FBI: History of the American Intelligence Agency

[Mutt]

Intelligence agencies and their history is a page that is not talked about.
This topic tells the WHOLE TRUTH about the main US intelligence agency. Who the FBI really is.

The history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is still shrouded in vultures, myths and speculation. We lift the veil of secrecy. How the FBI was born, what is the Bureau of Investigation. Who was Edgar Hoover, what role did he play in US politics and why was he the head of one of the main American intelligence agencies for 50 years. What is the FBI, how did they fight the mafia. Confronting maniacs. Surveillance of communists. Is it possible to get a job at the FBI and what is the selection process there. What secrets does Hoover's famous safe keep. How the gangsters were defeated, what is the FBI doing now. Why do they need special forces. How the organization is structured from the inside and who exposed the main Nazi spy network in the USA.

Contents:

• What is the FBI? What is the topic about?
• Fingerprints as the Basis of FBI Investigations
• The National Bureau of Criminal Identification is the first US intelligence agency
• How the Bureau of Investigation was born
• Edgar Hoover. The man who personified the FBI. The chief agent of the state.
• Anthony Kosmotok. The man who became the prototype for the game Bioshock.
• Why Hoover Didn't Take Women into the FBI. Bureau Prohibitions and Requirements.
• The Great Depression and the Rise of the Mafia
• Fighting the Mafia. Creation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
• The most famous gangsters of the USA
• Agent Melvin Purvis - The Man Who Took Down America's Most Dangerous Gangster
• FBI vs. Third Reich. Fighting Abwehr spies.
• Nazi Spy Supernetwork: The Duquesne Organization.
• American Communists. How Many Were There in the USA. Recruitment and Surveillance by the FBI.
• Secret Files in the FBI
• Undercover agents
• What secrets did FBI chief Hoover hide?
• FBI Headquarters
• How the FBI is organized from the inside. Rules. Codes. Prohibitions. General structure.
• Zodiac Maniac: How the Federal Bureau Investigates Such Crimes.
• FBI SWAT
• Who is recruited into the Federal Bureau of Investigation. FBI Academy.

What is the FBI? What is the topic?
Good evening, I am calling regarding your report on the current case that you are leading. Apparently, the investigation is not going well. Please tell me what evidence has been collected so far. Yes? No, it is not enough. No, I do not think it is enough to put this bastard behind bars.

Mr. Ubrien, I understand everything, this is your business and you are leading it, but if the investigation reaches a dead end, this case will fall apart. After all, we do not work here for personal ambitions, we protect the country and our citizens, do you remember that? Today I am sending you two of our people, Sullivan and Murphy, you know them, please bring them up to date.

Hello dear friends, so we meet. Today I will give you a tour and take you behind the scenes of the most famous, huge and powerful special service of the United States of America, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI. Murphy? Yes, Murphy.

Go see Sullivan. You're turning over to Mr. Kelly today, so Protocol 5 is sending you to Towen Falls County, Idaho, where Mr. O'Brien will be waiting to brief you, so do it. Hello again, I hope you know about the FBI from the movies, and we haven't met before in our line of work.

Let's start by defining what the Federal Bureau of Investigation does. I'll start by filling you in. The Federal Bureau of Investigation investigates federal crimes. Unlike state laws, federal crimes are universal.

Kidnapping, hijacking, fraud, identity theft, cybercrime, racketeering, tax evasion, espionage, invasion of privacy, surveillance, wiretapping, grand larceny or theft of valuables, hate crimes and forgery, organized crime, violent crimes against persons, especially serial crimes, corruption, terrorism, human trafficking, bank robberies.

We cooperate with all relevant agencies in our investigations, be it the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Drug Enforcement Administration, or Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Of course, the FBI cooperates with local police. And no, federal agents do not snatch cases out of the hands of cops who have almost solved them and then indignantly continue to investigate the case themselves in order to wipe the noses of the people from the bureau.

That only happens in the movies. The police are receptive to any assistance from the FBI, since the bureau's capabilities are much more sophisticated and extensive than those of the police, and the likelihood of a positive investigation of the case immediately increases by an order of magnitude.

Often the police can't even investigate this case, it's just not their level and they pass on the initial materials and evidence they've collected to the people in the bureau. So, we've destroyed the first myth and I think this myth won't be the last.

Fingerprints as the basis for FBI investigations.
Every person has their own dossier. Tasty, written, electronic. This is their biography, where, when they lived, studied, worked, served, were friends. Their entire history. And after reading it, you can form an impression of many things. There is also a history of the organization, and we'll start with it. In most films and books, you'll find one name and one surname near the beginning of the FBI's history.

Edgar Gower, the father of the organization. But we'll get to Gower later. And we need to start earlier. Crime has always existed. I once read reports dating back to the times of late Rome. Literally, of course, there was no exact translation, but the surviving inscriptions quite well described what any investigator would understand even centuries later.

People have always been the same, the nature of crimes changes under the influence of scientific and technological progress, but the vices remain the same. However, I will also add on my own behalf that not all crimes now were crimes then and vice versa.

Any crime for many years could only be solved on the trail or by catching the criminal in the act. Quick questioning of witnesses, interceptions on the roads, work with an agent network. In the USA and in old Europe, street vendors, janitors and gangs of boys who always hang out in the most crowded places provided invaluable service to detectives. But detaining a suspect was not enough.

It was necessary to prove the fact of his guilt. The most effective method is a personal confession of the suspect. It was obtained by different methods at all times, but the effectiveness of different methods is very poor. The crime is solved, and the real criminal is probably free and will continue his crimes. During an internship in the history of forensic science, one of the topics will be the story that even in the Middle Ages people tried to find the uniqueness of each person, which is expressed in physical form.

