Early FBI Years
| Federal Bureau of Investigation | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Common name | Federal Bureau of Investigation | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Abbreviation | FBI | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Seal of the Federal Bureau of Investigation | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover often moved Bureau agents around so they would have wide experience. Felt observed that Hoover "wanted every agent to get into any Field office at anytime. Since he had never been transferred and did not have a family, he had no idea of the financial and personal hardship involved."
After completing sixteen weeks of training at the FBI Academy at Quantico, Virginia and FBI Headquarters in Washington, DC. Felt was first assigned to Texas, working in the Field Offices in Houston and San Antonio, spending three months in each. He then returned to the "Seat of Government", as Hoover called FBI Headquarters, and was assigned to the Espionage Section of the Domestic Intelligence Division, tracking down spies and saboteurs during World War II, where he worked on the Major Case Desk. His most notable work there was on the "Peasant" case. Helmut Goldschmidt, operating under the codename "Peasant", was a German agent in custody in England. Under Felt's direction, his German masters were informed "Peasant" had made his way to the United States, and were fed disinformation on Allied plans.
The Espionage Section was abolished in May 1945 after V-E Day. After the war, Felt was sent again to a Field Office, first to Seattle, Washington. After two years of general work, he spent two years as a Firearms Instructor and was promoted from Agent to Supervisor. Upon passage of the Atomic Energy Act and the creation of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, the Seattle Office became responsible for completing background checks of workers at the Hanford plutonium plant near Richland, Washington. Felt oversaw these checks. In 1954, Felt returned briefly to Washington as an inspector's aide. Two months later, he was sent to New Orleans, Louisiana, as Assistant Special Agent in charge of the Field Office. When he was transferred to Los Angeles, California fifteen months later, he held the same rank there.
Read more about this topic: Mark Felt
Famous quotes containing the words early, fbi and/or years:
“A two-year-old can be taught to curb his aggressions completely if the parents employ strong enough methods, but the achievement of such control at an early age may be bought at a price which few parents today would be willing to pay. The slow education for control demands much more parental time and patience at the beginning, but the child who learns control in this way will be the child who acquires healthy self-discipline later.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“Has anyone ever told you that you overplay your various roles rather severely, Mr. Kaplan? First you’re the outraged Madison Avenue man who claims he’s been mistaken for someone else. Then you play the fugitive from justice, supposedly trying to clear his name of a crime he knows he didn’t commit. And now you play the peevish lover stung by jealously and betrayal. It seems to me you fellows could stand a little less training from the FBI and a little more from the Actors Studio.”
—Ernest Lehman (b.1920)
“Perfect present has no existence in our consciousness. As I said years ago in Erewhon, it lives but upon the sufferance of past and future. We are like men standing on a narrow footbridge over a railway. We can watch the future hurrying like an express train towards us, and then hurrying into the past, but in the narrow strip of present we cannot see it. Strange that that which is the most essential to our consciousness should be exactly that of which we are least definitely conscious.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)