Background In 1896, the
National Bureau of Criminal Identification was founded, providing agencies across the country with information to identify known criminals. The
1901 assassination of President
William McKinley created a perception that the United States was under threat from
anarchists. The
Departments of Justice and
Labor had been keeping records on anarchists for years, but President
Theodore Roosevelt wanted more power to monitor them. The Justice Department had been tasked with
the regulation of interstate commerce since 1887, though it lacked the staff to do so. It had made little effort to relieve its staff shortage until the
Oregon land fraud scandal at the turn of the 20th century. President Roosevelt instructed Attorney General
Charles Bonaparte to organize an autonomous investigative service that would report only to the
attorney general. Bonaparte contacted other agencies, including the
U.S. Secret Service, for personnel, investigators in particular. On May 27, 1908, Congress forbade this use of Treasury employees by the Justice Department, citing fears that the new agency would serve as a
secret police department. Again at Roosevelt's urging, Bonaparte moved to organize a formal
Bureau of Investigation, which would then have its own staff of
special agents. Attorney General Bonaparte, using Department of Justice expense funds, to work for a new investigative agency. Its first "chief" (the title is now "director") was
Stanley Finch. Bonaparte notified the Congress of these actions in December 1908. In the same year, its name was officially changed from the Division of Investigation to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
J. Edgar Hoover as FBI director , FBI director from 1924 to 1972
J. Edgar Hoover served as FBI director from 1924 to 1972, a combined 48 years with the BOI, DOI, and FBI. He was chiefly responsible for creating the Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory, or the
FBI 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 as detailed below, 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. Early homicide investigations of the new agency included the
Osage Indian murders. During the "War on Crime" of the 1930s, FBI agents apprehended or killed a number of notorious criminals who committed kidnappings, bank robberies, and murders throughout the nation, including
John Dillinger,
"Baby Face" Nelson,
Kate "Ma" Barker,
Alvin "Creepy" Karpis, and
George "Machine Gun" Kelly. Other activities of its early decades focused on the scope and influence of the
white supremacist group
Ku Klux Klan, a group with which the FBI was evidenced to be working in the
Viola Liuzzo lynching case. Earlier, through the work of
Edwin Atherton, the BOI claimed to have successfully apprehended an entire army of Mexican neo-revolutionaries under the leadership of General
Enrique Estrada in the mid-1920s, east of San Diego, California. Hoover began using
wiretapping in the 1920s during
Prohibition to arrest bootleggers. In the 1927 case
Olmstead v. United States, in which a bootlegger was caught through telephone tapping, 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. Hoover was administering this project, but he failed to notify the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 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.
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 December 7, 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 February 19, 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. 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." COMINFIL programs allowed the FBI to surveil organizations and individuals, ranging from the Farmworkers' union to the Los Angeles PTA to entire industries, like radio and broadcasting
Sex deviates program According to Douglas M. Charles, the FBI's "sex deviates" program began on April 10, 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 June 20, 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 [sic] are sex deviates". The program was expanded to include non-government jobs. According to
Athan Theoharis, "In 1951 he [Hoover] 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 May 27, 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 July 8, 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.
Civil rights movement 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.. ", mailed anonymously to King by the FBI 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. In March 1971, the residential office of an FBI agent in
Media, Pennsylvania, was burgled by a group calling itself the
Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI. Numerous files were taken and distributed to a range of newspapers, including
The Harvard Crimson. The files detailed the FBI's extensive
COINTELPRO program, which included investigations into lives of ordinary citizens—including a black student group at a Pennsylvania military college and the daughter of Congressman
Henry S. Reuss of
Wisconsin. To ensure clarity about the responsibility for investigation of homicides of federal officials, Congress passed a law in 1965 that included investigations of such deaths of federal officials, especially by homicide, within FBI jurisdiction.
Organized crime (aka Donnie Brasco),
Benjamin "Lefty" Ruggiero and
Edgar Robb (aka Tony Rossi), 1980s In response to organized crime, on August 25, 1953, the FBI created the
Top Hoodlum Program. The national office directed field offices to gather information on
mobsters in their territories and to report it regularly to Washington for a centralized collection of intelligence on
racketeers. After the
Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, for RICO Act, took effect, the FBI began investigating the former Prohibition-organized groups, which had become fronts for crime in major cities and small towns. All the FBI work was done undercover and from within these organizations, using the provisions provided in the RICO Act. Gradually the agency dismantled many of the groups. Although Hoover initially denied the existence of a
National Crime Syndicate in the United States, the Bureau later conducted operations against known organized crime syndicates and families, including those headed by
Sam Giancana and
John Gotti. The RICO Act is still used today for all
organized crime and any individuals who may fall under the act's provisions. In 2003, a congressional committee called the FBI's organized crime
informant program "one of the greatest failures in the history of federal law enforcement". Two of the four men died in prison after serving almost 30 years, and two others were released after serving 32 and 36 years. In July 2007, U.S. District Judge
Nancy Gertner in Boston found that the bureau had helped convict the four men using false witness accounts given by mobster
Joseph Barboza. The U.S. Government was ordered to pay $100 million in damages to the four defendants.
