G-Men: 1975 Style

The FBI File

by Sanford J. Ungar

For John Bassett, the FBI is something of a dream come true, the victory of his ambition and ability over his adventurousness and aimlessness. A high school dropout in Burlington, Vermont, he began boxing professionally under the name of “Sparky Bassett” at age fifteen, well below the legal limit, and then went off to spend two years in the Coast Guard. By 1946 he was in New York City, appearing in fights at Madison Square Garden and Yankee Stadium, among other places, but a close friend, a regional official with the Veterans Administration, pleaded with him to get out of the boxing world and into something more respectable. He took Bassett to lunch with the president of Seton Hall University in New Jersey. One thing led to another, and because he had completed high school equivalency courses at the University of Vermont, Bassett was immediately admitted to Seton Hall as a college student. For four years, he attended classes by day and had a job as a policeman in East Orange, New Jersey, from midnight until 8 A.M.

Working as a cop in those days, one tended to meet FBI agents, and when Bassett graduated from Seton Hall in 1954, a friend in the Bureau encouraged him to apply; it was a period when police experience was being accepted as an especially relevant qualification or becoming an agent. Imagining the New York fight managers and other characters who might be interviewed during his background investigation, Bassett never expected to be chosen; but he was, and, he says unabashedly today, “It was wonderful.” Assigned to Buffalo and Charlotte, he quickly became something of a Bureau legend—a guy who might take off in the wrong direction after a bank robber, but invariably would come up with his man. In Chicago since 1961, he has served as a sort of Man Friday, a facilitator and arranger, for one special-agent-incharge after another. He is the perfect greeter and guide for visiting Bureau personnel, and a natural investigator on organized crime cases to boot.

Bassett spent his twentieth anniversary at the FBI training academy in Quantico, where he served as a “counselor” to a group of fifty policemen.

Tony Christy, a casual man with a degree in finance from Ohio State University, was quite content with his job as an auditor at the Mead Corporation in Dayton. In fact, he was about to be promoted in 1970 when his mind began to wander.

One Sunday night he and his wife were watching an episode of The FBI, a television series with Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. He thought it was silly and glossy and probably unrealistic, but still he wondered, What would it be like? Christy had no background in law enforcement nor any prior inclination toward it, but somehow at that moment the idea of the FBI struck his fancy. “So why don’t you find out about it and apply?” his wife suggested. “Just as a lark,” he insists, he dropped in at the Dayton resident agency later that week and filled out some forms. Before long, he had a phone call on a Saturday night, asking him to report to the Cincinnati field office the next morning—Sunday—for an interview. The Bureau had an appropriation to hire a thousand new agents and the push was on. The Christys drove to Cincinnati as requested, and Cheryl Christy sat freezing in the parking lot for what seemed like hours while Tony was being grilled upstairs. By the time he was finished. he was even more intrigued by the idea. Very soon thereafter, he had a telegram offering him the new job and giving him a date to report to Quantico. He never even hesitated.

Christy bought five white shirts for training, because he had none; he hasn’t worn them since, finding them unnecessary in the Atlanta, New York, and Jackson field offices, except during occasional court appearances on behalf of the Bureau.

After seven years as a member of the New York City Police Department, J. P. Morgan, the son of a New York police detective, recalls, “I had to make a decision whether to go corrupt.” One choice, made by some of his colleagues, would have been to accept payoffs and get into crooked operations which could have raised his annual unofficial income to about $200,000; another was to “go straight.” “In the back of my mind,” says Morgan. “I guess I always wanted to be an FBI agent. That seemed like the ultimate in cops. But I felt it was out of my reach, and I was always told, ‘If the FBI wants you, they’ll come look for you.’”

