The federal law enforcement organization in the United States as well as its domestic intelligence and security service is the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The FBI reports to both the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence and operates under the authority of the US Department of Justice.
Federal Bureau of Investigation is also a part of the US Intelligence Community.[/3] The FBI is a premier counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and criminal investigation agency in the United States. It is tasked with looking into violations of over 200 federal crime categories.*4
While the FBI performs numerous unique tasks, its national security operations are similar to those of the Russian FSB, the New Zealand GCSB, the British FSB, and the British MI5 and NCA. In contrast, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is exempt from legislation.
Despite its emphasis on domestic matters, the FBI has a sizable global presence, running 60 Legal Attache (LEGAT) offices and 15 sub-offices in American embassies and consulates around the world. These foreign offices often don’t carry out unilateral activities in the host nations; instead, their main function is to coordinate with foreign security services.[8]
The CIA has limited domestic operations, and the FBI can and occasionally does conduct covert operations abroad. These operations typically call for cooperation between many government agencies.
The Bureau of Investigation, sometimes known as the BI or BOI for short, was founded in 1908 and became the FBI. In 1935, it changed its name to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).10] The J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C. serves as the FBI’s headquarters.
History of Federal Bureau of Investigation
Background
The National Bureau of Criminal Identification was established in 1896 and has since then supplied organizations all around the nation with data to help them identify known offenders. The assassination of President William McKinley in 1901 gave rise to the belief that anarchists posed a threat to the United States.
President Theodore Roosevelt sought more authority to keep an eye on anarchists, despite the fact that the Departments of Justice and Labor had been maintaining statistics on them for years.[14][needs page]
Since 1887, the Justice Department has been entrusted with the regulation of interstate commerce, despite its insufficient workforce. It hadn’t done anything to address its staffing shortfall prior to the Oregon land fraud incident at the start of the 1900s. Attorney General Charles Bonaparte was given instructions by President Roosevelt to set up an independent investigating agency.
Creation of BOI
On July 26, 1908, the Bureau of Investigation (BOI) was established.[17] Attorney General Bonaparte employed thirty-four individuals, some of whom were former Secret Service agents, to work for a new investigative organization utilizing Department of Justice spending money[14]. Stanley Finch served as its inaugural “chief” (the position is now “director”). In December 1908, Bonaparte informed Congress of these developments.In [14]
The first formal assignment assigned to the agency was to examine and assess prostitution establishments in order to get ready to enforce the Mann Act, often known as the “White Slave Traffic Act,” which was approved on June 25, 1910. The United States Bureau of Investigation was the new name given to the bureau in 1932.
J. Edgar Hoover as FBI director
J. Edgar Hoover led the FBI for 48 years in total, working with the BOI, DOI, and FBI, from 1924 until 1972. As part of his efforts to professionalize government investigations, he was primarily responsible for founding the Federal Bureau of Investigation Laboratory, also known as the Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory, which formally opened in 1932. During his tenure, Hoover was heavily involved in the majority of the FBI’s important cases and operations. However, as will be seen below, particularly in the final years of the Bureau, his term as director proved to be quite contentious. Following Hoover’s passing, Congress enacted laws limiting the terms of incoming FBI directors to ten years.
The Osage Indian murders were one of the first homicide cases the new agency looked into. Federal Bureau of Investigationagents captured or killed a number of well-known criminals who carried out kidnappings, bank robberies, and murders across the country during the 1930s “War on Crime”; these individuals included John Dillinger, “Baby Face” Nelson, Kate “Ma” Barker, Alvin “Creepy” Karpis, and George “Machine Gun” Kelly.
Other early decades’ endeavors centered on the size and power of the Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacist organization with which the FBI was purportedly collaborating on the lynching of Viola Liuzzo. In the mid-1920s, the BOI claimed to have captured an entire army of Mexican neo-revolutionaries led by General Enrique Estrada, thanks to the efforts of Edwin Atherton.
During Prohibition, in the 1920s, Hoover started utilizing wiretapping to apprehend bootleggers.[20] The United States Supreme Court held in the 1927 case Olmstead v. United States—a case in which a bootlegger was apprehended through telephone tapping—that FBI wiretaps did not violate the Fourth Amendment as an unlawful search and seizure, provided that the FBI did not enter a person’s home to carry out the tapping.[20]
Congress enacted the Communications Act in 1934 following the abolition of Prohibition, which made non-consensual phone tapping illegal but permitted bugging.[20] The court decided in the 1939 case of Nardone v. United States that the evidence the FBI collected by phone tapping was not admissible in court because of the 1934 statute.20] Congress passed the Omnibus Crime Act following the overturning of Olmstead in Katz v. United States (1967).