Special FBI teams agents in a training exercise In 1982, the FBI formed an elite unit to help with problems that might arise at the
1984 Summer Olympics to be held in Los Angeles, particularly
terrorism and major-crime. This was a result of the
1972 Summer Olympics in
Munich, Germany, when
terrorists murdered the Israeli athletes. Named the
Hostage Rescue Team, or HRT, it acts as a dedicated FBI
SWAT team dealing primarily with counter-terrorism scenarios. Unlike the special agents serving on local
FBI SWAT teams, HRT does not conduct investigations. Instead, HRT focuses solely on additional tactical proficiency and capabilities. Also formed in 1984 was the
Computer Analysis and Response Team, or CART. From the late 1980s to the early 1990s, the FBI reassigned more than 300 agents from foreign counter-intelligence duties to violent crime, and made violent crime the sixth national priority. With cuts to other well-established departments, and because terrorism was no longer considered a threat after the end of the
Cold War, Between 1993 and 1996, the FBI increased its
counter-terrorism role following the first
1993 World Trade Center bombing in
New York City, the 1995
Oklahoma City bombing, and the arrest of the
Unabomber in 1996. Technological innovation and the skills of FBI Laboratory analysts helped ensure that the three cases were successfully prosecuted. However, Justice Department investigations into the FBI's roles in the
Ruby Ridge and
Waco incidents were found to have been obstructed by agents within the Bureau. During the
1996 Summer Olympics in
Atlanta, Georgia, the FBI was criticized for its investigation of the
Centennial Olympic Park bombing. It has settled a dispute with
Richard Jewell, who was a private security guard at the venue, along with some media organizations. In response to the
1998 U.S. embassy bombings in
Kenya and
Tanzania, the FBI developed its
Strategic Plan 1998–2003 to prioritize counterterrorism and national security. This plan introduced a three-tiered system to classify and prioritize investigative programs agency-wide. Tier One, the highest priority, included national security programs such as counterterrorism and counterintelligence; Tier Two encompassed major criminal investigations, such as organized crime and white-collar crime, while Tier Three covered lower-priority matters, including "the most significant" crimes against property and individuals. The September 11, 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 (OIG) reported that the average number of agents assigned to terrorism-related investigations more than doubledfrom 2,126 in
FY 2000 to 4,680 by FY 2002largely due to the expansion of the Counterterrorism Division's Joint Terrorism Task Forces and related initiatives.
September 11 attacks During the
September 11, 2001, attacks on the
World Trade Center, FBI agent
Leonard W. Hatton Jr. was killed during the rescue effort while helping the rescue personnel evacuate the occupants of the South Tower, and he stayed when it collapsed. Within months after the attacks, FBI director
Robert Mueller, who had been sworn in a week before the attacks, called for a re-engineering of FBI structure and operations. He made countering every federal crime a top priority, including the prevention of terrorism, countering foreign intelligence operations, addressing cybersecurity threats, other high-tech crimes, protecting civil rights, combating public corruption, organized crime, white-collar crime, and major acts of violent crime. In February 2001,
Robert Hanssen was caught selling information to the Russian government. It was later learned that Hanssen, who had reached a high position within the FBI, had been selling intelligence since as early as 1979. He pleaded guilty to
espionage and received a
life sentence in 2002, but the incident led many to question the security practices employed by the FBI. There was also a claim that Hanssen might have contributed information that led to the September 11, 2001, attacks. The
9/11 Commission's final report on July 22, 2004, stated that the FBI and
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 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 July 8, 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 September 11, 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.
Faulty bullet analysis For over 40 years, the FBI crime lab in Quantico had believed that lead alloys used in bullets had unique chemical signatures. It was analyzing the bullets with the goal of matching them chemically, not only to a single batch of ammunition coming out of a factory, but also to a single box of bullets. The
National Academy of Sciences conducted an 18-month independent review of
comparative bullet-lead analysis. In 2003, its National Research Council published a report whose conclusions called into question 30 years of FBI testimony. It found the analytic model used by the FBI for interpreting results was deeply flawed, and the conclusion, that bullet fragments could be matched to a box of ammunition, was so overstated that it was misleading under the rules of evidence. One year later, the FBI decided to stop conducting bullet lead analyses. After a
60 Minutes/
The Washington Post investigation in November 2007, two years later, the Bureau agreed to identify, review, and release all pertinent cases, and notify prosecutors about cases in which faulty testimony was given.
Technology 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.
January 6 United States Capitol attack An FBI informant who participated in the
January 6 United States Capitol attack on democratic institutions in Washington D.C. later testified in support of the
Proud Boys, who were part of the plot. Revelations about the informant raised fresh questions about intelligence failures by the FBI before the riot. According to the
Brennan Center and
United States Senate committees, the FBI's response to white supremacist violence was "woefully inadequate". The FBI has long been suspected to have turned a blind eye towards right-wing extremists while disseminating conspiracy theories on the
origin of SARS-CoV-2. == Organization ==