Federal Bureau of Investigation

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The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation is a law enforcement agency that functions as a federal police, counterintelligence and domestic intelligence agency within the United States. FBI is a division of the Justice Department. FBI agents are armed federal officers with police powers.


FBI has the following mission:


Their priorities are:

1. Protect the United States from terrorist attacks
2. Protect the United States against foreign intelligence operations and espionage
4. Combat public corruption at all levels
5. Protect civil rights
6. Combat transnational/national criminal organizations and enterprises
7. Combat major white-collar crime
8. Combat significant violent crime
9. Support federal, state, local and international partners
10. Upgrade technology to successfully perform the FBI's mission [1]

Moreover, the FBI has immediate jurisdiction over all bank robberies, which they take seriously, except in LA. There are too many in LA for the FBI to keep up, so they keep out.


The bureau traces its roots to the mid-19th century, but it was more or less an obscure agency trying to enforce the Interstate Commerce Act. Then, in the 1920s the US government experimented with alcohol prohibition. Naturally this caused the crime rate to soar and the government needed a more effective policing organization. During the prohibition era, a young bureaucrat named J. Edgar Hoover found that he could build a career in law enforcement, and began running the FBI as his own private fiefdom. He took the reins in the 1920s and only left the agency when he died, in the 1970s. In the 1930s, heavily armed bank-robbing outlaws, such as Bonnie and Clyde or John Dillinger, became a serious problem in the country, and the FBI became famous for its attempts at suppressing the crime wave. The outlaws also became famous for outwitting the feds, until their bodies started turning up with incredible levels of lead poisoning. During World War II the Bureau had a few successes stopping potential German spies and saboteurs. Hoover gained a lot of power during the war years, something which was very addictive, and in the 1950s the Bureau turned to the next major threat: civil rights marchers communists. They had a few successes in the 1960s arresting white supremacists who were killing black people with impunity in the South, and many more successes killing Black people, Native Americans and Chicanos with impunity themselves,[citation needed] but they also kept an eye on anti-war activists and the greatest threat of all: hippies.

FBI and counter-intelligence[edit]

The FBI is supposed to be the major counter-intelligence branch of the US government. However, it has previously performed the job fairly badly. The COINTELPROWikipedia's W.svg program, aimed at disrupting "subversive" organizations through covert and often unconstitutional means, completely failed to prevent the rise of the 1960s radical/countercultural movement, however it was quite effective at stopping groups such as the Black Panthers, the Brown Berets, the AIM and others.[citation needed]Major Soviet spies within the US were able to go about their business for a long time despite obvious red flags. For example, one CIA officer in Soviet employment was able to buy a house with cash, despite being very far down the pay scale. In another major case, that of Robert Hanssen, the FBI spent years searching for him, never realizing he was one of their own agents.

Many believe that the FBI, also charged with being the country's preeminent law enforcement agency, does not have the proper culture to engage in effective counter-intelligence. Recently, there have been calls to take counter-intelligence out of the FBI's portfolio, and instead build an agency similar to Britain's MI5. However, as past United States history has shown, if this was done, soon the FBI would probably start doing counter-intelligence again, and there would be yet more duplication within the intelligence community.

FBI vs celebrities[edit]

The FBI, particularly in the Hoover years, was famous for its occasionally eccentric pursuit of celebrities and literary and artistic figures. A considerable amount of historical study has been conducted on this. However, because the FBI received and kept large amounts of correspondence, often from very strange people, the existence of a long FBI file on somebody does not indicate that they were considered a criminal or that Hoover had anything against them.

  • James Baldwin, the black, gay American author, was the subject of a 1884-page FBI file. Like Baldwin's writing the file has itself become the object of significant literary analysis, notably in William J. Maxwell's F.B. Eyes: How J Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature.[2] Baldwin's record - or at least part of it - is now available on the FBI website.[3] Other writers were subject of files including 260 pages on black writer Richard Wright and 110 pages on Truman Capote, but Baldwin's was particularly extensive.[4]
  • Eleanor Roosevelt (wife of President Franklin Roosevelt) was not an obvious threat to the USA, but according to her biographer Blanche Cook, her record was "one of the largest individual files that Hoover compiled".[5] It is claimed that this was largely because of her interest in human rights, and consequent suspicion that she was a communist or communist stooge.[6]
  • Elvis Presley was the subject of a 683-page file. However most of this concerned potential and actual crimes against Presley, such as death threats, major thefts, and fraud, as well as comments from members of the public who believed Elvis was a threat to public morals. It does not appear that the FBI considered Presley to be a significant threat to the nation.[7]
  • John Lennon was considered a threat to the US government, and the INS attempted to have him deported in the early 1970s; Lennon's legal team managed to resist. Lennon's FBI file is the subject of a book by Jon Wiener. Wiener reported that the FBI also attempted to have Lennon arrested for drugs possession, which would have been grounds for deportation, although drug possession was not normally something the FBI would investigate. The FBI also mentioned in the files their desire to "neutralise" Lennon; this is taken by some people as indicating plans to assassinate Lennon but Wiener reckons it merely indicates a desire to get Lennon to shut up and cease his activism. Lennon sued the FBI to find out if they were wiretapping him, but they denied that any wire taps had been authorised (of course, some people take this to mean that there were unauthorised wiretaps against Lennon).[8]
  • Martin Luther King was subject of a lengthy FBI file, including rumors of affairs, "drunken sex orgies", an illegitimate child, and secret communist sympathies; most was based on hearsay and rumour.[9]

The FBI in popular culture[edit]

  • The coolest and most unlikely FBI agents ever are named Cooper and Mulder.
  • Feds are the mortal enemies of TV cops-which isn't saying much, as police dramas are apt to portray anyone who isn't a homicide detective as corrupt and/or incompetent. Federal agents lie somewhere between Internal Affairs and DEA on the evildoer scale.
  • The FBI's only use for the local police in Reno is to send them for coffee. And they did that badly.

See also[edit]