Something that makes absolutely everyone special among millions. This is how the teachings of anthropology were born, where observations were made that the size of the feet, the length of the fingers, the location of the eyes, ears and other parameters in people are different, but not unique, but still.

However, in those days it was difficult to conduct such research and not get into the field of view of the Holy Inquisition. Therefore, the interpretation that ink fingerprints left on parchment are clearly distinguishable remained theories. Too bad. However, if you have a well-versed lecturer, he will definitely tell you that in the time of the Babylonian kings, fingerprints were taken from prisoners using wet clay.

In the 7th-8th centuries A.D. Similar practices were in ancient China. In medieval France, potters put a fingerprint as a stamp on their dishes, and in Britain, illiterate people signed their names. But all this was remembered and forgotten dozens of times, as well as the works of the German anatomist Johann Myers, who for the first time on paper in 1789 substantiated and confirmed the fact that fingerprints differ in different people.

In 1850, the British Scotland Yard tried to somehow apply this knowledge to finding criminals. But everything rested on two things - the impossibility of thoroughly removing them from the crime scene and the lack of any basis for study, cataloging and comparison.

The National Bureau of Criminal Identification is the first US intelligence agency.
Even after catching a criminal and removing his fingerprints on paper, there was simply nothing to compare them with 100%. And it is better to send the case to court not with such evidence, but with his confession. Everything will change in 1901, when the French-Polish Cunier received the opportunity to remove fingerprints from a surface by fumigating it with iodine vapors.

This is where it all began, the National Bureau of Criminal Identification, created in Chicago in 1896, will be created as a future single database of all criminals and evidence at the federal level. From now on, a single standard was created for criminals - a dossier that will contain his photo, his personal data, parameters and his criminal cases.

This bureau, in principle, will be the first in the new world to adopt a new method called "Dactyloscopy", which will help to immediately increase the efficiency of police services and detective agencies tenfold. Crimes that seemed unsolved will be solved. Even if the criminals were silent as monuments on Hilt Square at that moment, fingerprints became official evidence confirming guilt and were now officially used in court.

Stories immediately began to spread around prisons that detectives could find absolutely everything from fingerprints. Dactyloscopy was not so effective at that time and it was impossible to take fingerprints from many surfaces with that technological progress.

However, as now, but who will tell the crooks about this? The myth and fear of criminals about the all-powerful form of obtaining evidence will play a huge role in many cases around the world. It was enough for the investigator to say, we have your fingerprints taken from the water along which you left after robbing a bank, and your accomplices have already confessed to everything.

And the criminal immediately began to write a confession to ease his guilt or tried to make a deal with the investigation. A working method, by the way, is to say that the investigation has all the evidence and his accomplices have already confessed to everything and are blaming him for everything. After that, it is worth leaving the criminal to think.

It works on many, but, alas, you can't get through to seasoned criminals like that. But crime, like society, grew smarter, organized, drew conclusions and learned. And the fear that fingerprints will give everything away no matter what comes with the thought that gloves significantly reduce the effectiveness of any investigative actions.

With the growth of the crime rate, his knowledge, experience, and intelligence were needed, and those who would do this at the state level. The twentieth century will become the century of radical political ideas.

How the Bureau of Investigation was born.
At that time in the United States in 1902, the main ones were the growing movements of American anarchists.

This radical movement, which saw in the strengthening of state authorities, the violation of their rights to freedom, a free country, free views and the so-called "spirit of the frontier", which Fenimore Cooper praised so much. Later, these movements will be replenished with fighters for workers' rights, supporters of land and constitutional reforms, and at some point they will become quite classic anarcho-communist movements, which were so full of old Europe.

They took the most radical methods of struggle for their views, and it will become clear that the police will not cope with this, due to the fact that this is not their profile. How to fight something that does not steal and does not attack?

President Theodore Roosevelt, no, not that one, but the one with a mustache and on a horse, planned to give the solution of this issue under the control of the Department of Justice, but the Department of Justice in those days was going through its worst moments, and the corruption scandals that occurred there shook society. Attorney General Charles Bonaparte takes up the case. He plans to create a nationwide autonomous investigative service with broad powers, controlled only by the office of the Attorney General.

They will be tasked with investigating cases involving government corruption, the slave trade, and radical political movements. They will be called the Bureau of Investigation. The year is 1908. Thirty trusted and reliable secret service people and their chief, Stanley Finch, are tasked with putting an end to corrupt judges, prosecutors, conspirators, and slave traders.

During congressional hearings, Bonaparte is openly accused by representatives of the Justice Department of violating the constitution and trying to create a secret police. But Bonaparte was unyielding, his last name still obliged him to be one.

Edgar Hoover. The man is the personification of the FBI. The main agent of the state.
You already know the next name. Hoover, Edgar John. A man who began his career working for the state, working as messengers in libraries and congresses. A man who could draw conclusions, benefits, and meaning from everything. His meticulousness and attention to detail will allow him and his agents to send entire gangs to Alcatraz in the future.

And you will be surprised, but he learned to understand people, precisely while working in the library order department. Thousands of people passed by him with their books, and he made psychological portraits of each one. He classified types of people, what they liked, what they took more often, what pages they read more often, what interests them. This is a very effective method and to this day Hoover at some point began to understand what kind of person he had in front of him and what books he needed, and what he could be advised.

This is an exceptionally high quality, necessary for any detective - to see right through people. But no one paid attention to the boy who stuttered. He also corrected his stuttering with his own approach - he learned to pronounce words as quickly as possible, so that the moment of pause came as far away as possible.

