Translated material
Napoleonic plans
100 years ago one of the strongest intelligence services in the world was created
The French gave the Americans not only the Statue of Liberty. On June 26, 1908, exactly one hundred years ago, Carl Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon's great-nephew, signed an order establishing a Bureau of Investigation at the Ministry of Justice. At that time, Bonaparte, the grandson of Prince Jerome, Napoleon's younger brother, served as US Attorney General.The creation of the bureau was caused by necessity - the US Department of Justice was left without its investigative apparatus. The new bureau, with a staff of 26 investigators, was allowed to hire eight more from the Secret Service. The first task of the new department was to implement the white slave trade law passed in 1910. This was the clever name of the law prohibiting the transport of prostitutes from one state to another.
Every year the number of the bureau and the list of tasks grew. After the United States entered World War I, the FBI, for example, was tasked with catching enemy agents. Two years later, prohibition was adopted. In the next decade, the fight against bootleggers became a priority. In the thirties, the organization received its usual name - the Federal Bureau of Investigation. During the Second World War, the fight against German and Japanese spies came first. After the war, FBI agents switched to fighting the intelligence of their former ally - the USSR. The bureau considers the arrest of Rudolf Abel in 1957 to be the greatest success. No less active in the 50s and 60s. last century, the FBI fought against an internal threat from the left. The list of opponents, in addition to American communists and their sympathizers, also included liberals who had nothing to do with the revolutionary struggle.
By the way, in America itself, many blame the FBI and John Edgar Hoover, who headed the bureau for almost half a century, for putting all their efforts into fighting the left. The FBI began to seriously engage in the fight against organized crime, which half a century ago was mainly the mafia, after his death in 1972 and the adoption of RICO, the law against organized crime. After 20 years, the mafia was largely finished.
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were a turning point in the history of both America and the FBI. The bureau, which along with the CIA was largely rightly criticized for inaction, had to be urgently rebuilt. After Black Tuesday, the fight against international terrorism was added to his responsibilities. However, the first SWAT (special forces) unit in the FBI appeared almost two decades earlier, in 1984, on the eve of the Los Angeles Olympics. The Patriot Act, passed in 2002, gave the FBI new capabilities: wiretapping phones, monitoring the Internet, etc. What caused the most controversy in society was the FBI's permission to search apartments and houses in the absence of the owners.
The bureau's activities are now led by Robert Mueller, who was sworn in on September 4, 2001, just a week before the terrorist attacks in New York. In total, over the century-long history, the bureau has had ten heads, and relations between the directors of this powerful intelligence service and US presidents have not always been cloudless. It is known that John Kennedy wanted to fire J. Edgar Hoover, who retained his post under eight presidents for almost 48 years. However, he prudently collected more than one suitcase of incriminating evidence against the head of state. Reluctantly, Kennedy was forced to leave him at the head of the bureau, receiving in return a promise to keep everything secret.
President Clinton also had a bad relationship with then-FBI Director Louis Freeh. In his controversial book, My FBI: Defeating the Mafia, the War on Terror, and the Bill Clinton Investigations, Freeh complained that his people had to devote as much time and energy to amorous presidential scandals as to fighting gangsters. Moreover, the FBI director even refused a pass that allowed him to enter the White House at any time of the day or night. He wanted all his visits to President Clinton's residence to be strictly official.
The FBI also hated Richard Nixon, who encroached on the independence of the bureau. As it became known recently, Nixon had to leave the White House in no small part thanks to the FBI. Information about Watergate was leaked by Mark Felt, Hoover's deputy.
Now the intelligence agency, which began in the last century with three dozen employees, has 30,488 people, has centers in 56 major US cities and more than 400 branches in smaller cities. The bureau's budget in fiscal year 2007 was more than $6 billion.