The FBI: Perseverance and Change

in a Complex Organization

by Michael E. Marotta

Sociology 462: Complex Organizations

Dr. Ronald Westrum, Spring 2007

Eastern Michigan University

The year 2008 marks the centenary of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI has been with us for about 80% of our history. Few alive today know a time without it. For nearly half of the Bureau’s life (48 years), J. Edgar Hoover was the director. The extent of Hoover’s legacy may be debatable, but the fact that there exists a "Hoover legacy" – as opposed to a "Burns Legacy" or a "Sessions Legacy" – is intuitively obvious.

Whether the FBI evolved according to some sociological imperative is perhaps intractable. Certainly, answering that question would require comparing it to other similar organizations and then comparing them to others that are dissimilar. "Similar" organizations need not be law enforcement agencies. Establishing the criteria for comparison would be a special sub-task before any such study could offer significant insights.

The history of the FBI is multidimensional and episodic. It is easy to see the organization oscillating between times of flamboyant excesses contravening civil rights and civil liberties and withdrawals into professional criminalistics and technical criminology. However, those two stereotypes sometimes played out simultaneously. Also, the Bureau has gone through several reorganizations. The formal structure of the central office in Washington changed. More or less control was given to or taken from field offices. Those changes took place in parallel with the other episodes.

Furthermore, the FBI is in and of American society. During Prohibition, agents did not drink – or at least they were officially forbidden from doing so. Diversity has been slow within the overall structure. However, even critics acknowledged that in training at Quantico race and gender were as unimportant as religion: proficiency and dedication were the only benchmarks. That dichotomy could describe America, generally.

The FBI has been both bravely independent of political pressure and frighteningly immune to public accountability. Over the decades the employment rosters lengthened and contracted and grew again. Most recently, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the FBI has been called to answer for its failure to identify a major threat. Yet, 50 years ago, the FBI denied the existence of the Mafia.

The more it changes, the more it stays the same. (Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.) That still leaves two questions: what is the "it" that is "the same thing;" and exactly what never changes? Before J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI was in its embryonic state. Certainly, from 1908 to 1924, the Bureau of Investigation more closely resembled a voluntary organization than it did a bureaucracy. William Burns employed "dollar a year" men. Nominally such persons of high social standing donate their talents to the public good. In fact, Burns issued federal shields to private cronies. In that mode, the Bureau more closely modeled an enterprise than it did a bureaucracy. It was only with the coming of Hoover that Max Weber’s criteria were met.

Bureaucracies are intended to be fast, honest and precise. They operate automatically according to established rules of conduct, both at the macro level for the organization per se, as well as at the micro level for the individual workers. They do well at routine, though they cannot handle novelty. Bureaucracies depend on the technical competence of the workers within them. They provide fulltime work for officeholders who draw regular payment, usually a salary. Although the reality is that people come and go, this is at least designed to be a lifetime vocation. Promotion is via some kind of objective examination. In America, we have civil service examinations, but other criteria can be applied as long as those modes are open to all equally. A bureaucracy has a special administrative staff, separate from its production staff. As the past is prologue to the present, bureaucracies depend on written documentation not only to track the work they do, but to develop future plans.

Applying those standards to the FBI reveals much about its history. Bureaucracies do well at routine and the FBI has been successful at routinizing crime. However, bureaucracies do not handle novel situations well and the 9/11 attacks underscored that. If fulltime, lifetime work is a required measure, then the FBI was not a bureaucracy before J. Edgar Hoover and certainly was not in the days of Burns’ dollar-a-year men. Paradoxically, Hoover’s campaign for bureaucracy actually made him a "moral entrepreneur."

J. Edgar Hoover successfully fought civil service intrusions into his bureau. His central staff and the field offices employed a body of clericals who were not agents. They could have been civil service, but were not. Also, civil service rules did not apply to the agents. The production of reports that track one’s productive time was one objective measure that substituted for examinations. Tallying arrests and convictions was also an equivalent objective requirement. As the agency (and Hoover) aged, as it (and he) rose above constitutional oversight, other criteria were applied. According to one critic, the choice of socks made a difference. Still, socks are an objective, albeit strange, measure.