Despite the fact that at thirty-two he was older than the average applicant (and color-blind), and had a couple of police-brutality complaints pending against him. Morgan was accepted in 1964. He took a cut in pay, and he and his wife moved out of their recently purchased “dream house” because he was sent by the Bureau to the Charlotte, North Carolina, field office. “It was the greatest thing that ever happened to me,” he now feels; “I had thought the world ended at the other side of the George Washington Bridge. It was wonderful to get a chance to travel. A whole new world opened up to me.” On Morgan’s first case, a man he was attempting to arrest told him, “I used to eat guys like you for breakfast.” and physically attacked him, a situation that required the summoning of reinforcements from the field office. But it was all uphill from there—single-handed capture of a Most Wanted fugitive; work in important civil rights cases elsewhere in the South: six months at the Navy Language School in Monterey, California; assignment to Miami; and then transfer to headquarters to help establish a “management unit” in the Training Division. But although Morgan had intended to make the Bureau a career, he was lured away in 1969 by the offer of a professorship at the University of Georgia, “an opportunity to preach what I had been practicing.” Later he served as police chief of St. Petersburg, Florida, and as a consultant for The Police Foundation. His was a short Bureau career, but one that opened great new vistas to him.

“I don’t want to sound corny,” says Esteban Uriarte when asked how he happened to become an FBI agent, “but I wanted to pay this country back.” The United States, as he puts it, “opened its arms to me” in 1960, when he left Cuba with only the clothes on his back and five dollars in his pocket. His parents, who had left Spain for Cuba in the 1930s during the Civil War, followed him to the United States three years later. Eventually, through refugee aid programs, he attended Louisiana State University, graduating with an accounting degree in 1972.

But in 1971, as soon as he became an American citizen, Uriarte had applied to the Bureau for employment. Shifting uncomfortably as he talks, he explains, “I saw what went on in Cuba—the shooting and all that. You couldn’t go to church or a movie without a bomb going off. . . . I saw the need for law enforcement, and the FBI is the strongest law enforcement organization in the country. I wanted to do something to help this country defend itself, and the FBI seemed the best way to do that.” When he first got his degree, there was a freeze on the hiring of new agents; but with his skills in accounting and in the Bureau’s most-needed language, Spanish, not to mention his resentment toward the Castro regime in Cuba, Uriarte was a natural, and in May, 1973, he got a letter inviting him to training. After breaking in on general criminal cases, he was quickly shifted to a squad where his accounting knowledge would be helpful—but he was also used for surveillance work on other cases, since his Latin look distinguished him from the usual FBI agent.

“The more I get into it,” he said after a few months in the field, “it’s incredible how much crime there is . . . and how the public doesn’t know what’s going on. So much money is taken from the public; you could work twenty-four hours a day and never get through.”

The winner of the Heisman Trophy for the best college football player of 1973, John Cappelletti of Penn State University, interviewed by sportswriters in his moment of glory, was asked about his career plans. Without hesitation, he replied that what he would most like to do eventually was to become a special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It is difficult to calculate the reinforcing effect that may have had on tens of thousands of grammar school and high school students who already thought that football players and FBI agents were two of the best things in the world that one could ever be. But it must have been very gratifying indeed to the 8600 FBI agents to know that even as they were going through some of the most difficult times in the agency’s history, their job was still one aspired to by people who played other glamorous roles. For it is often the matter of image that has recruited men into the FBI—and has kept them there. As one agent in Los Angeles put it. “I never really knew what it was like to be on top of the heap until I came into the FBI.”

In practical terms, “the top of the heap” has usually meant that doors open which would not open to others, that one is respected in the community and among one’s peers, and that daily life has an overlay of theoretical, if not actual, excitement and romance to it.

“I never really knew what it was like to be on top of the heap until I came into the FBI.”

For some agents, life is verv exciting indeed, as they go about solving bank robberies, kidnappings, and dramatic extortion cases, or pursuing organizedcrime families or foreign spies operating in this country; those assigned to the best squads in the busiest field offices say they would not trade their job for any other. But for many, the daily routine is banal—running down stolen cars that have been taken across state lines, keeping humdrum track of organizations presumed to threaten the nation’s security, or pounding the pavement to do background investigations of applicants for FBI jobs and potential appointees to high federal positions.

