Bureau of instigation
Getlein, Frank
Of several minds: Frank Getlein BUREAU OF INSTIGATION SET A THIEF TO CATCH A THIEF Assume the FBI would do nothing really risky without clearing it with the Department of Justice. Assume the...
...No doubt there is something to be said for it if the FBI had budget enough, agents enough and imagination enough to seize control of all the crime going on in the country...
...The FBI has simply been out of things for a long time, has long lost the unique prestige it enjoyed under J. Edgar Hoover, may even feel its very budget in danger in the foreseeable future...
...And what on earth was the Carter White House up to...
...The Department of Justice, on the other hand, has a Watergate score to settle with Congress...
...It's quite a performance all round...
...Unfortunately, it doesn't exactly work that way...
...Those with a memory for oddities in the news will recall that when the Berrigan brothers were in prison for opposing Nixon's and Kissinger's wars in Southeast Asia, the FBI sent in a "real'' criminal to involve them in some sort of phony "plot" against Kissinger which occasioned that statesman's saying, with his customary graciousness, that he was the kidnap target of a group of "sexstarved nuns...
...It's an interesting theory of crime detection: first you order the crime to be committed, then you brilliantly "solve" it...
...The wrongly called "sting" operation on members of Congress had barely been leaked when it was learned that at least one, probably two, of the FBI's criminal collaborators easily and automatically applied their lessons from the Bureau to free-lance swindling on their own...
...Dillinger goes off on the spree and eventually gets it coming out of the movie theater the FBI had directed him into and the Bureau has achieved its semi-divine status in the USA, never again a budget item to be questioned, never again the remarkable political opinions of its director to be laughed at as the self-burlesque they were, never again anyone in public life to do anything but tremble at the mention of the name...
...One can see the sequence, all in rather grainy black and white film stock of the kind employed by Warner Brothers for crime pictures featuring Edward G. Robinson, Paul Muni, especially Jimmy Cagney...
...One of his interim predecessors, L. Patrick Gray, was, briefly, the leading destroyer of incriminating evidence in the country on the same terms...
...In short, there is quite a record of the FBI actually bringing crime into existence or attempting to do so where none existed before the Bureau started it up...
...For instance, the FBI's greatest and most enduring fame was in its tracking down and shooting—-as distinct from "bringing to justice" in a society of laws—the bank-robber of the 'thirties, John Dillinger...
...The emerging pattern is that of the country's leading law enforcement officer as simultaneously one of the country's leading creators of crimes...
...Assume the Department of Justice would likewise demur at dangerous initiatives without prior consultation with the White House...
...Here's an unlisted 'phone number...
...As for the Carter White House, having never made the slightest effort to understand how Congress works, it has not surprisingly found that it doesn't work at all under such circumstances, has complained regularly about this and might well—at some level—welcome the opportunity to discipline the unruly legislature by a demonstration of power...
...The model A comes around the corner, coasts to a halt in front of the rural gas-station-general-store, where Dillinger is lounging with his friends...
...In the greasy-spoons of the Dillinger epoch, there was a gag sign: if your wife can't cook, don't divorce her, eat here and keep her for a pet...
...Just hit it and you don't have to split a cent with us...
...Of several minds: Frank Getlein BUREAU OF INSTIGATION SET A THIEF TO CATCH A THIEF Assume the FBI would do nothing really risky without clearing it with the Department of Justice...
...The connection between crime investigation and crime instigation is very old in the Europe that gave us most of our cultural patterns...
...Up to, that is, in all three cases, in leading members of Congress into temptation, recording their responses to proferred or, at least bruited to be available, bribes for legislative favors and leaking all this to the press before the targets had been sought, let along brought in...
...I'll let you know where to go next, how much loot there is, when it's there, all that...
...Granted the pattern and sub-patterns revealed above, it seems an entirely reasonable supposition that the entire FBI record as fearless crime-solvers was fabricated out of the same kind of whole cloth...
...Three questions arise: What on earth was the FBI up to...
...In the back seat you'll find a couple of surplus World War I Thompson sub-machine guns, some .38s, plenty of ammo...
...What on earth was the Justice Department up to...
...Once the pattern is grasped, a subpattern emerges...
...We might do that with the FBI: keep it for a pet and somehow find an entirely new agency that actually addresses itself to real crime...
...Is there any real reason to believe that Dillinger was, so to speak, an "honest" bank robber, i.e., a small-time criminal who launched himself, unassisted by the national police, into the bank-robbing that brought the FBI into hot pursuit and eventually made national heroes of them...
...An FBI agent, readily identified by the snap-brim hat, steps from the car, beckons Dillinger to one side: "Listen, John...
...There's a bank down the road in Hicksville just waiting to be knocked over...
...Keep in touch...
...It was notorious throughout most, perhaps all, of the whirligig regimes of nineteenth century France, an essential element of Czarist Russia in the same period, legendary in the Metternichian Austrian imperialist police-state so recently held up as a model for our time...
...There was not, it must constantly be borne in mind, a bribery plot, influencepeddling, whatever, going on with the FBI moving in on it...
...Then all crime would take place through the Bureau, selected criminals brought to justice and we would all revel in a crime-free society...
...This is all speculation, of course, but it is speculation well called for by official professions of ignorance, innocence, on all levels...
...Suddenly a pattern emerges...
...The FBI created everything that happened and incidentally spent a huge bundle of the taxpayers' money to do so...
...FRANK GETLEIN 28 March 1980: 167...
...There are interesting ramifications...
...An immediate one is that FBI Director Webster is now, the leading briber in the country, at least in terms of public knowledge...
...It is true that ineptness, plain dumbness, should never be left out of account as the explanation for baffling behavior in government or elsewhere, but still it goes beyond dumbness for the executive branch of the government to attack the legislative out of nowhere...
...I'm leaving this car for you...
...Having presented itself in court as believing the burglary of Democratic headquarters by employees of the Republican White House more latterly employed by the Committee to Reelect the President (Nixon) to have nothing whatever to do with either that White House or that Committee, the Department soon found itself shouldered aside as incompetent, dishonest or both, replaced by a Special Prosecutor, the replacement come about largely as a result of Congressional insistence...
...This was hardly an invention of Webster's or even Hoover's...
...On somewhat different terms, the sainted J. Edgar Hoover was for many years the leading blackmailer...
...Is it not at least as reasonable to assume that Dillinger, like the Congressmen, like the Ku Klux Klan, like who knows how many others, was set up by the Bureau...
...The motives of all three assault echelons are easy to discern, perhaps deceptively so...
...One way to get back some of its fear and respect, if not exactly prestige, would indeed be to demonstrate to Congress that its members, too, are subject to unpredictable disasters visited upon them by the Bureau...
...At almost the same time we learned that the FBI, through its criminal collaborators, was heavily, if murkily, involved in blowing up that church with the little girls in it down South and, worse, that the Bureau had heavily intervened to prevent the bringing to trial of its house criminals...
...The way it works is that the FBI spends an inordinate amount of what the Bureau itself never tires of calling its inadequate resources on let's-pretend crime, allows real crime to go unpursued because of prior obligations in the let's pretend world, and the rest of us get the worst of both: the real criminals come at us undeCommonweal: 166 terred by the FBI which is otherwise engaged, and the FBI's vigorous pursuit of imaginary crime or its creation of real crime is chalked up big on the tax bill...
Vol. 107 • March 1980 • No. 6
