interior of gun barrels was on order.
For about a year, Appel was the Bureau’s one-man lab. His handwriting and typewriter font analysis solved a poisoning case in 1933. His analysis of handwriting on the Lindbergh kidnapping ransom notes ultimately helped convict Bruno Richard Hauptmann.
Agents across the Bureau soon started receiving training on what this new lab could do for them and their cases, and they spread the word about the value of scientific work to their law enforcement partners. By January 1940, the lab had a total of 46 employees. As America headed into a second world war, its growing skills and capabilities would be needed more than ever.
(Link: https://www.fbi.gov/history/brief-history/the-fbi-and-the-american-gangster)
Heading into the late 1930s, fresh off a victory over the gun-slinging gangsters, the FBI hardly had time to catch its collective breath. The Bureau had reformed itself on the fly; it was stronger and more capable than ever. But now, with the world rushing headlong into war and the pendulum swinging back towards national security concerns, the FBI would need to refocus and retool its operations once again.
At the start of the decade, the public enemies were almost entirely homegrown—from “Scarface” to “Baby Face.” The next wave of villains would come primarily from afar, and they were in many respects bigger and badder still. They were hyper-aggressive fascist dictators, fanatical militarists, and revolution-exporting communists—along with their legions of spies, saboteurs, and subversive agents—who sought to invade, infiltrate, or even conquer entire swaths of territory, if not the world. They threatened not only the fate of peoples and nations, but the survival of democracy itself.
Across the Atlantic in Europe, 1939 was a dark turning point. Five years earlier, less than a month after a cornered Dillinger had reached for his gun the last time, a power-hungry Adolph Hitler had declared himself “Führer” and taken total control of Germany. Hitler wasted little time rearming the country. He meant to build an empire—the Third Reich—and within a few years he’d annexed Austria and the Sudetenland, a German-speaking region in Czechoslovakia. England and France, hoping to cut their losses through appeasement, acceded to the takeovers. But in 1939, Hitler seized the rest of the Czechoslovakia and invaded Poland. England and France had seen enough and declared war.
In the Far East, Japan was making military waves as well. It invaded China in 1937, seized its northern capital, began taking control of coastal areas and nearby islands dotting the Pacific, and even deliberately sank an American gunboat. It formally joined with Germany and Mussolini’s Italy to form the Axis powers in September 1940.
Cushioned by twin oceans, an isolationist America was staying out of the fray—for the time being. But, remembering how helpless it was against German sabotage in the years leading up to World War I, the nation wasn’t taking any chances at home. The lingering Great Depression provided fertile ground for fascism. Groups like the German American Bund and the Silver Shirts that embraced the Nazi vision were becoming more and more vocal. And Americans were increasingly becoming enamored of communism and its seductive promise of a classless state; the Communist Party of the United States and other like-minded organizations soon boasted more than a million members.
President Roosevelt was concerned—he suspected these groups were allying themselves to foreign political movements seeking to overturn democracy and were crossing the line into criminal activity. In 1934, he had first asked the FBI to determine if American Nazi groups were working with foreign agents. In 1936, the President and Secretary of State tasked the Bureau with gathering intelligence on the potential threats to national security posed by fascist and communist groups.
Meanwhile, Nazi espionage on U.S. soil had become a real threat. The intelligence arms of the Army and Navy had noticed increased activity by German and Japanese spies in the late 1930s and began working with the Bureau to disrupt it. Learning the counterintelligence ropes as it went along, the FBI was ultimately given the lead in these cases and uncovered some 50 spies operating in America before the nation entered the war, including a massive ring led by long-time German agent Fritz Duquesne.
As the new decade opened, the nation was drifting towards war and increasingly supporting the Allied cause. It clearly needed more and better intelligence to understand the threats posed by the Axis powers. The Bureau had been put in charge of domestic intelligence and had already built an extensive network of sources, with law enforcement around the country serving as an important set of eyes and ears. It had also begun developing connections abroad with Canadian and British intelligence and law enforcement.
But who would handle overseas intelligence? There was no CIA in 1940—and its predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services, would not be launched until June 1942. Roosevelt decided to assign intelligence responsibilities for different parts of the globe to various agencies. The Bureau landed the area closest to home—the Western Hemisphere.