J. Edgar Hoover’s leadership had elements of the "charismatic" style. However, this was not his primary mode. Unlike Gandhi (or Donald Trump), Hoover did not meet most of our modern standards for charismatic leadership. He did, however, have a vision and he communicated it to his followers. He wanted bright, educated, well-mannered young men who could work as criminalists. In his early days, Hoover was an innovator, in the same mode as August Vollmer. As he and the Bureau matured, that innovation fell out of favor. Certainly, while Hoover pushed for technical achievements in the crime lab, he did not tolerate any hint of structural innovation. Neither did he rely on much more than coercion to bring intransigents into line – or to push them out of the organization. He certainly did not engage in personal risk taking, unconventional expertise, and self-sacrifice. In the main, Hoover and his successors were bureaucratic leaders. They followed the rules. They expected others to follow those rules, as well, of course.

Hoover died as the Watergate scandal was breaking. Passing through those two events stressed the FBI as surely as a steel ingot forced between the rollers of a shaper.

The new directors developed Mission Statements and Vision Statements. It is not clear that anyone joined the FBI as a result of reading its mission statement. We know what the FBI is. Cultural information might be moderated by the reality of experience for the new recruit, but the selection process is so stiff that anyone who is successfully hired has been pre-selected to meet the norms of the Bureau.

Over the last 100 years, the Bureau has shown that it can be pathological. In the early days, before Hoover, cronyism and corruption were rampant. In the Hoover years, punishment was used to achieve consensus. Hoover dedicated significant resources to building his empire. The FBI had been involved in the Teapot Dome scandal. Following that – at which time Hoover became the director – the FBI was limited to investigating those who broke specific federal laws. At first, the number of such laws was necessarily small. As the national government grew, so did the FBI. Rum-running gangsters were a threat. So were fascists and communists. Spies and saboteurs threatened the nation. Objectively, auto theft is a minor crime. Legally, there are severe penalties for it, but the reality is that no one gets hurt and the insurance companies typically pay off. Therefore, tracking stolen autos brings good numbers, and a successful prosecution of "a major ring" never hurts. The FBI was investigating white collar crimes before the term was invented. Empire-building was the director’s chief concern and Hoover had many tools at his disposal. Everyone feared his "secret files."

Power in the United States, at least as exercised by J. Edgar Hoover, had about as much refinement and nobility as that exercised by Hollywood's version of the Emperor Caligula. We assume that it was not as violent, although it may have been. Certainly the sexual lust and prurience were there, the arrogant manipulation of the law, the use of terror and blackmail, the dependence on slavish satraps, and the tastelessness. And for what purpose? Not, as in similar circumstances under the Medicis, for monumental buildings and breath-taking works of art, nor, as under the Caesars, for order in a far-flung empire - but for nothing more than that this uninteresting man should not be deposed …

Lest there be any mistake, the FBI was never a "generative" organization. Generative organizations are those focused on the organization’s missions. Departments and organizations are subordinated to the common goal. The leader has an inspiring vision. Hierarchy is in abeyance. People are empowered to do the job right. Neither was it every anything like a "high performance" organization in which the full brainpower of the organization is dedicated to the goal. The fact is that police work is inherently dull and mechanistic and the FBI is nothing more (or less) than a great police force.

It is therefore easy to predict that what success the FBI has enjoyed came from one of three modes. They routinely caught common criminals by doggedly tracking them and running them to ground. The FBI also tolerated the non-conformist who could produce results without upsetting the cart. At least, that is the point of one case study of "the Georgia cracker" an old-fashioned agent who shot it out with bank robbers even in Miami Beach of the 1960s. Less exciting is the report by Peter M. Blau on the unofficial practices of FBI agency. Although anonymity is preserved to project the subjects, this report is apparently about a white collar crime unit with 16 agents and one clerk. Agents worked in the field, auditing books and interviewing people. "The agent had to evaluate the reliability of the information he obtained – since concealment of violations occurred, of course – and had to decide whether violations had taken place on the basis of a large and complex body of legal regulations." Each case took about 17 hours of work developed over a course of about 31 days, with each agent managing a about a dozen cases at once.

