The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the main investigative arm of the U.S. Justice Department. The FBI’s mission encompasses both law enforcement and intelligence, including more than two hundred types of federal law violations. In the post-9/11 era, the FBI’s top priorities are investigations of domestic and international terrorism and of foreign intelligence services operating within the United States. In addition, federal criminal law violations remain an important part of FBI responsibilities, including investigations of organized crime, white collar crime, cybercrimes, and certain major violent crimes. Approximately twenty-nine thousand employees, including more than eleven thousand special agents, carry out the work of the bureau throughout the United States, operating out of fifty-six field offices and four hundred smaller offices, known as resident agencies. There are also forty-five offices in foreign cities.
The FBI’s role in law enforcement and domestic security has not always been so extensive. In fact, when the bureau was first established in 1908, its mandate was limited and uncertain. The original thirty-four agents were limited to investigating cases involving antitrust laws, interstate commerce laws, land frauds, and miscellaneous statutes not enforced by other federal agencies. It was not until 1910 that Congress assigned the Bureau of Investigation (renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935) its first major investigative responsibility with the passage of the White Slave Traffic Act (or Mann Act). This legislation was aimed at curbing organized prostitution, specifically the interstate transportation of women for immoral purposes.
A central theme of the FBI story throughout the twentieth century is the expansion of its law enforcement authority. Although historically law enforcement has been (and is) a local and state function, the U.S. Constitution’s Commerce Clause, which allows Congress to regulate interstate commerce, provided a basis for extending federal police powers. This clause was invoked in the passage of the Mann Act and later legislation involving auto theft (1919), kidnapping (1932), and bank robbery (1934). The administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) provided a major impetus for the expansion of the federal role in law enforcement. His attorney general, Homer Cummings, embarked on a ”war on crime” as he and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover pursued Depression-era gangsters, such as John Dillinger. The success of this anticrime crusade culminated in the 1934 passage of legislation that dramatically increased the FBI’s role in crime control. It was during this period that the crime fighting G-man image of the bureau became embedded in American popular culture. In subsequent decades the FBI acquired additional law enforcement responsibilities: white collar and organized crime in the mid-1970s (made top priorities), drug enforcement in 1982, and violent crime in 1989 (became a high-priority program).
Paralleling the FBI’s widening role in law enforcement was its development as an intelligence agency. In the bureau’s early years, the ”Palmer raids” of 1919 and 1920 marked a controversial foray into intelligence matters. U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer formed a General Intelligence Division (GID) within the Justice Department as a response to the post-World War I threat of Reds (communists), alien anarchists, and radical workers, who it was feared were about to launch a revolution. The culmination of this Red Scare was the arrest and detention by bureau agents of several thousand aliens and radicals nationwide (the ”Palmer raids”) and the deportation of several hundred of the alien detainees.
The excesses of these raids along with other Justice Department scandals, such as Teapot Dome, led to major changes in both the Justice Department and the bureau. In 1924, the reform-minded attorney general, Harlan F. Stone, abolished the GID, limiting bureau investigations to federal criminal law violations, and at the same time appointed Hoover to head the FBI. FBI domestic intelligence authority was not restored until World War II— at first by a secret 1936 directive from FDR and then publicly in 1939 by an executive order at the outbreak of World War II. The 1939 order established the FBI as the national clearinghouse for all information pertaining to espionage, sabotage, and subversive activities.
In the postwar era (1950s), communists in the United States became the main target of FBI domestic intelligence activities, and in the 1960s, civil rights leaders and antiwar (Vietnam) activists were surveilled under various domestic security programs. During the early and mid-1970s, public disclosure of questionable FBI intelligence activities, such as COINTELPRO, culminated in congressional inquiries (the Church and Pike Committee hearings). The aftermath of this scandal led to reforms in FBI intelligence and a curtailing of such activities.
In 1982, during the administration of President Ronald Reagan, terrorism (which replaced the older term “domestic security”) again became a national priority, but it was not until the 1990s (following the bombings of the World Trade Center and the federal building in Oklahoma City) that the FBI began to allocate significant resources to it. And it was not until after the 9/11 terrorist attacks that the FBI began to transform itself into an agency focused on the prevention of future terrorist attacks.
Key events in U.S. history (FDR’s “war on crime,” World War II, the Cold War, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks) have shaped the FBI’s traditions and culture. All of these events left their mark on the bureau, but perhaps none was as noteworthy and long lasting as the forty-eight-year directorship of Hoover (1924-1972).
Hoover helped to professionalize the FBI and its agents by requiring higher training and education standards. He also attempted to bring an aura of science to crime investigation with the establishment of the FBI Crime Laboratory in 1932 and the extensive use of fingerprints in criminal identification. However, his long tenure as director gave him (and the FBI) power and autonomy unprecedented in the federal government. Major abuses of authority were publicly revealed only after his death in 1972, resulting in a major rethinking of FBI policies and investigative priorities in the mid-1970s.
The contemporary FBI faces many unresolved issues, some stemming from its controversial past, others from the circumstances of the historical moment. Among them are the federal role in law enforcement, the tension between law enforcement and intelligence functions, and the balance between national security and civil liberties. As fears and threats about law and order and national security wax and wane, each historical era has confronted these issues differently. Throughout FBI history, controversy has often centered on how to resolve these issues. The post-9/11 era is no different. The passage of the USA PATRIOT Act in 2001 and Attorney General John Ashcroft’s revised guidelines on domestic intelligence gathering (May 2002) have once again expanded FBI powers in this historically controversial area of bureau operations— domestic security.