(Link: https://www.fbi.gov/history/brief-history/world-war-cold-war)
When nine black-robed Supreme Court judges sat down behind their mahogany bench on spring day in 1954 and declared that a separate system of schools for blacks and whites was not really equal after all, turning Jim Crow on its ear, the winds of change began to blow across America.
They’d blow harder still when a 42-year-old black woman named Rosa Parks, after a long day at work, refused to give up her bus seat to a white man on the first day of December in 1955, and when a young, then unknown Baptist preacher named Martin Luther King, Jr., took up her cause and led a successful bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama.
“We shall overcome,” blacks and whites alike soon began singing, and what they hoped to overcome was the deep-seated prejudice and injustice that existed towards African-Americans in this country for far too long. Thomas Jefferson had penned the classic phrase, “All men are created equal,” nearly two centuries earlier, calling it a self-evident truth. But the question was, did we as a nation really mean it? Could we deliver justice for all? The civil rights movement aimed to find out.
Wrapped up in this struggle in the ensuing years would be the FBI. It had cut its investigative teeth on civil rights crimes; a dozen of the first 34 special agents were experts in “peonage”—the modern-day equivalent of slave labor. The Bureau had begun battling the KKK prior to the 1920s, and for years it had handled so-called “color of law” cases involving brutality or other civil rights crimes by state and local authorities.
In 1947, for instance, after a local sheriff and his deputy stood by and watched a mob dressed in Klan robes burn crosses and beat a handful of blacks in Georgia, the FBI’s investigation led to the conviction of both officers. The federal grand jury singled out the work of the special agents in the case, resolving that “…by their great fidelity and singleness of purpose in developing the information in the Dade County, Georgia, conspiracy trial [they] have gone far beyond the line of duty to aid, assist and protect the citizens of the United States and to further the cause of equity and justice in America.”
Still, the FBI had its jurisdictional limits. Lynching in those days was not a federal crime, nor were bias-based attacks and most murders (to this day, hate crime is not a specific federal offense). States guarded their rights jealously, and local authorities often loudly complained if the FBI interfered in race-related crimes in their communities. Even when the Bureau did have jurisdiction in civil rights-related cases, that didn’t guarantee the cooperation of witnesses. And in the Deep South especially, white-dominated juries all too often disregarded the facts and evidence Bureau agents and others put together, letting the guilty go scot-free in remarkable miscarriages of justice.
A good example of the FBI’s limitations—and the prevailing state of justice below the Mason-Dixon line—came in August 1955, when a visiting black teenager from Chicago named Emmett Till reportedly whistled at a white woman in a Mississippi country store. Till was kidnapped, beaten beyond recognition, shot in the head, and thrown into the Tallahatchie River with a large fan tied to his neck. The woman’s husband and his half-brother were accused of murder, but an all-white jury acquitted them both. The FBI was prevented from investigating by the Department of Justice, which ruled that no federal laws had been broken despite the horrific nature of the crime. In 2004, when times (and laws) were different, Bureau and Mississippi officials reopened the case, but with the main culprits long since dead and credible evidence against others hard to come by, no charges were filed.
As the 1950s turned into the early 1960s, the backlash against blacks by the Klan and like-minded racists became increasingly violent as the civil rights movement gained momentum. In 1961, angry white mobs repeatedly attacked busloads of “freedom riders” who traveled to the South to help integrate public facilities.
The next year, violence and riots erupted when James Meredith became the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi. In May 1963, Birmingham police commissioner “Bull” Connor—a known KKK member—unleashed police dogs and fire hoses on peaceful protestors. The following month, a leading black civil rights activist named Medgar Evers was shot dead in the driveway of his Mississippi home. Three months later, four young black girls were killed when a powerful bomb exploded in the basement of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. The FBI investigated the Evers murder and the Birmingham bombing, but it had no jurisdiction in the case of Connor’s actions.
A turning point came in 1964 at the start of “Freedom Summer,” a massive campaign to register blacks to vote in Mississippi. Three young civil rights activists—two white, one black—were brutally murdered by the KKK there, with the full cooperation of local law enforcement. The FBI quickly identified the culprits in a case that came to be called “Mississippi Burning,” arresting 21 men in Mississippi by early December. Martin Luther King responded to the news by saying, “I must commend the Federal Bureau of Investigation for the work they have done in uncovering the perpetrators of this dastardly act. It renews again my faith in democracy.”