It would seem, but the method worked, and years later Hoover could reread any street master of rhyme from the East Coast. By the age of twenties, his passion and study of law leads him to the Bureau of Investigation. The times were turbulent, the First World War raged across Europe, followed by a series of revolutions, the Old World was collapsing before our eyes, empires were falling, and society was being captured by the ideas of communism.

For a state and society built on the idea and thoughts of capital accumulation and growth of well-being through the labor of generations, the views of taking everything and dividing it up, destroying it and building a new world would seem alien.

But revolutions are not made by the masses, but by groups that then impose dictatorship on the masses with their bayonets. Revolutions brought with them not only the collapse of the financial and political system, but also the collapse of the views of society, offering something completely different to replace it. Conservative society was being replaced by free morals and views. Guverovka did not have an example to inspire him.

The man is the personification of a fighter for conservatism, or as he called himself, a fighter against vices. Anthony Kamstock. Do not be surprised if you have heard this name somewhere before. You guessed right, Bioshock.

Anthony Comstock. The man who became the prototype for the game Bioshock.
Comstock was a postal inspector, and also a political activist, waging an uncompromising fight against obscene literature, gambling, prostitution and other things that do not fit into the framework of conservative morality. His methods were radical, sometimes dirty. He did not even have any ideas about entering into someone's position, he always set only a goal for himself.

But he had his admirers, and his views were periodically pushed through as laws, which were called Comstock laws. He wrote denunciations, burned books and newspapers, and claimed that reading books destroys the institution of marriage and sends people to brothels. Of course, I can't understand how Hoover, who just started his career working in one of the largest libraries in the world, felt about this.

In 1919, against the backdrop of the civil war in Russia, the failed November Revolution in Germany, and the rise of fascists in Italy, waves of immigrants from Europe begin to arrive in the United States. That same year, Alexander Mitchell Paumer, the United States Attorney General, appoints Hoover to head the Bureau of Investigation's General Intelligence Division.

Inside the bureau, this division was called the Radical Division. I think you've guessed what they did. Paumer is best known for leaving his mark on history not as an attorney general, but as a man associated with the events known as the Paumer Raids.

In the 19-20s, immigrants are arrested, primarily Italians. This event is preceded by radical actions among Italian anarchists who organized strikes, and 12 revolutionary communist cells will also be formed by immigrants from Soviet Russia fleeing the civil war. It was Hoover who supervised the arrests of immigrants and the search for radicals on Palmer's orders.

The then US President Woodrow Wilson repeatedly stated that people who came to the US should not inject the poison of discord, radicalism and anarchy into society. America gave them the opportunity to start everything from scratch in safety, and this opportunity should be respected. As a result, some of the people detained during Palmer's raids will be sent back, some will be acquitted, and some will be acquitted later due to the lack of any evidence of their activities.

But public opinion was divided into two parts. Some sympathized with the innocent and expressed regret that they again had to be subjected to persecution and harassment, while others suspected hidden Marxists in all the immigrants who arrived.

In 1924, against the backdrop of the Burstepot Dome corruption scandal, Edgar Hoover became the head of the entire Bureau of Investigation. Hoover is considered a reliable and proven person.

Why Hoover did not hire women in the FBI. The Bureau's prohibitions and requirements.
The previous head of the bureau, William Burnst, nicknamed the American Sherlock Holmes, was a distinguished detective and had a brilliant track record, but the investigation established indirect connections with corrupt officials, ministers, politicians, and Burnst was forced to resign. His bureau had previously been a place of the classic English detective school, where observation, logic, unhurried conclusions, adventurous moves and enormous intelligence work were valued.

Burnst relies not on the quantity, but on the quality of the agent and halves the staff to 600 people. The patriarchal detective society, established literally for centuries, he introduces a new rule: some agents will be women. They will undergo the same training as men. And the main thing in his agents is professionalism, not gender.

This will give its results, female agents bring new views, visions in investigations, put forward versions of where to dig, and these versions turn out to be true. But there were not so many female agents who passed all the tests and remained in service in the 20s, or rather only three. Lenore Houston, Jessie Dartstein and the star of the federal detective Alaska Davidson. The

first thing that Hoover did when he came to the post of director of the Bureau of Investigation was his phrase "I have no work for women and agents." From 1924 to 1978, the Bureau will be an exclusively male organization. This was Hoover's fundamental position. He believed that all his people are constantly exposed to risk, danger and threat, and such a psychological state should be perceived by them as normal.

They will deal with the most notorious scoundrels from all over the states, who will do literally unthinkable things, and the agents will need to analyze all this in detail. At the same time, agents will be threatened, attempts will be made to eliminate them and pressure will be put on their families, and agents need to understand this and continue working.

A woman, as Hoover believed, can succumb to emotions and the Bureau will lose the fight against crime. The 20th century with its frantic pace of technical progress requires the same pace of investigations. The times of reasoning and conducting cases for years should have been replaced by a conveyor belt, where cars were assembled at Ford factories, and the efficiency of detection should be exactly the same.

For these actions, Hoover will be called a "tank". He acts on prolums very illogically, and no one knows what will happen the next day of his directorship. He carries out massive layoffs of agents and re-recruits new ones, believing that an agent is a status. An agent is a person who is smart, cold, he looks respectable, stylish, but he looks in such a way that anyone who gets in his way freezes and falls into fear.

He stands in defense of the Constitution, the state and society. His enemies are not outcasts and drunken knife fights. His enemies are spies, revolutionaries, maniacs and, most importantly, organized crime and their kings. The enemy is smart, financed and cunning. An agent should be able to instill terror in such a scoundrel with just his appearance and words.

