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Authors: Mark Olshaker John Douglas
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home to Long Island, where my dad was so proud, he flew the American flag in front of the house. With what I’d been doing the last several years, I didn’t have any dress-up civilian clothes, so my dad bought me three "regulation" dark suits—a blue, a black, and a brown—white shirts, and two pairs of wing tips, one black and one brown. Then he drove me down to Washing ton to make sure I’d be on time for my first day of work.
It didn’t take long to become inculcated with FBI ritual and lore. The special agent leading our induction ceremony told us to take out our gold badges and stare at them as we recited the oath of office. We all spoke in unison, staring at the blindfolded woman holding the scales of justice while solemnly swearing to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. "Bring it closer! Closer!" the special agent ordered, until we were all staring at these badges cross-eyed.
My new-agent class was made up solely of white men. In 1970, there were few black FBI agents and no women. That wouldn’t really open up until after Hoover’s long tenure, and even from beyond the grave he continued to exert a ghostly and powerful influence. Most of the men were between twenty-nine and thirty-five, so at twenty-five, I was one of the youngest.
We were indoctrinated to be on the lookout for Soviet agents, who would try to compromise us and get our secrets. These agents could be anywhere. We were told particularly to beware of women! The brainwashing was so effective I turned down a date with an extremely good-looking woman who worked in the building who had actually asked me out to dinner. I was afraid it was a setup and I was being tested.
The FBI Academy on the Marine base in Quantico, Virginia, wasn’t fully built and operational yet, so we took our firearms and physical training there and the classroom work in the Old Post Office Building in Washington.
One of the first things every trainee is taught is that an FBI agent only shoots to kill. The thinking that went into this policy is both rigorous and logical: if you draw your weapon, you have already made the decision to shoot. And if you have made the decision that the situation is serious enough to warrant shooting, you have decided it is serious enough to take a life. In the heat of the moment, you seldom have the latitude to plan your shot or time to indulge in a lot of mental gymnastics, and attempting merely to stop a subject or bring him down is too risky. You do not take any unnecessary chances for yourself or a potential victim.
We were given equally rigorous training in criminal law, fingerprint analysis, violent and white-collar crime, arrest techniques, weapons, hand-to-hand combat, and the history of the Bureau’s role in national law enforcement. One of the units I remember best, though, came fairly early in the course of study. We all re ferred to it as "dirty-words training."
"Doors closed?" the instructor asked. He then handed each of us a list. "I want you to study these words." The list, as I recall, contained such gems of Anglo-Saxon usage as
shit, fuck, cunnilingus, fellatio, cunt,
and
dickhead.
What we were supposed to do was commit these words to memory so that if they ever came up in field usage—such as during the interrogation of a suspect—we’d know what to do. And what we were supposed to do was to make sure any case report containing any of these words was given to the office’s "obscene steno"—I’m not kidding!—rather than the regular secretary. The obscene steno would traditionally be an older, more mature and seasoned woman, better able to handle the shock of seeing these words and phrases. Remember, this was all men in those days, and in 1970 the nation al sensibility was somewhat different from what it is today, at least within Hoover’s FBI. We were actually given a spelling test on these words, after which the papers were collected and—I
It didn’t take long to become inculcated with FBI ritual and lore. The special agent leading our induction ceremony told us to take out our gold badges and stare at them as we recited the oath of office. We all spoke in unison, staring at the blindfolded woman holding the scales of justice while solemnly swearing to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. "Bring it closer! Closer!" the special agent ordered, until we were all staring at these badges cross-eyed.
My new-agent class was made up solely of white men. In 1970, there were few black FBI agents and no women. That wouldn’t really open up until after Hoover’s long tenure, and even from beyond the grave he continued to exert a ghostly and powerful influence. Most of the men were between twenty-nine and thirty-five, so at twenty-five, I was one of the youngest.
We were indoctrinated to be on the lookout for Soviet agents, who would try to compromise us and get our secrets. These agents could be anywhere. We were told particularly to beware of women! The brainwashing was so effective I turned down a date with an extremely good-looking woman who worked in the building who had actually asked me out to dinner. I was afraid it was a setup and I was being tested.
The FBI Academy on the Marine base in Quantico, Virginia, wasn’t fully built and operational yet, so we took our firearms and physical training there and the classroom work in the Old Post Office Building in Washington.
One of the first things every trainee is taught is that an FBI agent only shoots to kill. The thinking that went into this policy is both rigorous and logical: if you draw your weapon, you have already made the decision to shoot. And if you have made the decision that the situation is serious enough to warrant shooting, you have decided it is serious enough to take a life. In the heat of the moment, you seldom have the latitude to plan your shot or time to indulge in a lot of mental gymnastics, and attempting merely to stop a subject or bring him down is too risky. You do not take any unnecessary chances for yourself or a potential victim.
We were given equally rigorous training in criminal law, fingerprint analysis, violent and white-collar crime, arrest techniques, weapons, hand-to-hand combat, and the history of the Bureau’s role in national law enforcement. One of the units I remember best, though, came fairly early in the course of study. We all re ferred to it as "dirty-words training."
"Doors closed?" the instructor asked. He then handed each of us a list. "I want you to study these words." The list, as I recall, contained such gems of Anglo-Saxon usage as
shit, fuck, cunnilingus, fellatio, cunt,
and
dickhead.
What we were supposed to do was commit these words to memory so that if they ever came up in field usage—such as during the interrogation of a suspect—we’d know what to do. And what we were supposed to do was to make sure any case report containing any of these words was given to the office’s "obscene steno"—I’m not kidding!—rather than the regular secretary. The obscene steno would traditionally be an older, more mature and seasoned woman, better able to handle the shock of seeing these words and phrases. Remember, this was all men in those days, and in 1970 the nation al sensibility was somewhat different from what it is today, at least within Hoover’s FBI. We were actually given a spelling test on these words, after which the papers were collected and—I
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