Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

The FBI began without a name. In May 1908 Congress, suspicious of presidential power, banned the loan of Secret Service operatives to other departments, leaving the Justice Department without investigators. Attorney General Charles Bonaparte hired nine of them anyway, added 25 of his own, and on 26 July 1908 ordered his department's lawyers to send their investigative work to this new force of 34 special agents. On 16 March 1909 his successor, George Wickersham, called it the Bureau of Investigation¹.

From white-collar cases to spy-catching

The early Bureau handled antitrust, land fraud, banking and naturalization cases, and from 1910 enforcement of the Mann Act. The First World War put it into counter-espionage: after Congress declared war on 6 April 1917, the Espionage Act and the Sabotage Act gave it German saboteurs, draft deserters and "enemy aliens" to pursue. The Red Scare followed, and with it the Palmer raids of 1919–20, planned from files compiled by a young Justice Department lawyer, J. Edgar Hoover. The Bureau's own history calls the raids "poorly planned and executed" and an assault on "the civil liberties of the thousands of people swept up"¹.

Hoover became acting director on 10 May 1924 and stayed until his death in 1972. He purged political appointees, demanded legal or accounting training of new agents and built the fingerprint files and the laboratory. In July 1935 the Bureau became the Federal Bureau of Investigation^1,8.

Domestic intelligence and the Second World War

The intelligence role was given quietly. In 1936 President Roosevelt asked the FBI to gather intelligence on fascist and communist groups. When the Attorney General sent him a joint FBI and military plan in 1938, he advised that no new legislation was needed and that the plan "should be handled in strictest confidence"^2,5. The Church Committee later called this the origin of the federal government's permanent domestic intelligence structure⁵.

Before Pearl Harbor the FBI uncovered some 50 German spies, including the ring around Fritz Duquesne, and in 1942 it captured the eight saboteurs of Operation Pastorius. From 1940 its Special Intelligence Service sent more than 340 people undercover to Latin America; by 1946 it had identified 887 Axis spies there². Hoover hoped to keep a worldwide role after the war. A memorandum he sent the Attorney General on 6 September 1945, attacking William Donovan's plans for a peacetime successor to the OSS, shows how hard he fought it; the job went instead to the new CIA⁶.

The Cold War

After 1945 the FBI was the main American service against Soviet espionage at home. Working with the Army's Venona decrypts, which it used quietly to avoid tipping off Moscow, it identified networks including the one that passed atomic secrets through Harry Gold and Julius Rosenberg. Venona and the investigations it supported identified some 350 people connected with Soviet intelligence. In 1957 agents arrested the Soviet "illegal" William Fisher, known as Rudolf Abel, in New York².

The same years produced the Bureau's worst abuses. From 1956 to 1971 COINTELPRO turned counterintelligence methods on American political groups, from the Communist Party to the civil rights and antiwar movements. The Bureau kept a secret Security Index of people to be detained in an emergency, wiretapped and bugged Martin Luther King Jr., and asked the NSA to search international communications for the names on its lists under Project Minaret^3,5.

Reform and the "Year of the Spy"

The 1971 burglary of the Media, Pennsylvania, office exposed COINTELPRO, and the Church Committee's 1975 hearings examined it alongside the campaign against King. In February 1973 the Bureau moved investigations of domestic subversives under stricter guidelines, a reform continued by Clarence Kelley, Director from July 1973. In 1976 Attorney General Edward Levi issued guidelines limiting such investigations to groups breaking the law or engaged in violence; by the FBI's count domestic security cases fell from over 21,000 in 1973 to 626 by September 1976. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 put national-security wiretaps under a court^4,5.

Counterintelligence revived in the 1980s. With FISA and new laws on classified evidence in trials, so many American spies were arrested in the mid-1980s that the press called 1985 the "Year of the Spy". The worst case came from inside the Bureau: Special Agent Robert Hanssen, arrested in February 2001, had spied for Moscow for most of two decades^4,7,8.

Operations in these files

8 February 1940 – 2 January 1942 The Duquesne spy ring Thirty-three German agents convicted in 1941–42 after the FBI turned an Abwehr recruit, William Sebold, ran his radio link to Hamburg for 16 months and filmed spies in a wired Manhattan office. 1 February 1943 – 1 October 1980 The Venona project The US Army codebreaking program that, from 1943 to 1980, read parts of some 2,900 wartime Soviet intelligence cables and exposed Fuchs, the Rosenbergs and Donald Maclean. 5 September 1945 – 27 June 1946 The Gouzenko affair In September 1945 a GRU cipher clerk walked out of the Soviet embassy in Ottawa with over a hundred documents, exposing a Soviet spy network in Canada and a British atomic scientist. OPERATION · 1950 27 January 1950 – 1959 Operation Washtub From 1951 to 1959 the US Air Force, at first with the FBI, recruited Alaskan civilians as stay-behind agents who would hide and radio intelligence if the Soviet Union invaded the territory. 22 June 1953 – 15 November 1957 The Hollow Nickel case A Brooklyn newsboy's trick nickel held a coded message the FBI could not read for four years, until a drunken KGB defector explained it and led agents to the illegal known as Rudolf Abel. August 1956 – 28 April 1971 COINTELPRO From 1956 to 1971 the FBI ran secret programs to 'disrupt' and 'neutralize' American political groups, from the Communist Party and the Klan to civil rights and antiwar organizations. A burglary in 1971 exposed them. OPERATION · 1961 November 1961 – 15 March 1988 TOPHAT: the Polyakov case From 1961 to 1980 GRU officer Dmitri Polyakov, later a major general, spied for the FBI and CIA. Betrayed by Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames, he was arrested in 1986 and shot in 1988. 20 October 1967 – October 1973 Project Minaret From 1967 to 1973 the NSA searched international communications for the names of Americans supplied by the FBI, CIA and Secret Service, among them Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali and two sitting senators. 16 April – 25 November 1985 1985, the Year of the Spy In 1985 the FBI arrested a string of Americans spying for Moscow, Beijing and Israel, a KGB officer defected and re-defected, and the CIA lost almost every agent it had inside Soviet intelligence.

Operations against the FBI

November 1979 – 18 February 2001 The Hanssen case FBI agent Robert Hanssen spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence in three bursts from 1979 to 2001 without revealing his name. Caught at a Virginia dead drop in 2001, he was the most damaging spy in FBI history.