Gover knew what he was doing, but he never explained the meaning of his plans to anyone. And then the press began to publish sarcastic articles that the previous head of the bureau wanted to intimidate them, and the new one was simply dispersing his staff of agents. America was experiencing its golden decade of abundance.

The Great Depression and the dawn of the mafia.
The Roaring Twenties. The Roaring Twenties in Europe were the roar of a crowd of guns. The Roaring Twenties in the USA were the people's Ford car, Zenit radios and Jazz, which would become the main music of the decade. Jazz bands staged performances that were no less in scale than the opening of the Olympic Games. Hollywood was experiencing its first golden age and everyone wanted to be at least a little bit like their idols.

The country lived in prosperity and only prohibition turned the possibility of unlimited fun into a joke. But good Samaritan bootleggers always helped the common man to feel the taste of fun in full. Behind the scenes of prohibition, bootlegging, and alcohol trade, the first organized crime was born. The Mafia. These were no longer gangs that robbed banks in states, terrifying farm towns.

Organized crime reached a much higher level, but society and official authorities for a long time tried to ignore the fact that these were not just gangs. Hoover's Bureau of Investigation then caused a scandal by using wiretapping of telephones for the first time to arrest a clan of bootleggers, and everyone was outraged by the violation of the Fourth Amendment of the inviolability of home, property and personal life.

Everyone lived in a world of stability and confidence in the future. Tomorrow's bottom will come on October 24, 1929, the day when windows became doors. The stock market crash marked the beginning of the deepest economic crisis that hit the entire Western world.

Companies and factories went bankrupt across the country, savings made by generations of labor and people depreciated. The middle class increasingly became poor, and the poor went under. America was stopping right before our eyes, and as in the classic game, society fell asleep, immersed in problems and apathy with no prospects, and Her Majesty, the Mafia, woke up.

The dawn of the Mafia and the rampant crime will fall on the Great Depression and will become one of the most serious challenges for the entire US law enforcement system in its entire history. The third lecture on criminology will probably always be an explanation of the fact of crime and its connection with the socio-economic situation of society and the state. In a nutshell, you should know about this.

Any military, political, economic upheavals are a guarantee of instability in society. Any layoffs, closure of production facilities, significant inflation, unemployment - this is a factor of marginalization of the population. In simple words, yesterday a respectable citizen with a stable job is now forced to make ends meet with odd jobs.

And the risk becomes great, social instability will be drowned in liters of alcohol. Gradually, degradation and disintegration of the personality will occur, and the person will sink deeper and deeper to the social bottom. Multiply the history of one person by the scale of the country and you will see a catastrophe. Labor hands are lost, citizens are lost, but this is still an optimistic option.

There will always be a percentage of accompanying factors that such a society becomes criminalized. And yesterday's builder is now waiting for people in a dark alley. And this means that every month of instability of the state now destroys the economic potential in the future. And now my second word. As the problems of the state grow, they are entirely reflected in any of its representatives.

Courts, education, police. Funding is cut, salaries are reduced. And now on the streets the authorities are not the representatives of law and order, but those who have real power to establish their own laws and order. Namely, organized crime. Syndicates. They will try to subjugate everything they can reach.

Business, legal or illegal, the media, the police, judges, prosecutors will be placed by their people in politics, will join the structure of the state and become part of it, working in their own interests. You are used to imagining the mafia as people in long coats and hats in Fidos, who conduct showdowns with the fire of their tommy guns. But the mafia has deceived you and you are mistaken.

You see only their infantry, pawns and expendable material. As a rule, they do not even enter into the deal. In the USA, such events were the gangster thirties. In the post-Soviet space, these are the bandit 90s. Times and countries are different, but social phenomena are completely identical. Any social instability is only to the advantage of organized crime.

They are actively using promises of social mobility and the good life now, recruiting their infantry from ordinary citizens. And it does not matter whether it is the image of a man in an expensive suit in a Ford B-18, who spends nights until the morning in a cabaret or a cherry nine, a raspberry jacket and nightclubs. The essence will always be the same. Being a member of organized crime is your chance from rags to riches, from a ruined farmer or a worker from a closed plant to get everything from life.

But all this has its price. Life is like a supermarket. They have beaten everyone now, but the cash register is ahead. The kings of the criminal world, who wage wars for influence and power with their foot soldiers, can calmly and freely discuss their relationships with each other, shake hands and part ways like gentlemen.

The fight against the mafia. The creation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
It is difficult to find evidence and dirt on them, they are reliably protected from any evidence of their ties to the mafia. Philanthropists, businessmen, art lovers, aristocrats. Go prove who they really are. The thirties are the beginning, this is the moment when it became difficult to stop noticing that the streets were filled with gentlemen in dark coats, that stores and shops were taxed, ports, warehouses, lands, companies, film production, factories, plants.

They are bought up, their owners die or sell everything for next to nothing to one-day firms, and a gigantic economic redistribution is taking place across the country. The mafia, which grew up on the crumbling of illegal alcohol production and gambling, begins to buy up the economy.

The police are completely powerless. Their ceiling is arresting mafia pawns. The police are dying in the fight against organized crime, not even understanding how to fight them systematically. After all, the challenge is not from individuals, not from a gang of crooks with a planning horizon of tomorrow at the latest, but from a real organized structure with its own clear hierarchy and ranks, army, economy, its own special services.

In fact, a simple policeman had to overcome a structure very similar to the state. The police are also corrupt, and money is not always the deciding factor there. The deciding factor was most often fear for oneself and family. That is, protecting the honest and brave in a world where you don’t know who sold out. Moreover, there were sad examples before everyone’s eyes.