National security
From the 1940s until the 1970s, the bureau looked into allegations of espionage against the US and its allies. Six of the eight Nazi spies who had planned to damage American targets were put to death (Ex parte Quirin) after serving their sentences. The FBI played a major role in the joint US/UK code-breaking project known as “The Venona Project,” which also broke Soviet diplomatic and intelligence communications codes at this time, enabling the US and British governments to read Soviet communications.
This endeavor verified that Americans were employed by Soviet intelligence in the United States.21] This initiative was being managed by Hoover, but he didn’t tell the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) about it until 1952. Abel, a Soviet spy, was apprehended, which was another noteworthy instance.
Japanese American internment
The Bureau started assembling a list of people who would be placed into custody in the event of conflict with the Axis powers in 1939. The FBI inquiry based on an existing Naval Intelligence index that had focused on Japanese Americans in Hawaii and the West Coast, therefore the majority of the names on the list belonged to Issei community leaders.
However, several German and Italian nationals also made their way onto the FBI Index list.23] On December 7, 1941, with bombs still raining over Pearl Harbor, Robert Shivers, the chief of the Honolulu office, asked Hoover for authorization to begin detaining persons on the list.24]
A few hours after the incident, there were widespread arrests and home searches (often without warrants), and over the course of the following few weeks, more than 5,500 Issei men were placed under Federal Bureau of Investigation custody.
[25] Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, authorized the expulsion of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. Executive Order 9066 permitted the ensuing mass evacuation and incarceration of Japanese Americans; FBI Director Hoover opposed this action, but Roosevelt won out.(26]
The majority complied with the ensuing exclusion orders, but FBI agents handled the arrests of the few Japanese Americans who disobeyed the new military laws.24] Throughout the war, the Bureau kept an eye on Japanese Americans and investigated the backgrounds of those who applied to be resettled.
Sex deviates program
The FBI’s “sex deviates” program, according to Douglas M. Charles, started on April 10, 1950, when J. Edgar Hoover forwarded a list of 393 alleged federal employees who had allegedly been arrested in Washington, D.C., since 1947, on charges of “sexual irregularities” to the White House, the U.S. Civil Service Commission, and branches of the armed services.
A letter 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 assertly [sic] are sex deviates” was released by Hoover on June 20, 1951, marking the expansion of the program. The program was extended to cover employment outside of government.
Athan Theoharis writes, “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.” Executive Order 10450 was enacted on May 27, 1953. This executive order further broadened the program by outlawing homosexual employment in the federal government.
Information from the sex deviates program was provided by the FBI to the U.S. Civil Service Commission on July 8, 1953. 300,000 pages from the Sex Deviants Program, gathered between 1930 and the mid-1970s, were destroyed by FBI agents in 1977–1978.In 2729]
Civil rights movement
Federal Bureau of Investigation authorities were more worried about the influence of civil rights leaders in the 1950s and 1960s because they thought these figures either had communist affiliations or were unduly influenced by communists or “fellow travelers”.
For instance, in 1956, Hoover published an open letter criticizing Dr. T. R. M. Howard, a wealthy Mississippian entrepreneur, surgeon, and leader in the civil rights movement, who had chastised the FBI for failing to solve the killings of Emmett Till, George W. Lee, and other Black people in the South.[/30] The FBI conducted contentious domestic monitoring under the “COunter-INTELligence PROgram,” or COINTELPRO, operation.(31 ) Its purpose was to look into and interfere with the operations of radical and nonviolent political organizations operating in the US.
The FBI looked into King on a regular basis. King started to criticize the Bureau in the middle of the 1960s for failing to pay enough attention to how white nationalists used terrorism. In response, Hoover declared in public that King was the most “notorious liar” in the country.34] Journalist Carl Rowan of the Washington Post claimed in his 1991 memoir that King received at least one anonymous letter from the FBI urging him to end his life.(35)
Historian Taylor Branch records an anonymous “suicide package” that the Bureau sent to the civil rights activist in November 1964, along with a note that said, “You are done.” “There is just one path out for you,” King said, playing audio clips of his extramarital affairs.36]
In March 1971, a group identifying itself as the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the Federal Bureau of Investigation broke into the Media, Pennsylvania, home of an FBI agent. A large number of data were removed and sent to other publications, including The Harvard Crimson.(37) The files provided information about the FBI’s wide-ranging COINTELPRO program, which involved looking into the lives of regular people.
Two such people were the daughter of Wisconsin Congressman Henry S. Reuss and a group of black students at a military academy in Pennsylvania.(37) The discoveries, which included the assassinations of political activists, “jolted” the nation, and Congressmen Hale Boggs, the majority leader of the House, criticized the acts.(37) There were reports that some Congressmen’s phones had been bugged, including Boggs’.(37)