Day 319 - G-Men

by  Joss U 

When I was a child, I wanted to be an FBI officer. There were lots of TV programs about the FBI, including The Untouchables in the early 60s and The F.B.I. with Ephram Zimbalist, Jr, in the later 60s.

They were G-Men, Government Men. I thought of them as the ultimate good guys. I couldn't imagine why anyone would try robbing a bank or kidnapping someone because the FBI always caught the bad guys. Always.

I read somewhere that J. Edgar Hoover was determined no women would ever be accepted into the FBI as agents, and I thought it was entirely unfair.  So my goal became to become the first female FBI agent. But at around the same time I also wanted to join the Army because TV commercials showed women wearing ball gowns in front of mirrors while the narrator promised new wardrobes with the career that offered an opportunity to see the world. I was too much influenced by marketing.

During college, I got a different impression of the FBI while I worked one summer for my church. One afternoon a man in a black suit, white shirt, and tie came into the church office and flipped open his wallet to show his badge. He was from the FBI and told me he was there to confirm the employment of one of the upper classmen of Concordia by the church as a camp counselor two summers earlier. Since I had been at camp that summer and I knew the upper classman, I told him I knew that he had been at the camp that summer, smiling because I was pleased I could help. Remember that at this point I had positive impressions of G-Men. But his response to my statement took me aback. Instead of a thank you or any other positive acknowledgement, he told me it didn't matter if I could confirm where he was for one week of the summer because he needed to know the exact dates he arrived and left. And if he had left the camp during that period of time, the FBI wanted to know.

Well, that was me told off. So I contacted one of the pastors for the G-Man to talk to.

The upper classman in question was one of the only African American students at Concordia. Later I learned he had applied for conscientious objector status so he wouldn't have to serve in the army as a soldier. I concluded that the FBI was looking for reasons to question his patriotism or find even more damaging information about him. Or maybe it was just because he was black.

My next encounter with someone from the FBI was in Berkeley where I once again worked for a church and a guy wearing a black suit, white shirt, and tie came in to ask where the guy who lived next door in the apartment above the garage, also an African American, was. I had met the guy next door but the church rented the apartment to a woman so I saw her at least once a month when she paid her rent, but not him. I could honestly tell the agent I had no idea where the guy was. He gave me his card and asked me to call him if I saw the man next door.

As soon as he left, the woman next door came in quite aggitated to ask me if an FBI agent had asked about her husband. I told her he had. She said the issue was nothing and she hoped that I would just ignore the agent's request. Again, since I rarely saw her husband, I had little reason to think I would face the dilemma of having to decide to make that call. And the shine had definitely gone off the FBI's star for me.

During my State Department career, I only had one assignment where the FBI had assigned a Legal Attache (or Legatt, the title members of the FBI were given overseas), in Barbados. And that was a positive experience overall. But I did learn about the interagency rivalry among law enforcement. The regional security officer was jealous and suspicious of everything the Legatt did. Of course since then I have become an NCIS addict so the competition among law enforcement agencies is no big secret to anyone these days.

by  IceNineJon 

But my thirteen months of service in Yemen was an intense experience with the FBI, almost none of it pleasant. 

More than 100 FBI agents arrived in Aden after the attack on the Cole. Most of them - or those who came in waves as their replacements - stayed in Aden. The numbers scaled back considerably, but there were as many to protect them as there were agents to investigate. One agent, Jennifer, was assigned on a temporary basis to Sanaa as a liaison between the Aden operation and the embassy. When it was clear that Jennifer had established a good working relationship with the ambassador and the rest of the staff in Sanaa, her colleagues in Aden seemed to think she had been co-opted by the embassy. What a can't-win situation she was put into.

There was pressure from the FBI at all times for the ambassador to press the Yemeni government for more cooperation. The ambassador believed the Yemeni government was already doing all it could. Seven months later, the FBI informed the ambassador that they had credible information that they were in danger in Aden so they planned to relocate to Sanaa. The whole operation in Aden was packed up, put into the embassy cars, trucks, and buses, and driven up the country through some very rugged terrain to Sanaa. The FBI team took residence in the Sheraton Hotel in Sanaa, taking up whole floors for their living and working spaces, setting up metal detectors at the entrance to the hotel for all hotel visitors to have to pass through, and armed guards at the entrance to the parking lot. When they traveled between the hotel and the embassy, they traveled all together in a bus with armed guards sitting on the roof. We referred to them as a pod. 

A few days later, the lead agent told the ambassador they had further intelligence that it was no longer safe for them to remain in Sanaa either. She gave the ambassador no details. She said only that they would be leaving. Nothing the ambassador said could convince them to stay.

And then they were gone.