The mafia collects dirt on key government officials and recruits politicians, trying to place its people everywhere. The gangs will not go anywhere either. They do not strive to become part of the state and they do not care about the mafia. Their ideas are prosaic. Banks, vaults, and then the good life. They are cruel and ruthless, using modern vehicles, automatic weapons and their own audacity.

The most famous gangsters of the USA.
America is shaken by the details of the daring bank robberies of John Dillinger, Machine Gun Kelly, aka George Barnes, the gangster with the Arizona Clark family gang or the FBI's enemy No. 1 in 1934 Baby Face, aka George Nelson. Of course, the most famous of them all will be, of course, Bonnie and Clyde, but this is the tip of the iceberg, the scumbag gangsters.

In fact, there were many more of them, and they toured the states, causing mayhem. The police, limited by the rights to act in their state and district, could do little with the touring gangsters. They needed those who would follow in their footsteps, having absolute powers in each state. The Bureau of Investigation undergoes several changes, primarily in its name. At first they become an investigation department, in 1935 they receive the modern name of the FBI.

They will be the first to give a serious rebuff to the mafia. You can fight the mafia infantry endlessly, it is a road to nowhere. It is unrealistic to knock out the mafia kings. They are protected by laws and the absence of any grounds to suspect them. They are well prepared. But any structure, like any building, collapses in seconds if you remove the pillars and support points.

The FBI begins to take out the officers of the criminal world of the kings' right hands, their confidants. And here you need to understand one more thing. I will tell you. All these structures live by the rules of the wolf world. Any weakening of one causes an attack by the others. Weakening them, they begin to gnaw each other's throats, trying to snatch a piece from their mouths.

This causes a sharp increase in violence, but it gives the opportunity to collapse their established world and enter it on the rules of the strong. And most importantly, the war exhausts them and gives the state time. Time during which it is possible to fix economic problems and deprive organized crime of a social base and a constant influx of fresh forces.

The collapse of the empire will give the opportunity to get to the kings. Their henchmen and confidants taken can make a deal with the investigation. The main thing in all this is to convince them that Mr. Salieri will not send them his regards.

But this is all in an ideal world, and in reality there is corruption, liquidation of agents, incriminating evidence, bribery, blackmail. Hoover tried to create an ultimate instrument, but he also did not recognize the fact that the mafia is something more than clans and a couple of hundred guys from the area, controlling the transportation of alcohol and engaged in racketeering. The press in the 70s expressed the opinion that the mafia had incriminating evidence on Hoover and its own levers of pressure. It was a difficult time, but no one could prove anything.

But if the mafia showdowns for the average citizen were happening in parallel with his existence and in principle did not affect him much, then the growth of banditry and lawlessness was a huge threat. The press in every way savored every raid of thugs with shotguns and trench brooms. Movies romanticized their image and exaggerated the colors. But they had to be done away with.

Agent Melvin Purvis is the man who defeated the most dangerous gangster in America.
FBI Special Agent Melvin Purvis takes on the case. He is the first in charge of the Czech branch of the bureau and was known as a tenacious, meticulous and unconventional thinker. He prefers to remain in the shadows and can pass for a simple worker. Slightly absent-minded, naive, stupid. This image is excellent for cover. A naive bungler allows everyone to feel a little better. Such a cover is great for winning over the interlocutor.

You can always blurt out something unnecessary to someone like that. There is no sense of anxiety with him. Purvis used this method well, working in the field and doing the work entrusted to him in an unconventional way. Following a trail, you will least of all draw attention to yourself in such an image. Purvis followed the tracks of the odious gangster, the sad star of the press John Dillinger and his gang.

Dillinger had already managed to add to his bloody list of special agents and wounded another, and left with his people during an attempt to detain him, but Purvis did not stop. By deception, suggestion, collecting rumors and playing on trust, he was able to approximately establish the location of Dillinger and close the matter with him. Then the matter with his henchmen will be closed, and Purvis will become a star, who will be talked about even in Washington.

The press bathes him in the rays of glory as the deliverer from a gang of thugs and everyone predicts that he will become the head of the FBI to replace the authoritarian and despotic Hoover, who has already been the target of criticism from society more than once. Hoover will do everything possible to oust Purvis, literally right after his triumph. There was an opinion that Purvis did not actually claim the post of head, but seriously considered the possibility of becoming Hoover's deputy.

However, it did not work out. But his method is simpleton, he is good for an investigator, bad and evil from the conventionality of each his own approach and his own result, an investigator who will not treat the suspect in a brotherly manner, wave away the case, move him, he will create the impression of a person who serves his time for money and this lulls vigilance.

The FBI against the Third Reich. The fight against Abwehr spies.
He may even talk more for a while than the suspect, talk off-topic, laugh, and then remember, and listen, let's write something for them, otherwise he asks and asks some trifle. But the next time their meeting will look like a friendly one. This may give the suspect a chance to tell something he didn't think to tell. Each investigator has his 2-3 favorite methods of work. The main thing is to understand that any method is not a universal hammer, and all cases are not nails.

And it is important to remember that at least two agents participate in interrogations in the Bureau. This opens up even more opportunities for work. According to the regulations, an interrogation can last no more than two hours, and upon request it can also be interrupted for a 30-minute break, which is not included in this two-hour interrogation. The war in Europe, which became the second world war, also affected the United States.

German and Japanese agents had been operating here since the 1930s, and it was important to cover them. The Abwehr and its people tried to find ways to reach the people responsible for military production. To find levers of influence on the media, the film business, in order to then form a positive image of the Third Reich in American society. There were also huge bureaucratic security holes left over from the times of isolationism.

