On the 26th of July 1908, thirty-four men gathered in a small office to form the United States Bureau of Investigation, a group that would eventually become the most powerful domestic intelligence agency in the world. This agency was born from a political crisis following the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901, which created a public perception that the nation was under threat from anarchists. President Theodore Roosevelt demanded more power to monitor these threats, but the Department of Justice lacked the staff to do so. Attorney General Charles Bonaparte, acting on Roosevelt's instructions, organized an autonomous investigative service that reported only to the attorney general. Congress forbade the use of Treasury employees by the Justice Department on the 27th of May 1908, citing fears that the new agency would serve as a secret police department. Despite this, Bonaparte moved to organize a formal Bureau of Investigation with its own staff of special agents. The bureau's first official task was visiting and making surveys of the houses of prostitution in preparation for enforcing the White Slave Traffic Act, also known as the Mann Act, which was passed on the 25th of June 1910. The agency was renamed the United States Bureau of Investigation in 1932 and became the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935, marking the beginning of its long and controversial history.
The Long Shadow Of Hoover
J. Edgar Hoover served as FBI director from 1924 until his death in 1972, a combined 48 years with the BOI, DOI, and FBI. He was chiefly responsible for creating the Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory, which officially opened in 1932, as part of his work to professionalize investigations by the government. Hoover was substantially involved in most major cases and projects that the FBI handled during his tenure, but his tenure as Bureau director proved to be highly controversial, especially in its later years. After Hoover's death, Congress passed legislation that limited the tenure of future FBI directors to ten years. Hoover began using wiretapping in the 1920s during Prohibition to arrest bootleggers. In the 1927 case Olmstead v. United States, the United States Supreme Court ruled that FBI wiretaps did not violate the Fourth Amendment as unlawful search and seizure, as long as the FBI did not break into a person's home to complete the tapping. After Prohibition's repeal, Congress passed the Communications Act of 1934, which outlawed non-consensual phone tapping, but did allow bugging. In the 1939 case Nardone v. United States, the court ruled that due to the 1934 law, evidence the FBI obtained by phone tapping was inadmissible in court. After Katz v. United States in 1967 overturned Olmstead, Congress passed the Omnibus Crime Control Act, allowing public authorities to tap telephones during investigations, as long as they obtained warrants beforehand. Hoover's use of wiretapping and surveillance became a tool for political control, targeting civil rights leaders and political dissidents.
During the 1950s and 1960s, FBI officials became increasingly concerned about the influence of civil rights leaders, whom they believed either had communist ties or were unduly influenced by communists or fellow travelers. In 1956, for example, Hoover sent an open letter denouncing Dr. T. R. M. Howard, a civil rights leader, surgeon, and wealthy entrepreneur in Mississippi who had criticized FBI inaction in solving recent murders of George W. Lee, Emmett Till, and other blacks in the South. The FBI carried out controversial domestic surveillance in an operation it called the COINTELPRO, from Counter-INTELligence PROgram. It was to investigate and disrupt the activities of dissident political organizations within the United States, including both militant and non-violent organizations. Among its targets was the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a leading civil rights organization whose clergy leadership included the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The FBI frequently investigated King. In the mid-1960s, King began to criticize the Bureau for giving insufficient attention to the use of terrorism by white supremacists. Hoover responded by publicly calling King the most notorious liar in the United States. In his 1991 memoir, Washington Post journalist Carl Rowan asserted that the FBI had sent at least one anonymous letter to King encouraging him to commit suicide. Historian Taylor Branch documents an anonymous November 1964 suicide package sent by the Bureau that combined a letter to the civil rights leader telling him You are done. There is only one way out for you. with audio recordings of King's sexual indiscretions. The country was jolted by the revelations, which included assassinations of political activists, and the actions were denounced by members of the Congress, including House Majority Leader Hale Boggs. The phones of some members of the Congress, including Boggs, had allegedly been tapped.
