The FBI and Me
Of late the FBI has been engaged in significant mischief, ranging from perjury to obtain a warrant to choosing sides in a partisan election. This has no resemblance to the FBI with which I worked for several decades.
The Seventies
I first worked with the FBI in the mid-1970s in the Washington, DC, area. The people with whom I worked were the finest, most honest, and dedicated professionals in the Federal Government. They were proud of their organization and felt honored to serve it.
Most of what I did with the Bureau in the seventies was sorting out how the military could support the Bureau in its national security efforts. I worked with both the Washington and Baltimore Field Offices to create integrated processes for supporting local military training. At the end of the decade, I was working with the Legal Attaché in Colombia passing leads back and forth to combat the narcoterrorism threat.
The Eighties
In the 1980s I worked with the Bureau in distinct phases. In the early eighties I focused on mutual support for training. I taught interviewing and interrogation to both the Bureau and CIA; both agencies participated in military counterintelligence training. In the early 1980s I was responsible for a variety of things including overseeing military support to Federal security, intelligence and law enforcement agencies on a case-by-case basis. At one point I found myself in the peculiar position of enforcing the Posse Comitatus Act’s prohibition on US military participation in Federal law enforcement efforts, and a few days later enforcing the sole exception to the Act (which has since been repealed).
In the mid-1980s, while working for the National Security Council, I worked with FBI representatives to several of the secretive agencies housed in an enormous rabbit warren of offices in the Pentagon basement. One was Dave Major, a rising superstar who had revolutionized counter surveillance training and doctrine while serving in Moscow, a program known as “Moscow Rules.” One of my colleagues was Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, a loud-mouthed braggart. North came to me one day and said he wanted to introduce me to someone he thought I would like. We made our way up a small set of stairs where he introduced me to my brother-in-law. I noticed Dave Major was sitting silently in the room, and North went into his narcissistic spiel about how important he was and how he didn’t need to follow the rules, giving examples from Iran-Contra. I let him prattle on. The next day Dave arrested North, beginning the scandals that rocked Reagan’s second term. Admiral Poindexter, I concluded, had a blind spot where North was considered, but North was simply too dangerous to be allowed to continue with his nonsense.
Before the end of the decade, I was invited into a couple of FBI double agent operations, helping to develop material for their sources to pass, giving the double agents tips on blending into the other doubles being run out of where they were handled
Throughout all of that I found the FBI to be an exemplary agency and its employees among the most honest in the country. The transformation of the Bureau into a rogue partisan weapon of the current authoritarian regime has shaken me to my core.
Please, Joe, say it ain’t so.
Do you still keep in touch with former colleagues? Would like to read about what should be done and can be done to repair the damage from the people who have been there at its best and at its worst.
My experience with law professionals was similar in terms of their professionalism. I simply cannot believe the agents behavior in these recent years. The overkill in a SWAT team for Stone and now the raid on Rev Houck are so out of character. The raid on Stone really was excessive and we really don't know about Houck because the FBI disputes the account of excess. But we also have
Navarro taken into custody with excess - leg irons?
The Stanford Prison experiment among others comes to mind. But at least one FBI agent has come forward to blow a whistle that his work as a SWAT member was inappropriate. Politics seems to have infected the DOJ/FBI in dangerous ways. Russiagate seems to be the tip of a corrupt world.