Initially, the image of importance and glamour was sustained in large part by the general esteem in which the late J. Edgar Hoover was held; it seemed to rub off on the men who worked for him. “I felt when I came in the Bureau that Mr. Hoover had hired me.” said the Los Angeles agent; “I felt proud to be one of his men.” Hoover was such an important part of the image that many agents displayed a portrait of the Director on the wall in their homes. (A few still do.) After some years, however, the image and the pride began to sustain themselves.

It is demonstrably true that FBI agents probably are of a higher caliber than anyone else in American law enforcement, but not exactly in the way that many people think. For years the Bureau basked in the myth that every agent is either a fully trained lawyer or an accountant; the Bureau did not actually state unequivocally that this was the case, but it allowed, even led, people to believe it. In fact, that has never been so. During Hoover’s first years in charge of the Bureau, he tended to hire lawyers (less on the basis of any abstract principle, it seems, than on the fact that he himself had a law degree) until the percentage of agents with legal training had dramatically increased. There was also a corps of accountants, who were considered to be in a category apart from the other agents and who worked only on cases requiring their special skills; as the number of those cases increased, more accountants were recruited.

Before very long, however, the Director saw that it was neither necessary nor desirable to insist that every agent hired be a lawyer or an accountant. Gradually, other qualifications were substituted: college graduates “with a major in a physical science for which the Bureau has a current need,” “with fluency in a language for which the Bureau has a current need,” or with “three years of professional, executive, complex investigative or other specialized experience.” That meant that while lawyers and accountants were still welcome, and in some periods given preference, there was also room for high school teachers and coaches, military veterans (especially Marines), policemen, stockbrokers, insurance men, bank officers, geologists, journalists, and, of course. Bureau clerks. The official circular on agent jobs also points out that “the FBI reserves the right to waive a qualification not bearing on character and integrity when found necessary to obtain an employee with demonstrated ability in some particular skill that is unique or unusual, and for which a need exists.” In other words, the rules leave room enough for the Bureau to take anyone it wants, and without the constraints and regulations of the Civil Service Commission. Today, in fact, only 14 percent of the agents are lawyers and 8 percent accountants. About 23 percent of the agents are former FBI clerks, and 64 percent are former members of the military who qualify for veterans’ preference.

Most of the other qualifications are standard— good vision and hearing and an otherwise “excellent physical condition,” as well as a driver’s license. For more than thirty years, applicants had to be at least five feet seven inches tall, but the height restriction was abolished last June—in part because it was thought to discriminate against the women newly competing for agent positions.

The college degree requirement and the age restriction—now twenty-three to thirty-six at the time of application—have assured that FBI standards remain much higher than those of most police departments and other law enforcement agencies; many agents enter the Bureau with master’s degrees or even doctorates (or work on them nights and weekends while on duty). Just completing the application for Bureau employment requires a certain level of stamina and literacy. It is an exhaustive ten-page form, with spaces for biographical details of “wives (including maiden names) and husbands of brothers and sisters.”of “brothers and sisters of your husband or wife" and “name and present location of ex-spouse.”(Divorce is not a disqualification, as is, say. homosexuality.) The application becomes the basis for an extensive field investigation of every prospective agent, which theoretically weeds out anyone of questionable background. character, or “loyalty.”The Bureau refuses to make a sample of its written examination available for any outside inspection, but insists that it is a rigorous test of aptitude, judgment, and legalstyle reasoning.