For example, a civilian could very well file an official request to the Ministry of Defense to find out if everything was in order with the equipment in the army, how things were with the production of protective equipment against chemical weapons. The same example, the Abwehr spy network, also known as the Dyukin group, was engaged in this, among other things. And, paradoxically, it was successful. Abwehr people stole the plans for one of the best bombsights of that time, the Norden.

The Japanese created their own spy networks to spy on the US Navy. The Abwehr arranged attempts to send US agents through Mexico, or, in a more brazen way, directly to the coast from submarines. The FBI also takes under its covert control US military personnel of Japanese origin, believing that there are Japanese agents there.

Thanks to double agents and offers of deals, one of the largest Abwehr operations, called "Pasturius," will be thwarted. FBI agents will capture groups of German saboteurs right at the moment of landing, when they were dropped in the area of Florida and Long Island. The bureau's triumph will also be the collapse of the elusive, daring Duquesne group, which collected military technical information on an industrial scale.

They entangled production, bases, and military units. They spared neither money nor compromising information. They understood how the American system worked and acted skillfully.

A super network of Nazi spies. The Duquesne organization.
For the Abwehr, this was one of the most serious defeats of their agents. In any investigation of an espionage case, it is important to remember that catching a spy red-handed is a success, but a local success. A competent agent network, having learned about the exposure of one, includes plans for withdrawal, cuts off tails and drains the extra ones.

It is important to find a weak link, to make an offer that is impossible to refuse. In the history of the Dyukin network, such a person was William Seabolt. A man who was recruited as a German spy in a very crude way. Mostly intimidated, at least motivated.

He had relatives in Germany, and they found leverage over a man working on the production of military aircraft. Moreover, the recruitment was so crude that it has entered textbooks on how not to do it. He arrived in Germany to visit his relatives and was immediately arrested by the Gestapo and charged. There is no need to tell you what it is like to end up in the Gestapo. After they had intimidated him, people from the SD came to him and made him an offer to work for them. The SD needed its own agents in the Abwehr networks.

There was a serious struggle between these special services at that time. He was introduced to people from the Abwehr and he expressed an interest in working for them. He underwent 7 weeks of training and returned to the United States to await instructions.

But he did not await instructions. He went to the FBI and told them what he had been offered. He didn't want to participate and asked for help. He received a counter offer - citizenship and a witness protection program if he continued working and joined the spy network.

American communists. How many of them were there in the US. Recruitment and surveillance by the FBI.
For the bureau, it was simply a gift from heaven, not a single report contained information, not even rumors, that the Abwehr had created large spy networks in the US.

An agent codenamed Harry Sawyer infiltrated Dukin's group and collected data on all of its members. He had a hidden camera on his clothes and recorded conversations. It was important for the bureau to find out and identify each member of this group. A total of 33 people, agents cover them all at once.

The Second World War was drawing to an end, and the fight against spies was just beginning. It was the time of the escalating Cold War and the confrontation with the USSR. Hoover proposed turning the bureau into an interstate bureau of world intelligence and bringing all forces to bear on communism. But he was then reproached for trying to create a Gestapo on a new LAD and the idea remained unrealized.

Hoover acted independently, collecting information and monitoring American communists and searching for Soviet agents. The bureau preferred not to share key information due to the risk of leaks. Everything was closed on Hoover and his famous safe. Lists of potentially disloyal citizens were created. Hoover's people would establish the total number of American communists by the mid-1950s. Ten thousand people for all of America.

If all this were an agent network, it would be a disaster. The agency also understands this. They recruit people and infiltrate communist cells, finding out their connections with the Soviet KGB. The bureau's network of agents in the Communist Party will consist of more than one and a half thousand people. Hoover later joked that his agents could be exposed at least because they regularly paid their party dues and actually read Lenin and Marx.

But as a result, the communist movement will be destroyed and from a threat within the state will turn into marginal cells with almost zero threat. Hoover did not like communists, however, in the 50s, the hunt for communists was part of public life and Hoover begins his game.

The COINTELPRO program, initiated by him, was not approved at the highest level and was an independent program of Hoover himself. Its goal was to destroy, compromise and liquidate the communist movement within the country by any possible means. This could be surveillance, intimidation, compromising evidence in front of other party members in order to expose any political activist as a traitor to their ideas.

Work under the KNT UPRA program was not limited to communists and other movements were of interest to them.

Secret materials in the FBI.
The 50s and early 60s were times of general spy mania, both manic and overt. In the Cold War, soldiers were spies that the sides sent to each other on the invisible front.

This was also the time when scientific progress accelerated significantly, and military progress in particular. Information about the observation of unknown types of aircraft began to appear in huge quantities across the country.

Most of this information was false, erroneous, some of the messages were natural phenomena, weather balloons, a certain percentage were tests of top-secret aircraft, for example, the blackbird aircraft, and it was involved in many civilian observations, there was also a percentage of the appearance of aircraft of a potential enemy, according to this data, they were already being worked on, but unlike, they were not a priority. Of course, there was still a small percentage of aircraft whose affiliation could not be established.

But based on these materials, Project Blue Book was introduced, and other people from other agencies. Since the early 50s, there have been enough problems on the ground. Organized crime, after a lull during the war and the post-war years, is starting a new offensive. Their infantry is filled with former veterans of World War II and Korea, and a little later, Vietnam veterans.

When will the RICO law be adopted, aka the law on corrupt or rocket-influenced organizations. In fact, this will be the first key law to date on recognizing the existence of the mafia and the constant fight against them. Organized crime learned lessons from the collapse of the Empire of the thirties, when Treasury Department agent Eliot Ness was able to put the impenetrable king of the criminal world Al Capone behind bars.

