![]() Moussaoui was later revealed to be part of the September 11 terror plots. House committee that “FBI investigation and analysis indicates that the threat of terrorism in the United States is low.” 11 Beginning less than a month before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, FBI agents at the field office in Minneapolis attempted and failed dozens of times to persuade FBI headquarters to obtain search warrants against Zacarias Moussaoui, a suspect who was seeking flying lessons under suspicious circumstances. 9 The FBI’s centennial history characterized the period before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as a “failure of imagination” that demonstrated the Bureau “needed to become adept at preventing terrorist attacks, not just investigating them after the fact.” 10 On July 26, 2001, an FBI counterterrorism official told a U.S. Federal legislation passed in 1984 granted the FBI authority to pursue terrorism suspects who had attacked Americans outside the United States. Terrorism, both foreign and domestic, became a major FBI priority during the 1980s. A sustained FBI effort to attack organized crime was implemented after 1978, and by 1990, the Bureau had inflicted major damage on the leadership and effectiveness of what until then had been the nation’s most-powerful mafia groups. The reason, according to New York Times organized-crime reporter Selwyn Raab, was FBI Director Hoover’s fear that agents could be too easily corrupted by the riches of the criminals they would be pursuing. Until 1978, the FBI did not prioritize investigating and eradicating organized-crime syndicates. The Spies historians estimated that the Soviet Union acquired atomic weapons 2-4 years sooner because of the stolen shortcuts and that it was “reasonably certain” this changed history because the first Soviet atomic weapons were controlled by dictator Joseph Stalin rather than “one of his less aggressive successors.” 5 6 However, according to the FBI’s official historian, Hoover’s priorities were frustrated in the years prior to and during most of World War II by “a lack of concern in the Roosevelt administration towards Soviet spying.” The spy networks that ultimately stole atomic-bomb secrets on behalf of the Soviets grew during the Roosevelt-directed hiatus. According to the historians who wrote Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, the Bureau was able to “shatter Soviet intelligence in America” when permitted to turn its full attention to the CPUSA and Soviet spies. Then-FBI Director Hoover’s preference was always to place Soviet spying and CPUSA assistance at the center of the Bureau’s counterintelligence work. ![]() 3 4įrom the birth of the Soviet Union through the end of the Cold War, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) was a directly controlled appendage of Soviet espionage. ![]() Senate investigation concluded that COINTELPRO was a “sophisticated vigilante operation” using techniques that were “adopted wholesale from wartime counterintelligence.” The Senate reported that COINTELPRO actions included harassment that was both “degrading (sending anonymous poison-pen letters intended to break up marriages)” and “dangerous (encouraging gang warfare and falsely labeling members of a violent group as police informers).” Targets of COINTELPRO included Martin Luther King, Jr., the Ku Klux Klan, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), and the Weather Underground. These tactics and more were used in the Bureau’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO). Until the mid-1970s, the FBI routinely made use of illegal intelligence-gathering tactics, such as breaking and entering, stealing documents, and warrantless wiretapping. Edgar Hoover became director of the Bureau in 1924, remained at the job until 1972, and is credited in an official FBI history with turning it into an “organized, professional, and effective force.” 1 2 One lawmaker had predicted that the Bureau would become a “central police or spy system in the federal government” and said there would be a “great blow to freedom and free institutions if there should arise in this country any such great central secret-service bureau as there is in Russia.” J. Known as the Bureau of Investigation until 1935, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was created within the Department of Justice in 1908, in defiance of a prior refusal by Congress to fund it. ![]()
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