Another characteristic that puts the FBI well above most other police and law enforcement agencies, not to say government agencies in general, is the absence of large-scale corruption among agents. The contacts and connections of FBI officials have often brought them favors and special considerations, but there are remarkably few documented instances of agents accepting payoffs or kickbacks, making personal use of evidence seized in connection with cases, or peddling their inf1uence—practices that are notoriously common among many local and state police forces. The Immigration and Naturalization Service, Bureau of Customs, and federal narcotics enforcement agencies, for example, have all been hit by wellpublicized scandals concerning the financial improprieties of their field personnel. But colleagues consider FBI agents straight arrows by comparison. And despite some investigative abuses, under the counterintelligence programs (“COINTELPRO”), of recent notoriety and on the initiative of individual agents, the Bureau has not often been tainted by such illegal and abusive tactics as those associated with agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration—knocking down doors in midnight raids on the wrong house, selling hard drugs themselves on the side, and the like.

The FBI also profits from its reputation for continuity. Bureau agents tend to stay in their jobs longer than most, and the turnover figures are astonishingly low. The unofficial agreement is that any person graduated from agent’s training will remain with the Bureau a minimum of three years, but in practice agents tend to stay longer than that—sixteen years and three months is the average. Once an agent passes the three-year mark, the odds are that he will last for twenty years or more, and then retire with a very attractive pension. The transfer policy and other bureaucratic factors, however, sometimes interfere with continuity, and individual citizens may be approached by different FBI officials on the same case from one period of time to another. But the routine paperwork and standardization of style which are so annoying to some Bureau people assure that one agent can usually pick up where another has left off.

Who are these agents who present themselves as being so proud and sure of themselves, the self-styled elite of law enforcement? The Bureau insists that it does not compile and computerize official biographical statistics, but an unscientific composite profile is relatively easy to construct on the basis of observation of. and conversation with, a substantial number of agents. They are overwhelmingly white males of an average age somewhat older these days than the Bureau would like to acknowledge for what is called a “young man’s profession.” In Bureau ranks there is a high representation of Catholics, especially of Irish origin, many of whom attended church-run or -supported colleges and universities, oftentimes in the northeastern part of the United States. (If the CIA prototype is a Yale man, his FBI counterpart likely went to Fordham or Notre Dame.) They tend to be churchgoers, but not to live overly restrained personal and social lives. (A striking number have relatives in the clergy, and there is irony in the fact that some of those relatives showed up on the other side of cases involving radical protesters during the Vietnam War.) Most are married and have children; if they are not married when they enter the Bureau, the chances are good that they will meet and marry an FBI stenographer or other clerical employee. They are robust, but not as rough-and-tumble as the 1930s “gangbusters" types. Quick-tempered, they can be rather easily provoked into arguments. They usually want to be assigned as close to their hometown as possible. They are rarely wealthy, and they are solidly planted in the middle class. Quite a few agents are the sons of policemen, and they see their career decision as a natural progression. a step upward that is still in the same great tradition of law enforcement.

Interestingly, there is a subtle, residual bias within the Bureau itself against agents who are former policemen. It is sometimes suggested that these ex-cops slipped in while the standards were lowered to expand the agent force; and former policemen rarely make it into the highest-ranking Bureau positions. (The former policemen, for their own part, can point to their ability to defend themselves physically better than most.)

The Bureau has always prided itself on good geographical distribution, drawing agents from every section of the country and. in keeping with a Hoover policy dating back to 1924. generally sending them to another area for their first assignmerits. But one striking aspect of the average field office for many years was the number of agents who originally came from small towns. The reasons have long been the subject of speculation. Is it because small-town boys are less cynical and more idealistic about the notion of government service, or that the image of policemen has been held in more awe in small communities than in big cities, or just that background checks on agent applicants are less likely to turn up derogatory information or other problems if the person has spent most of his life in sparsely populated, clean-living areas? Whatever the reasons, the effect, especially among old-timers in the FBI, was to carry over small-town values and principles to the Bureau. That meant an uncommon degree of openness and friendliness, but also a sense of horror about what goes on in the big cities where most of these agents ended up working. Younger agents have complained that the small-town mentality in the FBI also led to a certain narrow-mindedness and intolerance. The small-town influence seems to have diminished considerably in recent years.

