The F.B.I

The largest investigative agency of the United States federal government. Generally speaking, it is responsible for conducting investigations where a federal interest is concerned, except where another agency of the federal government has been specifically delegated that duty by statute or executive fiat. In pursuance of its duties, the bureau gathers facts and reports the results of its investigations to the attorney general of the United States and his assistants in Washington, D.C., and to the United States attorneys' offices in the federal judicial districts of the nation.The bureau is a part of the Department of Justice, responsible and subordinate to the attorney general of the United States. The bureau, headquartered in Washington, D.C., has field offices in large cities throughout the United States and in Puerto Rico. In addition, the bureau maintains liaison posts in several major foreign cities to facilitate the exchange of information with foreign agencies on matters relating to international crime and criminals.

The head of the bureau, whose title is director, was appointed by the attorney general until 1968; thereafter, by law, he became subject to appointment by the president of the United States with the advice and consent of the Senate.The bureau has a large staff of employees, including between 6,000 and 7,000 special agents who perform the investigative work. These special agents, the majority of whom have 10 years or more of service with the bureau, are usually required to have either a legal or an accounting education.

In 1908 the then attorney general of the United States, Charles J. Bonaparte, established the Bureau of Investigation within the Department of Justice to answer the need for a federal investigative body. In 1924 Attorney General Harlan Fiske Stone (later to become chief justice of the United States) appointed J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972) as its director and ordered that the bureau be reorganized. Reappointed to that post by successive attorneys general, Hoover was primarily responsible for the development of the bureau and its professional standards in law enforcement, though his frequent overzealousness and occasional persecutions have been criticized.Law enforcement in the United States remains principally a responsibility of state and local governments. However, trends toward centralization, the adoption of federal regulatory legislation, the passage of many substantive federal criminal laws, and the need of local law enforcement for supportive services (such as central FBI fingerprint files and laboratory facilities) have increased the responsibilities and duties of the bureau.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has investigative jurisdiction with respect to most federal criminal laws and other matters in which the United States is or may be a party in interest. This responsibility extends to some 180 areas of the criminal law (ranging from aircraft piracy and antiracketeering statutes through kidnapping to white-slave trafficking), and, in addition, the bureau is charged with collecting evidence in most civil cases in which the United States is or may be a party.The principal exceptions to the bureau's federal criminal investigative jurisdiction lie in specialized fields. These include narcotics violations and immigration matters (which fall in the jurisdiction of the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, both in the Department of Justice); tax, customs, and currency violations (the Internal Revenue Service, Bureau of Customs, and the Secret Service, all of which are agencies of the Treasury Department); security frauds (the Securities and Exchange Commission); and postal violations (the U.S. Postal Service).

Between 1961 and 1968 Congress enacted significant legislation protecting civil rights, addressed to such matters as elections and discrimination in public facilities, education, and employment. During this same period, a growing awareness of the existence of large organized criminal syndicates stimulated federal criminal legislation directed to their control. These laws and programs formulated by the Department of Justice greatly expanded the investigative role of the bureau.

The bureau's responsibilities in the internal-security field include matters relating to espionage, counterespionage, sabotage, treason, sedition, and related internal-security matters. In connection with these duties, the bureau is responsible for correlating information on internal-security matters and disseminating it to other interested federal agencies. The bureau is represented on the United States Intelligence Board, a body created by the president's National Security Council.Investigations of applicants and employees of the federal government who have or may be considered for sensitive positions are conducted by the bureau.

In full JOHN EDGAR HOOVER (b. Jan. 1, 1895, Washington, D.C., U.S.--d. May 2, 1972, Washington, D.C.), U.S. public official who, as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from 1924 until his death in 1972, built that agency into a highly effective, if occasionally controversial, arm of federal law enforcement.
Hoover studied law at night at George Washington University, where he received degrees as bachelor of laws in 1916 and as master of laws in the following year. He entered the Department of Justice as a file reviewer in 1917, and two years later he became special assistant to Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, in which post he oversaw the mass roundups and deportations of suspected Bolsheviks (Communists) after World War I. He was named acting director of the Bureau of Investigation (as it was then called) in May 1924 and confirmed as director seven months later. Finding the organization in disrepute because of the scandals of the Harding administration, he reorganized and rebuilt it on a professional basis, recruiting agents on merit and instituting rigorous methods of selecting and training personnel. He established a fingerprint file, which became the world's largest; a scientific crime-detection laboratory; and the FBI National Academy, to which selected law enforcement officers from all parts of the country were sent for special training.

In the early 1930s the exploits of gangsters in the United States were receiving worldwide publicity. Hoover took advantage of this to publicize the achievements of the FBI in tracking down and capturing well-known criminals. Both the FBI's size and its responsibilities grew steadily under his management. In the late 1930s President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave him the task of investigating both foreign espionage in the United States and the activities of communists and fascists alike. When the Cold War began in the late 1940s, the FBI undertook the intensive surveillance of communists and other left-wing activists in the United States. Hoover's animus toward radicals of every kind led him to aggressively investigate both the Ku Klux Klan and Martin Luther King, Jr., and other black activists in the 1960s. At the same time, he maintained a hands-off policy toward the Mafia, which was allowed to conduct its operations nationwide practically free of FBI scrutiny or interference.

Hoover habitually used the FBI's enormous surveillance and information-gathering powers to collect damaging information on politicians throughout the country, and he kept the most scurrilous data under his own personal control. He used his possession of these secret files to maintain himself as the FBI's director and was apparently able to intimidate even sitting presidents by threatening to leak damaging disclosures about them. By the early 1970s he had come under public criticism for his authoritarian administration of the FBI and for his persecution of those he regarded as radicals and subversives. He retained his post, however, until his death at age 77, by which time he had been the FBI's chief for 48 years and had served 8 presidents and 18 attorneys general