Stunned guns: how we've made the FBI too timid to bug mosques—or Ken Lay's office

Washington Monthly, Nov, 2004 by Richard Gid Powers

World War I moved the Bureau into the undeniably vital area of national security, hunting down spies and saboteurs. In view of the Bureau's perpetual battles with the CIA and other agencies (friction that contributed to its 9/11 failures), it is worth noting that the Bureau did not originally seek out this task, but embraced it reluctantly in order to protect its turf from rival agencies--the Treasury Department's Secret Service, and Army and Navy intelligence, all of which wanted a sham of the crowd-pleasing business of spy hunting. Unable to find enough real spies or saboteurs to justify the enormous expansion pressed on than by Congress, Bureau agents spent their time harassing antiwar activists--radical members of the Industrial Workers of the World and socialists who opposed the draft--whose offense was less any threat to the war effort than their political unpopularity, particularly among those business leaders who saw the war as an opportunity to paint labor agitators as traitors.

The Bureau got into trouble in 1920 after the Palmer raids (led, incidentally, by a young Justice Department attorney named J. Edgar Hoover), in which the Bureau rounded up thousands of aliens who had violated immigration regulations by joining the two just-formed American communist parties. It got into more trouble when k tried to cover up the Teapot Dome ,scandals of the Harding administration by trying to intimidate administration critics. With many calling for k to be abolished, the Bureau, with Hoover now its director, retreated into the apolitical field of "police professionalism." During the 1920s, Hoover led a movement to popularize scientific crime detection, and he crusaded for the independence of police forces (and the Bureau) by removing them from political control. The Bureau did help bring local law enforcement into the 20th century, but it also, then and forever after, involved itself in endless busy-work helping local law enforcement solve its managerial and technical problems. Then when the FBI was unleashed against the Midwest bank robbers who were winning folk-hero status during the depression, the John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Baby Face Nelson manhunts turned the G-Men and Hoover into national celebrities, and reinforced the FBI's belief that it could do no wrong if it kept exclusively to flashier, lower-level cases.

It wasn't that there was no more important work for the FBI to do. Organized crime was establishing a grip on labor unions, state and municipal governments, and control over entire industries. Senators and congressmen basked in Hoover's assurances that he would never, under any circumstances, investigate them--unless, of course, they criticized the Bureau. Blacks were routinely being brutalized under color of the law in the South. And, during the '30s, the Soviet Union was establishing the espionage networks that would deliver the secrets of the atom bomb to Moscow during World War II. But the FBI kept chasing bank robbers and kidnappers.