For a long time there were very few Jewish agents or members of other minority ethnic groups, and only a smattering of American Indians or Spanishsurnamed agents. The only blacks were people dubbed “honorary agents.” whose real assignments were to be personal servants, retainers, chauffeurs, or office boys to the Director, and of course there were no women agents at all. L. Patrick Gray III, as soon as he became acting director of the FBI in May, 1972, lifted the ban on women agents. Today there are thirty-one women assigned to field offices.

Part of the reason for this uniformity of race and background was the personal prejudices of J. Edgar Hoover and his associate director, Clyde Tolson. They wanted to be surrounded by average, all-American types. In fact there were Jews among the men who worked closely at Hoover’s side over the years, including Harold “Pop” Nathan in the 1920s and 1930s, and Alex Rosen from World War II until the Director’s death, but it was always assumed that law enforcement was not a very popular profession or a status career choice among Jews. One former agent, who worked on a security squad in New York, recalls that Jews were not expected to be particular friends of the FBI, and that one way to list somebody—and in the process, manage to skip interviewing him—was to describe him with the telling epithet, “a Jewish academician of known liberal persuasion.” But the paucity of Jewish agents also meant that there were few people considered eligible, for example, to conduct investigations among Orthodox Jewish communities in Brooklyn or, in the summertime, at the Catskill mountain resorts of upstate New York.

Similarly, the Bureau had very few agents it could confidently send into Mexican-American or Puerto Rican communities, onto Indian reservations, or into black ghettos, so it often had to rely on informant coverage or help from the police, who were themselves sometimes not very welcome in those communities.

There is little question that Hoover simply had an old-fashioned, narrow-minded, southern attitude toward blacks. When Robert Kennedy became Attorney General in 1961, and declared that every branch of the Justice Department, including the FBI, would have to increase its minority recruiting and hiring, the Director made an enormous fuss over the fact that he was not going to “lower standards” just to integrate the Bureau. It turned out that the FBI, like so many other employers, did not have to lower its standards, but had to develop some new recruiting techniques and make blacks feel they would have an equal shot at advancement in the Bureau. When Hoover yielded, he did so slowly and painfully. Fifteen years later, after other black recruiting pushes and establishment of an equal employment opportunity office within the Administrative Division, there are only about a hundred black FBI agents out of the total 8600, and a mere handful of them are in supervisory positions. One problem, according to Bureau officials, is that there is a higher turnover among black agents than among agents in general; once trained by the Bureau, they are inevitably offered other, perhaps better-paying, jobs with private industry, and some leave to take those jobs. As for Chicanos, of whom there are also very few in the Bureau, FBI officials have recently been heard on Capitol Hill to offer their own pop-sociological explanation: “They don’t like to leave their families or take the chance of being sent far away from home.”

Once in the Bureau, black agents, because they are so few in number, tend to get particularly exciting assignments, the closest thing to the flyingsquad image of fictionalized television programs. They were urgently rushed in, for example, to work on the recent murder cases in the Virgin Islands, and have been similarly deployed when and where their skin color would be an obvious investigative advantage. “I have already had experiences,” says one black agent after five years of service. “that some guys don’t get in twenty years.” Another young black agent confirms that his role poses special problems because he tends to have somewhat different values from his fellow agents, but also to be regarded with suspicion in the black community. “The kid on the street only reads about the Bureau’s harassment of the Black Panther party. He’s forgotten about Selma [Alabama] and the Bureau’s role in protecting the right of blacks to vote.” Most blacks in the FBI are opposed, but thus far quietly, to the Bureau’s easy tendency to label black people “extremists” and investigate them indiscriminately; they suggest that when their representation in the Bureau ranks is greater, as inevitably it must become, and there are blacks in special-agent-in-charge and assistantspecial-agent-in-charge positions, these hangovers from the past will change dramatically.