The Cold War And The Sex Deviates
Beginning in the 1940s and continuing into the 1970s, the bureau investigated cases of espionage against the United States and its allies. Eight Nazi agents who had planned sabotage operations against American targets were arrested, and six were executed under their sentences in the Ex parte Quirin case. Also during this time, a joint US/UK code-breaking effort called The Venona Project, with which the FBI was heavily involved, broke Soviet diplomatic and intelligence communications codes, allowing the US and British governments to read Soviet communications. This effort confirmed the existence of Americans working in the United States for Soviet intelligence. Hoover was administering this project, but he failed to notify the Central Intelligence Agency of it until 1952. Another notable case was the arrest of Soviet spy Rudolf Abel in 1957. The discovery of Soviet spies operating in the US motivated Hoover to pursue his longstanding concern with the threat he perceived from the American Left. The FBI's COMINFIL programs, initiated in the 1940s, gathered intelligence under categories such as political activities, legislative activities, domestic administration issues, Negro question, youth matters, women's matters, farmers' matters, cultural activities, veterans matters, religion, education, and industry. Writer Richard Steven Street maintains that COMINFIL programs were designed to expose, disrupt, or otherwise neutralize and purge Communist Party members and others considered subversive from positions of power. The FBI's Sex Deviates program began on the 10th of April 1950, when J. Edgar Hoover forwarded to the White House, to the U.S. Civil Service Commission, and to branches of the armed services a list of 393 alleged federal employees who had allegedly been arrested in Washington, D.C., since 1947, on charges of sexual irregularities. On the 20th of June 1951, Hoover expanded the program by issuing a memo establishing a uniform policy for the handling of the increasing number of reports and allegations concerning present and past employees of the United States Government who assertedly are sex deviates. The program was expanded to include non-government jobs. According to Athan Theoharis, in 1951 he had unilaterally instituted a Sex Deviates program to purge alleged homosexuals from any position in the federal government, from the lowliest clerk to the more powerful position of White house aide. On the 27th of May 1953, Executive Order 10450 went into effect. The program was expanded further by this executive order by making all federal employment of homosexuals illegal. On the 8th of July 1953, the FBI forwarded to the U.S. Civil Service Commission information from the sex deviates program. Between 1977 and 1978, 300,000 pages in the sex deviates program, collected between 1930 and the mid-1970s, were destroyed by FBI officials.
The Japanese American Internment
In 1939, the Bureau began compiling a custodial detention list with the names of those who would be taken into custody in the event of war with Axis nations. The majority of the names on the list belonged to Issei community leaders, as the FBI investigation built on an existing Naval Intelligence index that had focused on Japanese Americans in Hawaii and the West Coast, but many German and Italian nationals also found their way onto the FBI Index list. Robert Shivers, head of the Honolulu office, obtained permission from Hoover to start detaining those on the list on the 7th of December 1941, while bombs were still falling over Pearl Harbor. Mass arrests and searches of homes, in most cases conducted without warrants, began a few hours after the attack, and over the next several weeks more than 5,500 Issei men were taken into FBI custody. On the 19th of February 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing the removal of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. FBI Director Hoover opposed the subsequent mass removal and confinement of Japanese Americans authorized under Executive Order 9066, but Roosevelt prevailed. The vast majority went along with the subsequent exclusion orders, but in a handful of cases where Japanese Americans refused to obey the new military regulations, FBI agents handled their arrests. The Bureau continued surveillance on Japanese Americans throughout the war, conducting background checks on applicants for resettlement outside camp, and entering the camps, usually without the permission of War Relocation Authority officials, and grooming informants to monitor dissidents and troublemakers. After the war, the FBI was assigned to protect returning Japanese Americans from attacks by hostile white communities. The FBI's role in the internment of Japanese Americans remains a dark chapter in its history, highlighting the agency's willingness to target specific ethnic groups based on fear and prejudice.
The Modern Era And The 9/11 Failures
The 11th of September 2001 attacks accelerated the FBI's implementation of the tier system, leading to a significant reallocation of resources toward Tier 1 programs. A 2003 audit by the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General reported that the average number of agents assigned to terrorism-related investigations more than doubled from 2,126 in FY 2000 to 4,680 by FY 2002, largely due to the expansion of the Counterterrorism Division's Joint Terrorism Task Forces and related initiatives. The 9/11 Commission's final report on the 22nd of July 2004, stated that the FBI and Central Intelligence Agency were both partially to blame for not pursuing intelligence reports that could have prevented the September 11 attacks. In its most damning assessment, the report concluded that the country had not been well served by either agency and listed numerous recommendations for changes within the FBI. While the FBI did accede to most of the recommendations, including oversight by the new director of National Intelligence, some former members of the 9/11 Commission publicly criticized the FBI in October 2005, claiming it was resisting any meaningful changes. On the 8th of July 2007, The Washington Post published excerpts from UCLA Professor Amy Zegart's book Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11. The Post reported, from Zegart's book, that government documents showed that both the CIA and the FBI had missed 23 potential chances to disrupt the terrorist attacks of the 11th of September 2001. The primary reasons for the failures included: agency cultures resistant to change and new ideas; inappropriate incentives for promotion; and a lack of cooperation between the FBI, CIA, and the rest of the United States Intelligence Community. The book blamed the FBI's decentralized structure, which prevented effective communication and cooperation among different FBI offices. The book suggested that the FBI had not evolved into an effective counter-terrorism or counter-intelligence agency, due in large part to deeply ingrained agency cultural resistance to change. For example, FBI personnel practices continued to treat all staff other than special agents as support staff, classifying intelligence analysts alongside the FBI's auto mechanics and janitors.