He spoke a little too soon, as justice in the courtroom was a different matter. Most of the men went free or were convicted of lesser charges; it took until 2005 before Edgar Ray Killen, one of the chief conspirators, was convicted of manslaughter. Still, the outrage at the killings helped spur passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 less a month later and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 the following summer.
The 1964 law in particular—which banned segregation on a wide scale, including in schools, public places, government, and the workplace—made a number of civil rights violations federal crimes for the first time and gave the Bureau the federal lead in combating them. Today, protecting civil rights is one of the Bureau’s top priorities, and, using its full suite of investigative and intelligence capabilities, it works closely with state and local authorities (in ways not possible decades ago) to prevent and address hate crime, human trafficking, police brutality, and other crimes that take away the freedoms of the American people.
A night guard at the Watergate Complex was making his rounds early one Saturday morning when he came across an exit door that had been taped open. He was immediately suspicious. It was June 17, 1972, and he’d just uncovered what would become the most famous burglary in U.S. history. Five men were arrested by police a few minutes later for breaking into the Democratic National Committee Headquarters inside the Watergate. Police also found fake IDs, bugging equipment, and lookouts in the motel across the street.
Things snowballed from there. President Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign had not only been caught committing an illegal political dirty trick, but the administration reacted by lying and covering up the crime and others. Two years later, President Nixon resigned rather than face certain impeachment.
From the moment that police realized the Watergate break-in was no ordinary burglary, the FBI was on the case. But the timing couldn’t have been worse. It had been less than five weeks since J. Edgar Hoover—the only Director FBI employees had known—had died in his sleep. For years, criticism of the Bureau and Hoover had been building. There was dissatisfaction with Hoover’s age, increasing political disagreement over the Bureau’s tactics and techniques, and widespread unease over the chaos and violence of the late 1960s.
Now, the FBI was about to become involved in the most politically sensitive investigation in its history. During the Watergate scandal, the FBI faced political pressure from the White House and even from within its own walls—Acting Director L. Patrick Gray was accused of being too pliable to White House demands and resigned on April 27, 1973. And throughout, a high-ranking official—dubbed “Deep Throat” and ultimately identified in 2005 as FBI Deputy Director Mark Felt—was leaking investigative information to the press.
Still, FBI agents diligently investigated the crime and traced its hidden roots, working closely with the special prosecutor’s office created by the Attorney General and with the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities. Nearly every Bureau field office was involved in the case. Agents prepared countless reports and conducted some 2,600 interviews requested by the special prosecutor. The FBI Laboratory and Identification Division also lent their services. In the end, the Bureau’s contributions to unraveling the Watergate saga were invaluable.
In the midst of Watergate, the Bureau had gained new leadership. Clarence Kelley, a former FBI agent and Kansas City, Missouri, Chief of Police, took office on July 9, 1973. Kelley had the tough task of moving the FBI into the post-Hoover era. He did an admirable job of restoring public trust in the agency, frankly admitting that mistakes had been made and leading a number of far-reaching and necessary reforms. During the 1970s, more women began joining the ranks of the FBI, including (for the first time since the 1920s) as special agents.
In response to criticism of the Bureau’s Cointelpro operation, for example, he reorganized FBI intelligence efforts. In February 1973, the General Investigations Division took over responsibility for investigating domestic terrorists and subversives, working under more strict guidelines and limiting its efforts to actual criminal violations. The Intelligence Division retained foreign counterintelligence responsibilities but was renamed the National Security Division
Kelley’s most significant management innovation was shifting the FBI’s longstanding investigative focus from “quantity” to “quality,” directing each field office to set priorities based on the most important threats in its territory and to concentrate their resources on those issues.
And what were those threats? During the 1970s, domestic terrorism and foreign intrigue remained key concerns, as the radical unrest of the 1960s had spilled into the next decade and the Cold War was still raging. The FBI had its hands full with homegrown terrorist groups like the Symbionese Liberation Army—which wanted to lead a violent revolution against the U.S. government and kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst to help its cause—and the Weather Underground, which conducted a campaign of bombings that targeted everything from police stations to the Pentagon. And spy cases still abounded—from the “Falcon and the Snowman” investigation that uncovered two former altar boys from wealthy families selling secrets to the Soviets…to “Operation Lemon-Aid,” where the FBI used a double agent to unmask Soviet diplomats working as KGB spies.