Undercover agents.
New crime requires new actions. The FBI begins to fight them, relying on the experience of fighting the enemy's intelligence networks. Now it is necessary to collect and fully establish the total number of members of criminal groups, their business clans, connections, property, capital, schemes, get to the kings, collect information about them and their connections with the mafia.

Agent development must occur from within. The Bureau begins to introduce its people into criminal groups. Such people will have to give up everything, break all ties with everyone and understand that they risk everything. Such people are found. Being an undercover agent is still one of the most dangerous, but also the most respected jobs of the bureau's agents.

What secrets did FBI chief Hoover hide.
By the 70s, Gower was still the permanent head of the bureau, already in his fifth decade. This is an absolute record for officials of this level. He had hundreds of scandals, failures, he was accused of inaction, tyranny, selectivity, the investigation of the assassination of President Kennedy left society with more questions than answers.

Hoover, in theory, should have long since retired, but no one touched him. There is an opinion that this is connected with that very Hoover safe, the place where he kept convincing arguments against politicians of any level. These arguments convinced why it is better to be friends with Edgar Hoover.

Hoover could not leave, and he left himself, for natural reasons. After the death of the permanent head of the FBI, three radical reforms will be carried out very soon. The first is that the position of director can no longer be held for more than 10 years in a row. The second is that the FBI begins to hire female agents. 3. The Bureau moves from the Department of Justice to a new large headquarters of its own in Washington.

FBI headquarters.
The famous building, called the Hoover House. And the debate about this name did not stop even decades after the opening. The construction of this building itself began during the directorship of Edgar Hoover, but it was opened only in 1975. At the current moment, the FBI headquarters needs major repairs and its cost is such that for ten years now, options for building from scratch and in a new location have been sought.

Hoover is one of the most controversial figures in US history, but this man did everything to create a nationwide structure with enormous resources and capabilities from disparate services with random people. And when I say resources, I mean people first and foremost.

Professional qualities play an extremely key role in any investigation. You can have perfect card indexes and floors of forensic equipment, but without analytical departments, without agents, without undercover people and agents on the ground - all this will be just an excellent museum. The FBI was viewed critically by society and the press for a long time, and President Truman, known for his critical nature and little desire for any compromise, completely ordered Hoover to stop building his Gestapo.

And Hoover concluded that any professionalism and any neutralized spy network or mafia clan would generally pass by society unnoticed and would not be appreciated, and that it was necessary to create a positive image ourselves, and the FBI would begin to publish books, films, and programs, highlighting their fight against crime and their successes, and the image of FBI agents would be formed in society. In a strict business suit, taciturn, with powers and intelligence that allow them to immediately wedge themselves into any investigation, literally almost off the bat. Such people will always come to the rescue and solve any task and problem where local authorities and the police are powerless.

From maniacs and cartels to mysterious eccentrics from the forest. It is on this image that, according to the plot of the series, two brothers in an impala play in search of their paranormal phenomena. People in small towns see them and their IDs as a solution to their not quite human problems. I will add on my own behalf that impersonating a federal agent is a serious crime and two cute boys would have been pursued long ago across all states until the very moment of their arrest.

This series is iconic and therefore I think it is worth saying a few more words.

How the FBI is organized from the inside. Rules. Codes. Prohibitions. General structure.
An FBI agent is not only an appearance before citizens, it is also rules, powers and prohibitions, namely the Charter of the Bureau prohibits showing anyone your ID.

There is a token for this. The ID is intended for internal use. An FBI agent has every right to introduce himself with a fictitious name and surname, acting only in the interests of the investigation. The use of the same actions for personal purposes is at least equal to dismissal. Agents cannot involve employees of other departments to help in the performance of their official duties.

The only exception is a special operation to the knowledge of the management of the agency and other departments. It is strictly forbidden to involve civilians. The priority is the protection and safety of citizens. Agents and employees, despite their broad powers and opportunities, are very limited by laws, codes and charters created specifically to prevent abuse of power.

The Bureau has a very clear hierarchy, conditionally divided into six levels. The director is at the head, then his deputies, then the agency inspectors, and then the most common positions like department heads, their deputies and employees. But that's in short, and if in a little more detail, there are six more sub-ranks among agents and nine sub-ranks among management.

All of them have a clear delineation of powers, responsibilities and rules of treatment. This is important. Absolutely the same picture exists with the conduct of cases. There are categories that are assigned to cases depending on their complexity, the public resonance lyceum involved. The highest levels are usually cases that involve the highest echelons of the criminal world and government officials.

The Zodiac Maniac. How the Federal Bureau investigates such crimes.
The late 60s, early 70s, and then the 80s - this is the period of time when the agency will be challenged by loners.

This is the time of serial maniacs. This phenomenon has existed for a long time, but never before have criminals so openly challenged law enforcement systems, as, for example, the infamous Zodiac maniac. This phenomenon of crimes against the person shocked America, and the helplessness of the services forced people to ask questions, where is their omnipotence?

The eighties were the time of cults, many of which were essentially groups of maniacs, and this takes this type of crime to a completely different level. Not all of them received their punishment then, and unfortunately, some odious ones were never found and remained unknown. And it was necessary to urgently draw conclusions, and the conclusions were as follows.

Any spy network always has tails that can be stepped on. Any mafia structure has its top and its base. But what to do with a crazy loner who does not share plans, does not communicate, has no contacts in the criminal world. Your entire network of informants is simply powerless. A conventional new zodiac could be a respectable traveling salesman-vacuum cleaner seller, who has a wife, two children and a house with a white picket fence.