"They are not permitted to consult other agents. If they have a problem, they take it up with me," said the department supervisor. Yet, an agent averaged five contacts per hour with his colleagues. Hardly any of these were officially required, since each agent worked independently on the cases assigned to him. Some of them were purely private conversations, but many were discussions of their work, ranging from simple requests for information that could be answered in a sentence to complex consultations. … This unofficial practice had developed in response to a need for advice from a source other than the supervisor."

Informal requests among agents saved having to look up regulations. These chats also consisted of more selective conferences about complex technical issues. Blau pointed out that this consultation among colleagues was an exchange of values: the admission of inferiority by the one was traded for the valuable time of the expert. This led to "consultation in disguise" over difficult or unusual cases. More of an open questioning with give and take, these interactions served an even more subtle purpose. The agent did not so much want an opinion as the opportunity to thinking out loud. This developed into a full-blown network of interpersonal relations that created social cohesion within the office. It had the effect of setting standards for achievement and at the same time it enforced group norms. Status was complex. Earlier, in the formation stage of a team, or as new members came in, adherence to norms correlated with status. However, eventually this seems to reverse and the case of "the Georgia Cracker" confirms that.

The point is that as much as the director hated informality, and as regimented as their daily work was, the FBI succeeded at its tasks because the rules were not followed. That is symptom of organizational dysfunction.

Thus, the agency is open for more blame than praise in The 9/11 Commission Report. "Chapter 11: Foresight and Hindsight" is a condemnation of the "failure of imagination" not only of the FBI but of the entire US intelligence leadership.

The report admits that the 9/11 attacks surpassed any known proportionality. Pearl Harbor or the Chinese attack on Korea were the actions of major powers, whereas 9/11 was carried out by a tiny group of people. "Measured on a governmental scale, the resources behind it were trivial. The group behind it was dispatched by an organization based in one of the poorest, most remote, and least industrialized on earth. The organization recruited a mixture of young fanatics and highly educated zealots who could not find suitable places in their home societies, or were driven from them." [Kean page 340]

Previously, despite the 1993 attack on the WTC and the assassination of CIA employees (also in 1993), and including the attacks in Somalia and on the Cole, only about 50 Americans had died. Even the loss of over 241 US personnel in Beirut (220 Marines and 18 sailors 3 soldiers and the civilian groundskeeper) on October 23, 1983, pales by comparison to the 3,000 deaths on September 11, 2001.

Although al Qaeda was formed in 1988, it apparently did not receive a mention in U.S. intelligence reports until 1999. That was despite the fact that in 1996-1997, Ussama bin Laden had been identified as a terrorist who was building a group of followers. A Janaury25, 2001 memo from Richard Clarke to Condoleezza Rice was "blistering" in its condemnation of the administration to identify and pursue its sworn enemy. Again on September 4, 2001, identifying al Qaeda as a threat., the 9/11 Commission Report notes that Clarke spoke of ‘hundreds" of U.S. deaths: he did not imagine that thousands would die a week later. That was a failure of imagination.

Alluding to Pearl Harbor, the 9/11 Commission begged for a way to "routinize and bureaucratize the exercise of imagination." Since terrorists already used truck bombs and had attacked the Cole with boats, then the leap is not great to imagine aircraft used as delivery vehicles. In 1996, TWA Flight 800 crashed and Vice President Al Gore headed a commission on aviation security. They did not mention the possibility that aircraft could be hijacked and then used as weapons. Even though, this was already common knowledge:

Frank Eugene Corder (May 26, 1956–September 12, 1994) crashed a stolen Cessna 150 onto the South Lawn of the White House early on September 12, 1994, apparently trying to hit the building; he was the sole casualty.

An unemployed truck driver and U.S. Army veteran from Perry Point, Maryland, Corder had lost his wife to cancer several weeks prior to the incident, which is thought to have driven him towards suicide. Friends claim he bore no ill will towards President Bill Clinton and likely only wanted the publicity of the stunt. The President was not even in the mansion at the time due to renovations, but was instead staying at Blair House.