The FBI’s overall minority-hiring record compares favorably with that of many other federal agencies, but relatively few of the minority employees hold the prestigious position of agent. The latest Bureau statistics show 104 black agents, 107 with “Spanish surnames,” nineteen “Asian-Americans,” and thirteen American Indians.

The world view of agents generally includes a heavy component of political conservatism. Most agents, for reasons of family background and tradition, are registered Democrats, but are inclined to believe that the Democratic party has gone off the deep end of radicalism. Above all, they feel a tremendous world-weariness, which leads them to distrust many people with whom they have contact, especially politicians and newsmen.

Not every agent shares these views on his arrival in the Bureau, but the organization has a powerful conservative influence on new recruits. Although the FBI today is officially a nonpolitical agency, one relatively new agent says he was surprised to find that “everybody feels obligated to take a stand on every political issue, and after a while you realize that this is a right-of-center organization.” Another young agent speculates that much of the conservative mind-set derives from the law-and-order issue and the Bureau’s constant frustration with the courts. “I can’t stand seeing these bad guys released from prison,” he says mournfully; “I haven’t yet seen people turn around and follow the straight and narrow path. . . . I’m twenty-eight years old, but I feel forty-eight sometimes. I get very upset and cannot sleep some nights. At the expense of the taxpayers, agents are risking their lives to capture people, and then those people are just turned out on the streets again.” But increasingly, one agent posted in the South claims, young recruits are taking the chance of expressing more liberal, progressive attitudes in conversation with their older colleagues—especially on issues like the environment, defense spending, and tax laws. They remain distinctly minority viewpoints, however.

The life-style of FBI agents is usually in keeping with their image as solid citizens. They tend to buy their own homes, preferably in the distant, newly developed suburbs, and to send their children to public or parochial schools. Except in cities like Miami, where the norm is different, they generally dress conservatively, notwithstanding the repeal of Hoover’s old white-shirt-and-black-shoes rules. Their hair is still relatively short, and anyone who starts growing a moustache will likely be teased as a “hippie” for a while before he is ultimately accepted. There are only a few rebels here, who, in contrast to the many in the military, feel tempted to make themselves test cases by growing beards. (It remains the official Bureau view that a beard and other manifestations of nonconformity are outside the average citizen’s reasonable expectations of an FBI agent. But it is not absolutely forbidden, and there are probably about a dozen bearded agents these days—in many cases because of special undercover assignments.)

External characteristics are also often important to agents in their judgments of others, including those they investigate. One agent who worked on the investigation of the National Guardsmen who fired into a crowd and killed four students during the May, 1970, antiwar demonstrations at Kent State University in Ohio acknowledged frankly that “what those kids looked like” and their obscene gestures at the Guardsmen had affected his ability to feel sympathy for them.

Agents have a strong yearning for normality and stability, and one young agent says that he would not under any circumstances want to work with a colleague who had been seeing a psychiatrist. “I could never be sure whether I could rely on him,” he says. It was scandalous enough when an agent assigned to the Louisville field office committed suicide, but considered even more so when it was learned that he had been seeing a psychiatrist without the Bureau’s knowledge.

Most agents feel a tremendous world-weariness, which leads them to distrust many people with whom they have contact, especially politicians and newsmen.

Virtually every FBI agent can cite the exact date when he entered on duty: it was a major event which meant important changes in his routine and perhaps even in his personality. It made him part of an organization that is sustained on an extraordinarily high level of spirit and enthusiasm. It is a while before full membership in this brotherhood takes effect. An agent must make an arrest or otherwise prove his mettle on the firing line before he is accepted as an equal by his immediate peers and colleagues. And traditionally, as long as he is still in his first office assignment, he is regarded as an apprentice; by the irrational, unofficial rules of the game, an agent who has been in the Bureau only seven months but is in his second office might be trusted with more independent responsibility than one who has been on duty twice as long but is still in his first office assignment. Two first-office agents, in fact, are not supposed to make an arrest together.¹

