Federal Bureau of Investigation

Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the principal investigative arm of the Department of Justice, with jurisdiction over more than two hundred categories of federal crimes.Its major late twentieth‐century priorities were counterterrorism, illicit drugs and drug‐related crime, foreign counterintelligence, violent crimes, and financial malfeasance. The Bureau provides local police with training, fingerprint identification, and crime‐laboratory services. Its National Crime Information Center compiles crime statistics. In 1997, with a budget of some $2.5 billion, the FBI employed 10,529 special agents and 15,398 support personnel in a network of field offices, special installations, and foreign liaison posts. The director, nominated by the president and approved by the Senate, is limited to a single ten‐year term.

Founded in 1908, the FBI received its current name in 1935. Its earliest responsibilities included bankruptcy fraud, antitrust crimes, violation of neutrality regulations, and enforcement of interstate prostitution laws. Its jurisdiction expanded during World War I to include espionage, sabotage, sedition, and draft‐law violation. The Bureau won the lasting enmity of radicals and civil libertarians during the 1919–1920 Red Scare when hundreds of aliens were arrested and deported. The Warren Harding–era Teapot Dome scandal further tarnished its reputation. To reform the Bureau, J. Edgar Hoover, with whom the FBI's history is inextricably entwined, was appointed director in 1924; he served until his death in 1972.

Committed to professionalizing law enforcement, Hoover during the later 1920s sought to make the Bureau an indispensable resource for local police. The activist New Deal administration unleashed the Bureau on John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and other celebrity gangsters of the era. During World War II, the Bureau targeted homefront sabotage and espionage. Movies, radio programs, magazine features, and tours of the FBI's Washington headquarters enhanced the Bureau's reputation.

With the Cold War, the Bureau entered its most controversial phase as it allied with the House Committee on Un‐American Activities to purge alleged communist sympathizers from unions, schools, and the entertainment industry. Despite notable successes in investigating Soviet espionage, especially in the Alger Hiss and Rosenberg cases, the Bureau became embroiled in partisan politics with Hoover feeding information to Red‐hunting politicians like Richard M. Nixon and Joseph McCarthy.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the Bureau conducted surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr.; assembled dossiers on thousands of citizens; and used infiltration and counterespionage techniques to disrupt the Communist party, then the Ku Klux Klan, the Black Panthers, civil rights organizations, and Vietnam War protesters. The Bureau's deep‐dyed conservatism and hostility to social protest widely discredited it. Revelations of illegalities and excesses that emerged during House and Senate investigations of the intelligence agencies in 1975–1976 led to the creation of formal congressional oversight committees and other reforms.

During the 1980s the Bureau used the Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO, 1970) and wiretapping authority granted it in 1968 to build devastating cases against organized crime figures. Under director Louis Freeh (appointed in 1993) it played a key role in international law enforcement, training foreign law officials at its Quantico, Virginia, academy and establishing FBI academies overseas. But the Bureau's disastrous handling of armed stand‐offs with militant antigovernment groups at Ruby Ridge, Idaho (1992), and Waco, Texas (1993), coupled with revelations of slipshod laboratory procedures, complicated its efforts to restore its reputation as America's most professional, as well as most celebrated, law enforcement agency.

The catastrophic terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, further tarnished the FBI's reputation, as post-9/11 revelations highlighted the Bureau's failure to coordinate with other agencies, to assemble separate pieces of intelligence into a coherent whole, or to follow up on reports from its own field agents of suspicious activities‐steps that might have prevented the attacks.
See also Anticommunism; Civil Liberties; Civil Rights Movement; Communist Party—USA; Federal Government, Executive Branch: Other Departments (Department of Justice); Intelligence Gathering and Espionage; Prostitution and Antiprostitution; Twenties, The.

Bibliography

Richard Gid Powers , Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover, 1987.
Ronald Kessler , The FBI, 1993.

Richard Gid Powers

; Updated by

Paul S. Boyer