The Technology And The Controversies
In 2012, the FBI formed the National Domestic Communications Assistance Center to develop technology for assisting law enforcement with technical knowledge regarding communication services, technologies, and electronic surveillance. The FBI Laboratory, established with the formation of the BOI, did not appear in the J. Edgar Hoover Building until its completion in 1974. The lab serves as the primary lab for most DNA, biological, and physical work. Public tours of FBI headquarters ran through the FBI laboratory workspace before the move to the J. Edgar Hoover Building. The services the lab conducts include Chemistry, Combined DNA Index System, Computer Analysis and Response, DNA Analysis, Evidence Response, Explosives, Firearms and Tool marks, Forensic Audio, Forensic Video, Image Analysis, Forensic Science Research, Forensic Science Training, Hazardous Materials Response, Investigative and Prospective Graphics, Latent Prints, Materials Analysis, Questioned Documents, Racketeering Records, Special Photographic Analysis, Structural Design, and Trace Evidence. The services of the FBI Laboratory are used by many state, local, and international agencies free of charge. The lab also maintains a second lab at the FBI Academy. In 2000, the FBI began the Trilogy project to upgrade its outdated information technology infrastructure. This project, originally scheduled to take three years and cost around $380 million, ended up over budget and behind schedule. Efforts to deploy modern computers and networking equipment were generally successful, but attempts to develop new investigation software, outsourced to Science Applications International Corporation, were not. Virtual Case File, or VCF, as the software was known, was plagued by poorly defined goals, and repeated changes in management. In January 2005, more than two years after the software was originally planned for completion, the FBI abandoned the project. At least $100 million, and much more by some estimates, was spent on the project, which never became operational. The FBI has been forced to continue using its decade-old Automated Case Support system, which IT experts consider woefully inadequate. In March 2005, the FBI announced it was beginning a new, more ambitious software project, code-named Sentinel, which they expected to complete by 2009. Carnivore was an electronic eavesdropping software system implemented by the FBI during the Clinton administration; it was designed to monitor email and electronic communications. After prolonged negative coverage in the press, the FBI changed the name of its system from Carnivore to DCS1000. DCS is reported to stand for Digital Collection System; the system has the same functions as before. The Associated Press reported in mid-January 2005 that the FBI essentially abandoned the use of Carnivore in 2001, in favor of commercially available software, such as NarusInsight.
The Future And The Legacy
In June 2021, the FBI held a groundbreaking for its planned FBI Innovation Center, set to be built in Huntsville, Alabama. The Innovation Center is to be part of a large, college-like campus costing a total of $1.3 billion in Redstone Arsenal and will act as a center for cyber threat intelligence, data analytics, and emerging threat training. The FBI has a total of 33,852 employees, including 13,412 special agents and 20,420 support professionals, such as intelligence analysts, language specialists, scientists, information technology specialists, and other professionals. Line of duty deaths include 87 FBI agents and two K9s who have died in the line of duty from 1925 to February 2021. To apply to become an FBI agent, one must be between the ages of 23 and 37, unless one is a preference-eligible veteran, in which case one may apply after age 37. The applicant must also hold U.S. citizenship, be of high moral character, have a clean record, and hold at least a four-year bachelor's degree. At least three years of professional work experience prior to application is also required. All FBI employees require a Top Secret security clearance, and in many instances, employees need a TS/SCI clearance. To obtain a security clearance, all potential FBI personnel must pass a series of Single Scope Background Investigations, which are conducted by the Office of Personnel Management. Special agent candidates also have to pass a Physical Fitness Test, which includes a 300-meter run, one-minute sit-ups, maximum push-ups, and a run. Personnel must pass a polygraph test with questions including possible drug use. Applicants who fail polygraphs may not gain employment with the FBI. Up until 1975, the FBI had a minimum height requirement of 5 feet 4 inches. The FBI director is responsible for the day-to-day operations at the FBI. Along with the deputy director, the director makes sure cases and operations are handled correctly. The director also is in charge of making sure the leadership in the FBI field offices is staffed with qualified agents. Before the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act was passed in the wake of the September 11 attacks, the FBI director would directly brief the president of the United States on any issues that arise from within the FBI. Since then, the director now reports to the director of national intelligence, who in turn reports to the President. The FBI continues to face controversies, including the handling of the January 6 United States Capitol attack, the Whitey Bulger case, and the use of surveillance devices on numerous American citizens between 1940 and 1960. The FBI's legacy is one of both significant achievements and deep controversies, reflecting the complex role it plays in American society.