Once an agent has been through initiation, his job will invariably give him a profound feeling of security, in more than the ordinary sense. The FBI is unique in the extent to which agents, particularly in the field, will bail each other out of crises. If an agent is ill but has used up all of his sick leave, it is standard procedure for his colleagues to chip in and make up his paycheck every week; if his wife or other family members have problems, or if he otherwise falls into a desperate financial situation, the same thing will be done. The widow of an agent who dies suddenly, on or off duty, can count on unofficial help of every sort as long as she wants it. In the midst of disasters, colleagues are always available to help. When the resident agent in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, was a victim of the floods caused by Hurricane Agnes in the summer of 1972, for example, a whole crew from the Philadelphia field office, to which he reports, spent a weekend helping him dig out.

If the CIA prototype is a Yale man, his counterpart likely went to Fordham or Notre Dame.

But let an agent renounce the Bureau or otherwise defy the unwritten code of conduct, and his colleagues may immediately turn against him. When the chips are down and the lines of battle drawn, the instinct is to defend the Bureau as an institution against all attackers, even from within. Disenchanted former agents may have been saying publicly nothing more extreme than what hundreds of agents had said privately for years, but the fact of their saying it publicly and becoming “enemies” of the FBI disqualifies them entirely for support.

So strong is the pull and the security of the Bureau that some agents who leave eventually come back into the fold; with few exceptions, depending on the current needs of the Bureau at any given time, they are welcomed back in good standing. Those who leave under friendly circumstances remain profoundly loyal and reap considerable personal advantage. Their training and experience is thought to qualify them for employment with the security or public affairs divisions of major corporations or small businesses, as prosecutors or lawyers with a private criminal law practice, as police chiefs in small town or big city, or even as candidates for public office in communities where they have been assigned as agents. Many of these former agents achieve powerful positions from which they are able to show their gratitude to the FBI, whether by surreptitiously providing information to agents, speaking on the Bureau’s behalf in moments of controversy, or helping it gain subtle and sometimes undetected influence on the political scene. The relationship has dividends in the other direction, too. People who have left the Bureau are often able to call upon their former colleagues to check matters for them in FBI files and to do them other occasional favors. It is an exchange that goes on all the time.

Most former agents are united in a gigantic fraternity called the Society of Former Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Headquartered in New York, the organization serves primarily to facilitate contacts among former agents, and in mid-summer of 1975, 6387 of them were members. It publishes a confidential directory, so that people can readily locate old associates and find new ones with a common background who would be predisposed to help in an area of need. The organization has a monthly publication called The Grapevine, which consists largely of gossip about the Bureau and its alumni, and holds an annual convention, strictly off-limits to the press and the public. The director is always invited to address the annual meeting, and although Hoover stopped doing so in his last years, L. Patrick Gray III and Clarence Kelley after him seized upon the opportunity to cultivate an important source of support outside the government. The ex-agents’ association sometimes serves as a powerful lobby for the Bureau’s interests with both Congress and local governments.

Among the agent population of the FBI, there are several clearly definable generations of recruits who came in under circumstances that were different each from the others. Those circumstances often affect the way the agents do their work, view the Bureau’s mission and its relationships with the outside world, and look toward the future. Not everyone fits into one of these groups, obviously, because the FBI is always hiring; but the generations correspond, for the most part, to particular waves during which the Bureau expanded.

One generation entered the FBI just as World War II was beginning and the Bureau had only recently been assigned by President Roosevelt to make a major effort to combat espionage and subversion. The war was a dominant influence in their lives, and they saw the FBI as an extension of (in fact, it was an alternative to) military service; they considered it a privilege to be part of the war effort and to shape the Bureau to the needs of the time. Among the recruits of that era were Clarence Kelley, William C. Sullivan, Cartha (“Deke”) DeLoach, and others who would later become important in Bureau history. To them, a war was a war, be it in Europe, Korea, or Vietnam, and one did not question national policy in such a time of emergency. But these men tended to have a more flexible sense than Hoover did of what the FBI should be doing, and they considered it only logical that such an institution should shift gears and change emphasis (to civil rights, organized crime, terrorism, or whatever) with the temper and the needs of the times; they saw that to do so enhanced the Bureau’s importance in the life of the nation and in law enforcement circles. If Hoover had stepped aside ten years or so before he died, and if, at the peak of their careers, this generation had had an opportunity to shape the Bureau, it might have become an agency that was uniquely relevant and responsive to the changing times, if not greatly innovative about techniques.