He stole the Cessna on the night of September 11 and departed from Aldino Airport in Maryland severely intoxicated, which is presumed to have led to his later miscalculation. The plane was noticed by radar technicians at National Airport several minutes before he tried to steer it into the wall of the White House. At 1:49 a.m., he hit the South Lawn and died on impact.

The crash caused a re-evaluation in security procedures around the White House, as the pilot had entered restricted airspace. Though the White House was reportedly rigged with surface-to-air missiles, none were fired.

The 9/11 Commission pointed out the total absence of a "red team" analysis to look at this from the enemy’s point of view. There was no development of telltales that would give evidence (such as suspicious persons in flight training schools), and of course, no way to track such telltales since they were not developed. All of those could have been within the purview of the FBI. This is not to rehash the failures that led to 9/11 but to outline the limitations to bureaucracy. In its final recommendations, the 9/11 Commission called for the "routinization of imagination." But that is to call for the creation of a chimera.

On the eve of 9/11, the FBI was fighting political terrorism and international criminal cartels the way it fights all crimes: with lawyers. Legal attaches assigned to U.S. embassies are the first line of defense. According to Lewis Freeh, "Primarily created to safeguard the American public from foreign threat, legal attaches serve as the first line of defense in preventing foreign crime from reaching American shores." The legal attaches handled 24,000 investigative matters in 1998. The Bureau invested $20 million per year in training, of which $500,000 (annually) went to train individual officers of foreign nations. From 1994 to 2002 the number of courses delivered expanded from 94 to 289. The number of nations involved was extended from 56 to 174, raising the total enrollment from 1400 to 10,115 students. With 174 nations represented, the FBI was directly involved with all but the handful of "rogue states" such as Cuba, Libya, Iran, and North Korea. Yet, there is a downside to dancing with the devil.

For over ten years, the FBI had been working closely with Russian police. That did not protect policy expert Paul Joyal from being assassinated in front of his home in Adelphi, Maryland. Joyal, who had been a policy expert on Russia for the U.S. Senate, accused Vladimir Putin of complicity (if not cause) in the death of Alexander Litvinenko.

The failures of 9/11 are undeniable. Attempting to "fix" them is a long row to hoe because they were not anomalies. The FBI did not deal with the Mafia for many years, acting as if it did not exist, when actions showed that the FBI knew it did. The FBI "captured" German spies and saboteurs because they surrendered before they were detected.

Twenty years is a long time when you have to live it. In retrospect, it can be a sentence, or only a phrase. From its founding in 1908 until the appointment of J. Edgar Hoover, in 1924, the FBI was insignificant. Over the next 20 years, it became indomitable. From 1944 to 1964, it was an independent branch of government. Then, the first mainstream criticisms began to appear. Some people dared to speak out. In 1962, a former agent with short tenure, Jack Levine went on radio station WBAI in New York. (That caused an FBI investigation into the Pacifica radio enterprise.) Then, from the death of Hoover through Watergate, the FBI collapsed like a neutron star. Until the mid-1990s, its effects were indirectly discernable in the news events of other agencies, such as the DEA and SEC. With the fall of communism and the escalation of new conflicts, and the fading of Watergate, the FBI recovered, only to be hit by 9/11.: "How did this happen?" Yet, through all of that, the Bureau has persevered.

Bureaucracies do that. They do it well. Disheartening as the Congressional hearings must be to agents in the field, those agents continue to do their work as they always have.

Three weeks before 9/11, the FBI touted a major bust that seems bitter now. On

August 21, 2001, FBI issued a press release that "announced the arrests of eight individuals involved in a nationwide scheme to defraud the McDonald's Corporation and its customers by fraudulently manipulating McDonald's promotional prize contests." Perhaps the Bureau’s resources could have been better invested, but crime is crime. Without a crystal ball, which of these recent announcements is less important than the next unforeseen disaster? These headlines – from press releases from the field offices in Detroit, Cleveland, Phoenix, over the last six weeks to three months – are taken as typical of the work that the FBI continues to do. An important part of that work is publicizing the work. We can denigrate publicity-seeking, but the fact is that the visible presence of a capable guardian deters crime.

