Federal Bureau of Investigation

• 1. The Bureau's First Breath

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  On the 26th of July 1908, Attorney General Charles Bonaparte hired thirty-four people to form a new investigative agency. These initial employees included veterans from the Secret Service who had previously worked for other government departments. The Justice Department needed staff to enforce federal laws against organized vice and interstate commerce violations. President Theodore Roosevelt had urged the creation of this autonomous service after the Oregon land fraud scandal exposed gaps in existing law enforcement capabilities. Congress forbade the use of Treasury employees by the Justice Department on the 27th of May 1908, citing fears that such an agency would become a secret police force. The newly formed Bureau of Investigation received its first official task shortly thereafter. It involved visiting houses of prostitution to prepare for enforcing the White Slave Traffic Act passed on the 25th of June 1910. Stanley Finch served as the bureau's first chief until his tenure ended in 1924. The agency operated without a permanent headquarters during these early years. It relied on temporary office spaces while building its reputation through high-profile cases involving kidnappings and bank robberies. The organization remained small but grew steadily under the leadership of subsequent directors.

• 2. Hoover's Long Shadow

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  J. Edgar Hoover directed the FBI from 1924 until his death in 1972, serving forty-eight consecutive years. He created the Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory which officially opened in 1932 to professionalize government investigations. During Prohibition, Hoover began using wiretapping to arrest bootleggers starting in the 1920s. The Supreme Court ruled in Olmstead v. United States that telephone tapping did not violate the Fourth Amendment if agents did not break into homes. Congress later outlawed non-consensual phone tapping with the Communications Act of 1934. Hoover expanded surveillance capabilities beyond criminal investigations to target political organizations he deemed subversive. His Sex Deviates program began on the 10th of April 1950 when he forwarded lists of alleged federal employees arrested for sexual irregularities. By the 27th of May 1953, Executive Order 10450 made all federal employment of homosexuals illegal. Between 1977 and 1978, three hundred thousand pages from this program were destroyed by FBI officials. The bureau also conducted COINTELPRO operations targeting civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In November 1964, an anonymous suicide package containing audio recordings of King's private moments was sent to him. Hoover publicly called King the most notorious liar in the United States during the mid-1960s. After his death, Congress passed legislation limiting future directors to ten-year terms.

• 3. Security And Espionage

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  Beginning in the 1940s, the bureau investigated cases of espionage against the United States and its allies. Eight Nazi agents planning sabotage operations were arrested and six were executed under sentences handed down in Ex parte Quirin. A joint US/UK code-breaking effort called The Venona Project allowed American and British governments to read Soviet communications. Hoover administered this project but failed to notify the Central Intelligence Agency until 1952. The arrest of Soviet spy Rudolf Abel occurred in 1957 and confirmed the existence of Americans working for Soviet intelligence. During World War II, the bureau compiled a custodial detention list with names of those who would be taken into custody if war broke out with Axis nations. Robert Shivers, head of the Honolulu office, obtained permission from Hoover to start detaining people on the 7th of December 1941 while bombs fell over Pearl Harbor. Over the next several weeks more than five thousand Issei men were taken into FBI custody without warrants. President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 on the 19th of February 1942 authorizing removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. Hoover opposed mass confinement but Roosevelt prevailed. The bureau continued surveillance on Japanese Americans throughout the war conducting background checks on resettlement applicants. In February 2001, Robert Hanssen was caught selling information to the Russian government after doing so since as early as 1979. He received a life sentence in 2002 for espionage.

• 4. Crime And Forensics

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  On the 25th of August 1953, the FBI created the Top Hoodlum Program to gather information on mobsters in their territories. Field offices reported regularly to Washington for centralized collection of intelligence on racketeers. After the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act took effect, the bureau began investigating former Prohibition-organized groups that had become fronts for crime. All work was done undercover using provisions provided in the RICO Act. Gradually the agency dismantled many organized crime syndicates including those headed by Sam Giancana and John Gotti. In 2003, a congressional committee called the FBI's organized crime informant program one of the greatest failures in federal law enforcement history. The bureau allowed four innocent men to be convicted of the March 1965 gangland murder of Edward Teddy Deegan to protect Vincent Flemmi, an FBI informant. Three of the men were sentenced to death which was later reduced to life imprisonment while the fourth defendant received life in prison. Two of the four men died in prison after serving almost thirty years. U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner found in July 2007 that the bureau helped convict these men using false witness accounts given by mobster Joseph Barboza. The government was ordered to pay one hundred million dollars in damages to the four defendants. For over forty years, the FBI crime lab in Quantico believed lead alloys used in bullets had unique chemical signatures. The National Academy of Sciences conducted an eighteen-month independent review of comparative bullet-lead analysis. In 2003 its National Research Council published a report calling into question thirty years of FBI testimony.

• 5. Structure And Infrastructure

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  The FBI headquarters is located at the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C. The agency maintains fifty-six field offices in major cities across the United States and more than four hundred resident agencies in smaller areas. Specialized functions are located at facilities in Quantico, Virginia including the FBI Academy where new agents undergo training. Going through the twenty-one-week course is required for every special agent. First opened for use in 1972, the facility sits on woodland property. The Criminal Justice Information Services Division is located in Clarksburg, West Virginia and opened in 1995 as the youngest agency division. This complex spans the length of three football fields and provides a main repository for information in various data systems. Under its roof lie programs for the National Crime Information Center and Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System. Many state and local agencies use these data systems as sources for their own investigations. Public tours of FBI headquarters ran through the laboratory workspace before the move to the J. Edgar Hoover Building. The lab serves as the primary facility for most DNA, biological, and physical work conducted by the bureau. In June 2021, the FBI held a groundbreaking for its planned Innovation Center set to be built in Huntsville, Alabama. This center will cost a total of one point three billion dollars and act as a hub for cyber threat intelligence.

• 6. Scandals And Scrutiny

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  In 1985 it was found that the FBI had made use of surveillance devices on numerous American citizens between 1940 and 1960. The Whitey Bulger case involved the Boston Field Office turning a blind eye to criminal activities as an exchange for acting as an informant. Gary Thomas Rowe, an FBI informant who was also an active member of the Ku Klux Klan, assisted in the murder of Viola Liuzzo in 1965. Defamatory rumors were spread by the Bureau about the victim after her death. Ruby Ridge in 1992 resulted from a shootout between the FBI and Randy Weaver over his failure to appear for weapons charges. The Waco siege began in 1993 when a failed raid by the ATF led to a fifty-one day standoff involving the FBI and U.S. military. The building burned down killing seventy-six people including twenty-six children. This tragedy motivated Timothy McVeigh to carry out the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. In November 2007, two years after a sixty Minutes investigation, the bureau agreed to identify all cases where faulty bullet testimony was given. An Associated Press impersonation case saw a Bureau agent place surveillance software in the personal computer of a minor while masquerading as a journalist. The Stoneman Douglas High School shooting occurred after the FBI confirmed it had failed to act on a warning issued over a month prior to the event. In January 2023, the FBI Richmond Field Office produced an internal memo identifying radical traditionalist Catholics as potential domestic violent extremists.