Another group flocked into the Bureau as the Korean War broke out, heating up the Cold War. Hoover, by then taking the Bureau’s “internal security” mandate very seriously, asked for and obtained substantial increases in the appropriations for hiring agents. The people who came in, for the most part, had served in World War II, and they perceived their country to be going down the drain in its aftermath. With the McCarthy Era in full swing, they were frightened by Soviet moves abroad and saw possible domestic parallels in the offing. They were sympathetic, and sometimes publicly so, with the witch-hunts of the senator from Wisconsin and the House Un-American Activities Committee. They were perhaps the most stridently and enduringly conservative people ever to enter the FBI. They did not merely believe in the importance of the Bureau’s internal security work, they favored its considerable expansion. Many of them serve today as special-agents-in-charge or assistant directors, and in a relaxed moment they will pine for the good old days when the Bureau could call someone a “Commie” and not have to worry about the consequences. They are the most adoring of Hoover, unable usually even to joke about his foibles and mistakes, and especially wary of any significant changes within the FBI. Until more of them have retired—an event likely to occur by 1978 under the terms of a recently passed retirement bill—those changes cannot occur smoothly.

A third generation is made up of the children of the 1950s and 1960s, who came of age during a period of great upheaval in American society, culture, and government. They too entered the FBI in wartime, during the latter stages of the conflict in Vietnam in the late 1960s and early 1970s; but that was a different kind of war, which had declining support among the people. This group includes one contingent known by some as “The Berrigan 1000,” the extra agents specially authorized by Congress after Hoover’s dramatic testimony in 1970 concerning the alleged “incipient plot” of Fathers Daniel and Philip Berrigan and other militant Catholic activists to kidnap government officials, blow up buildings, and throw Washington into havoc. According to the terms of the Director’s request, they were to help the FBI in fighting organized crime, airplane hijackings, and the New Left. Under the circumstances of their hasty recruitment, one might have expected these new agents to be right-wing characters, yearning for the scalps of student demonstrators, and angry over the decline in public esteem for the Bureau. But whether by the force of history or by accident, what the FBI got was people who were especially free-thinking and who did not necessarily react to events on the basis of knee-jerk instincts. In contrast to the cozy Bureau the World War II generation of agents entered, these young people came into an impersonal and growing bureaucracy. They did not automatically seek involvement in security work, and indeed, some shunned it as outmoded and overdone; they were more interested in organized crime investigations and other areas of the FBI’s criminal jurisdiction.

Most Bureau officials did not appear to realize it at first—in part because it is not their wont to find out what ordinary agents think—but this new breed of agents, even if they were military veterans, tended to see the Vietnam War in some perspective. Many of them were vaguely troubled by the idea of looking for Selective Service violators and deserters who were possibly of their own age and similar backgrounds. They were less dogmatic about some of the Bureau’s political and social attitudes and less likely to overreact to the appearance of a liberal organization in an applicant investigation. Some, shock of all shocks, chose to let their hair grow longer even before L. Patrick Gray gave agents permission to do so, and tried to draw older colleagues out on the subject of why young people’s hair and clothes should be matters of such emotional contention in the FBI, why “hippies” provoked such wrath and hate. There is always a chance that these agents, like other generations before them, will become crusty and narrow-minded with the passage of time, but they insist—still quietly—that if and when their time comes, they will help bring reform to the Bureau. □