In the 100 years since it was created on July 26 1908, the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation — or FBI, as it is better known — has grown from a few dozen detectives to a force of 30 000-plus.
It has been elevated to the stature of global legend, thanks in part to names like J Edgar Hoover — the man who led the FBI for nearly 50 years, including during World War II and the tumultuous civil rights movement — and Elliot Ness, the agent who felled notorious gangster Al Capone.
And it has spawned numerous Hollywood films, including ‘G’ Men in 1935, with James Cagney, and Silence of the Lambs in 1991, with Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster.
But it also owes its reputation to its longevity, its ability to change with the times and to the cases it has successfully cracked.
The FBI was created by US Attorney General Charles Bonaparte, a member of the Baltimore, Maryland, branch of the family of Napoleon Bonaparte, who saw a need for detectives to investigate federal crimes for the US Department of Justice, FBI historian John Fox told Agence France-Presse
“In its early days, the bureau had about two dozen responsibilities — everything from federal criminal investigations to white-collar crime to national security responsibilities,” Fox said.
“Over time, as Congress said one thing or another was going to be a violation of the federal criminal law, our jurisdiction expanded. And it also grew with national security crises like World War I and World War II,” he said.
The FBI captured people’s imaginations starting in the 1930s, when the US was swept by a wave of crime, sparked by the tough times of the Great Depression and led by notorious crooks like John Dillinger and the colourfully nicknamed Machine Gun Kelly.
“The bureau became famous for bringing down Dillinger and those of his ilk,” said Fox.
It was during the era of Dillinger and Machine Gun Kelly that FBI agents acquired the nickname “G Men,” a moniker that has stuck until today.
According to Fox, it stands for government men, as in federal agents.
While the Dillinger-era enshrined the FBI as a legendary US crime-busting agency, it was World War II that saw the bureau’s biggest growth spurt: it surged from a couple of hundred agents and support personnel to almost 13 000 members.
It also cracked one of its most memorable cases, thwarting a plot by eight Nazi Germans who had snuck into the US to commit acts of sabotage on US soil.
Since then, physical growth has slowed but the FBI’s profile has remained high, thanks to the movies and television series it has inspired, and to a host of successes.
They include the role played by the FBI in bringing to justice the Ku Klux Klan members who killed three civil rights activists — the film Mississippi Burning was based on the case — in solving the Oklahoma City bombing, and in tracking down Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre.
Another FBI success story is its 10 Most Wanted list, which began in the 1950s.
More than 400 faces have been paraded on the list, and 95% of the fugitives have been arrested, Fox said.
Number one on the list at present is al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
He was added to the list not after the September 11 2001 attacks on the US, but following the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 — meaning he has evaded capture for 10 years now.
Fox was hard-pressed to put his finger on many high-profile FBI failures.
“Our biggest failure was probably Teapot Dome in the 1920s. It’s not that well known. It had to do with bribery in the federal government and the leasing of oil lands,” he said.
Another failure of the FBI, although it was not highlighted by Fox, was what a 2005 Justice Department report called its inability to detect and prevent the September 11 attacks in 2001.
“We have stumbled sometimes, we have made mistakes,” said Fox. “But we can learn from those mistakes as we go forward for the next 100 years and try not to do them again.” — AFP