FBI special forces.
But still, they have something in common, a pattern of crime. But to find it, you need to create new departments and entire centers for the analysis of violent crimes. This is how the work began under the understanding of the personality of a maniac.

Drawing up a psychological portrait of each, finding common features in everything, in biography, in work, in their actions, There are no invisible criminals, there will always be traces and it is important to find them. Everything will be established, seasons, days, minutes, clothes, average age, and even how each of them looks, plus or minus. These will be the first mass developments on this type of crime, which will allow raising the efficiency of detection to a new level.

Of course, these methods are criticized, because trying to create this template, you can become a hostage of this template and make a mistake by arresting innocent people. But solving such crimes is one of the highest categories of complexity. And the template is only an approximate direction in which to move when introducing such a case.

Such cases require a huge involvement of forces, questioning witnesses, collecting evidence, information, and often all this just goes to waste. But sometimes it can be that questioning a random witness will give both a car and a number, a photofit of a person. Very often, such criminals try to resemble their famous predecessors.

In the 80s, a case was solved in this way, when public libraries were asked who in the last six months was interested in materials, newspaper slides on the topic of crimes of this type in the past. As it turned out, such an action can find a suspect, and at the same time also carry out preventive measures. But to establish the location of a dangerous criminal is 70% of success, he must be detained.

There is a high probability that he will resist, during which agents, innocent citizens, and even the suspect himself will suffer. Any use of violence by special services should be aimed at detaining the individual and eliminating the threat from him against other individuals. Figuratively speaking, if a criminal offers a fair hand-to-hand fight, then according to his logic, in order to snap handcuffs on him, he must be defeated in a fair fight? This will not happen, let's leave all this for the movies.

There is a degree of violence from special means and techniques to the use of deadly weapons. And if there is an understanding that the criminal is armed with a firearm, no one will detain him with a stazer in their hands. Any law enforcement officer must always outgun their opponents.

This has been the case since the 1930s, when the police and services were powerless against those gangsters, and they began to adopt exactly the same automatic weapons. But for special cases of detention and release of hostages, there are special FBI special forces groups. Their training and equipment were developed specifically to solve such problems.

But they do not make movies about them; SWAT special forces are better known in the world. However, most of the work before this will be done not in the field, but in departments. Accumulated databases and knowledge will always provide answers as to where the investigation should go. Most bank robberies occur at about the same time. This is no secret. From 2 to 4 p.m.

Hostage-taking occurs according to a dozen common scenarios. Corruption schemes arise under similar conditions and there are also approximate scenarios. Contract killings also have their scenarios. From a wife who orders her husband or competitors in business, the experience of investigating previous cases makes it possible to solve new cases.

For each of these types of crimes, there are already standard rules, regulations, recommendations. Only the conditions and technical means change. And the people remain the same.

Who is recruited into the Federal Bureau of Investigation. FBI Academy.
And for those who want to rob, steal, there will always be those who will go to serve and protect. The agency has a strict selection, citizenship, age from 23 to 37, after 37, if the veteran of the armed forces has the appropriate benefits.

The applicant's biography should not have any problems in the past, his characteristics from previous places of work should not contain information about his low moral qualities. The person must also be educated, at least a bachelor's degree. He must have experience in the system for at least three years by the time of application. There are also requirements for physical fitness. And under Hoover, there was also a requirement for a height of at least 170 centimeters.

Each candidate takes a polygraph and his answers can determine his further employment or refusal. But if he gets approval, then in the future he will already attend the Academy and only then will he be employed in the bureau. But most candidates are eliminated even before the Academy. Training at the FBI Academy in Virginia is already a very serious stage, and the requirements there from the first days are very strict.

Of course, this makes sense, the entry of random people who came to test themselves is a guarantee of big problems for everyone. Moreover, the first two years of service will still be considered a continuation of training. And those who want to learn need to be taught. According to official statistics, on average, 30-50 people leave the bureau per year, for a staff of 35 thousand people.

But this is just a dismissal. A statistical share of a percent, and it is an indicator of the thoroughness of the selection of people for the right working conditions and places. In addition to prestige, the salary factor is also important, of course. It will be about twice as high as the average for the state. No one will name the numbers, because everyone has a little salary, but their own.

Today, the FBI is one of the most powerful analytical agencies in the world with a huge database with a full cycle of introducing all types of investigations and examinations. 56 departments, 400 agencies throughout the United States, as well as 60 offices with their attachés around the world for cooperation with local law enforcement agencies.

Yes, Mr. Morgan, how are you doing on the history of the tramp case? Are you getting everything right? Do you know how much attention is being paid to this case now? No, I don’t demand any speed from you. You know that our investigation does not require speed. But you must understand that we cannot wait until the witnesses in this case simply grow old and forget everything in the world.

Mr. Morgan, if something is not working out for you, you can always ask for additional funds. This is an important matter, this story must come to an end. In the history of the FBI, we are also approaching the end today. The Beronis are angels, and they were not, there will be scandals, There will be criticism, and accusations, there will be mistakes, and provocations, and betrayals.

The specifics of the work are not always prosaic, and the scoundrels are far from simpletons. Not all criminals are Mariarti, of course, but for every Mariarti there must be a Sherlock Holmes, Marilyn Purvis and Elliot Ness. And this is where today’s story about the special services comes to an end.

Which means it's high time to insert Mauder, write to Scully and subscribe to black helicopters. Well, dear friends, did you like the topic?

Oh, by the way, did you know that for a long time any agent of the government or state was called a G-man? This is information for you about where the man in Half-Life actually came from. Well, shall we begin?