All was calm aboard Pan Am Flight 103 as it cruised high above Scotland. At least for the moment. It was a touch past 7 o’clock in the evening on December 21, 1988—four days before Christmas Day. The massive Boeing 747 had left Heathrow Airport in London about 35 minutes earlier on its journey to New York City. On board were 259 passengers and crew, including 180 Americans who were headed home for the holidays.
Also on board, in the cargo hold near the front of the aircraft, was a suitcase full of plastic explosives. Suddenly, the bomb exploded with tremendous force. In a few horrifying seconds, the plane was ripped apart by the tornado-strength shock waves resulting from the blast and began plunging to earth. Not a single soul survived the attack.
Meanwhile, the southern coast of Scotland was about to become a massive crime scene. Metal hunks and fragments from the plane started raining down on the tiny town of Lockerbie and the surrounding countryside. The wing section and fuel tanks hit hardest; their high-speed impact—estimated at 500 miles an hour—wiped out a string of homes in Lockerbie, carving out a crater more than 150 feet long and creating a massive fireball that instantly incinerated 11 men, women, and children. Within minutes of the mid-air explosion, debris and human remains were scattered across some 845 square miles of Scotland.
The downing of Flight 103 was an attack of major proportions: aside from the 1983 truck bombing that killed 241 Marines in their barracks in Beirut, it took more American lives than any other terrorist strike up to that point in history. The death toll from the incident remains the third highest from terrorism in the nation’s history.
It was also a sign of things to come—a shocking prelude to a new age of international crime and terror. The investigation that followed was itself a harbinger—both massively complex and multinational in scope. The case was led by Scottish constables, British authorities, and the FBI, but it also involved police organizations in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland and intelligence agencies from many of these countries. Investigators turned up tiny bomb fragments that eventually pointed to a pair of Libyan intelligence operatives, who were indicted in the U.S. and Scotland and tried in the Netherlands. The chief U.S. prosecutor was none other than Robert Mueller, the future FBI director.
The FBI had been investigating international crime and working with global partners for years—including with the Canadians beginning in the late 1920s and the British starting in the late 1930s. The Bureau had set up its first international offices, or legal attachés, in the 1940s in Mexico City, London, Ottawa, Bogotá, Paris, and Panama City, followed by Rome and Tokyo in the 1950s. But the coming international crime wave would be of an entirely different magnitude.
It would be driven by two major forces. First, around the same time that Pan Am Flight 103 was exploding into a million pieces, a shadowy terrorist organization was secretly starting to come together in the Middle East. With their surprising victory over Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the late 1980s, tens of thousands of foreign mujahadeen who’d joined the struggle were brimming with confidence, wanting to advance their Islamic cause in other parts of the world. One group that congealed during this time was called “al Qaeda, or “the Base.” Its leader—Usama bin Laden—was the son of a wealthy Saudi businessman and a successful merchant in his own right. After centering operations in Sudan in 1992, bin Laden began formulating plans to attack the West with an evolving, deadly new brand of jihad. The following year, Ramzi Yousef—a young extremist who’d trained in one of bin Laden’s camps—would lead the first major Middle Eastern terrorist attack on American soil by planting a truck bomb beneath the World Trade Center.
It was just the beginning. Bin Laden and his supporters would later move to Afghanistan, where an alliance with the Taliban government gave them a secluded safe haven for training recruits and planning attacks, more of which were just around the corner.
Second, the international landscape had begun changing in ways that didn’t seem possible just a few years earlier, and the resulting shifts would have a profound impact on the state of security worldwide.
One major development came in November 1989 when the Berlin Wall crumbled, electrifying the world and helping to speed the lifting of the Iron Curtain. By 1992, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—the U.S.S.R.—was officially history. With the end of the Cold War came a growing outbreak of freedom, not just in Central and Eastern Europe but across the globe. As the rigidity, repression, and control that characterized communism began giving way to the civil liberties and free markets of democracy, the world started opening up. It soon became possible to travel to more places, to trade with more countries, and to communicate more freely with more people. At the same time, technology was taking off, wit