 

Detroit

Former Computer Contractor Pleads Guilty To Hacking Daimler Chrysler Parts Distribution Wireless Network

Former Bail Bondsman Sentenced For Impersonating An Fbi Agent

Superseding Indictment Returned Against La Shish Owner

Bad Axe Resident Indicted For Bank Fraud

Davison Man Sentenced For On-Line

Exploitation Of North Carolina Teens

Marquette, MI - May 17, 2007- United States Attorney Charles R. Gross announced that, on Thursday, May 17, 2007, Randall Wayne McLeod, Sr., pled guilty to a charge of Unlawful Eviction of a Servicemember's Dependents. McLeod entered his guilty plea before United States Magistrate Judge Timothy P. Greeley in Marquette, Michigan.

Man Sentenced For Conspiring To Burn Home Of African-American Family In Taylor, Michigan

Cleveland

Mark D. Lay Arrested in Relation to Management of Off-Shore Investment Fund That Resulted in the Ohio Bureau of Workers' Compensation's ("OBWC") Recovering Only $9Million of its $225 Million Investment

High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) Task Force Arrest

David A. Dadante Charged With Two Counts of Securities Fraud

Bribing Public Official Employed by the Cleveland Water Department Sentence

Employee Bank Fraud Changes

$5.5 Million Money Laundering Scheme

Ohio Man Pleads Guilty to Conspiring to Solicit Murder of Another

Employee Money Laundering Charges

Senior Vice President Pleads Guilty in Bank Fraud

Man Arrested On One Count of Federal Bank Robbery

Armed Bank Robbery Arrest

Bank Robbery Arrest

Bank Robbery Arrest

Phoenix

Mexican National Found Guilty of Assaulting Border Patrol Agent With Handgun

Woman Found Guilty of Lying to Federal Agents in Double Homicide Investigation

Three Californians Charged With Child Sex Trafficking

Serial Bank Robber

Former Corrections Officer and National Guardsman Sentenced for Participating in Bribery and Extortion Conspiracy

FBI Citizens' Academy Graduation Dinner

Those cases exemplify the FBI that we expect to be working for us 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The FBI still maintains its "Most Wanted" roster and now has a "Most Wanted Terrorists" list.

Like the Chicago gangs of the 1930s, the fascist and communist agents, the current climate forces the FBI to react with the public announcements that we, the people, apparently want to hear:

Our Priorities
In executing the following priorities, we will produce and use intelligence to protect the nation from threats and to bring to justice those who violate the law.

1. Protect the United States from terrorist attack
2. Protect the United States against foreign intelligence operations and espionage
3. Protect the United States against cyber-based attacks and high-technology crimes
4. Combat public corruption at all levels
5. Protect civil rights
6. Combat transnational/national criminal organizations and enterprises
7. Combat major white-collar crime
8. Combat significant violent crime
9. Support federal, state, local and international partners
10. Upgrade technology to successfully perform the FBI's mission

Currently, the Bureau has 30,000 employees, of whom 12,000 are special agents and 18,000 support staff. That staff includes scientists, linguists, and others as well as clericals. The annual budget is about $6 billion.

"The barometer by which citizens of all nations measure police effectiveness is (a) decreasing crime rates and (b) a sense of security in the minds of all the nation’s citizens. Citizens are no more willing to continue to invest in bankrupt police agencies than they would invest in bankrupt businesses." On the other hand, in addition to this class in Complex Organizations, I have another in Organizational Behavior (Management 386). The newest edition of the textbook for that class still cites Enron in its examples.

History cannot be unwritten. The FBI has to balance its successes against its Red-baiting, the political hatchet work, ignoring the Mafia while chasing Dr. Martin Luther King. Wounded Knee, Ruby Ridge, and Waco are also part of that history. That Homeland Security did not subsume the FBI – nor the CIA, DIA and NSA – while it did take in the Coast Guard and Secret Service, says much about the retained power of the FBI. That is the legacy of J. Edgar Hoover.

 

Works cited and other references