"Ma'am, what you need is a new, improved Hoover." (J. Edgar Hoover, management of FBI)

• Author: Miller, Matthew

Instead of wasting time catching Soviet spies, William Webster's FBI went after the real threat to our national security-peace groups and black and Hispanic agents

It's a Friday in September, and FBI Director William S. Sessions is playing damage control again. This time he's responding to a federal court ruling in a discrimination suit brought by more than 300 of the bureau's 439 Hispanic agents. Sessions's highly rated predecessor, William Webster, swore in a pre-trial statement that he never noticed "any bias against giving. . .advancement opportunities to Hispanics." But Lucius D. Bunton, a U.S. district judge in Texas, sees it differently. The federal agency that is supposed to enforce the nation's civil rights laws, he says, is itself guilty of "systematic discrimination" and has a "bankrupt" grievance process to boot. Still, Sessions tries to be upbeat. Citing his new audits and analyses, he concludes, "It is time to move forward."

It's not hard to imagine why he'd like to. For much of his first year on the job, Sessions and his deputies have dashed from committee hearings to press conferences to courtrooms, trying to explain away a pattern of scandalous FBI conduct that was thought to have died with J. Edgar Hoover. William Webster's nine years as director earned him a Mr. Clean reputation (not to mention a job at the CIA, recently renewed). But a look at the record shows plenty of dirt under the nails. While the bureau as a whole was systematically harassing Hispanics, several agents undertook their own grotesque mission of abusing a black colleague. The bureau responded with taps on the tormentors' wrists, and that case too is now in the courts. Meanwhile, in a clear abuse of its surveillance authority, the FBI spent two years spying on groups opposed to the Reagan administration's Central American policy without finding a single misdeed. And even the nation's librarians are up in arms because the bureau wants them to tattle on foreign-looking researchers, arguing that they could be Soviet agents in disguise.

It's not as though the bureau had nothing better to do. The mid-eighties march of FBI folly coincides with the unprecedented Soviet theft of state secrets. Edward Lee Howard, the CIA turncoat, escaped to Moscow when a crack FBI surveillance squad didn't see him drive away. FBI agent Richard Miller, who had "wacky" written on him in neon, continued to enjoy access to classified information, which he passed along to his KGB lover. And navy man John Walker got away with 15 years of entrepreneurship that left the Soviets holding some of the nation's most cherished defense secrets. This included an improved capacity to track American submarines-potentially compromising the most important leg of our nuclear deterrent, And when Walker's wife finally squealed, it took the FBI another three months to decide to do something about it. As Michael Dukakis might say, the issue here isn't ideology, it's competence.

To be sure, Webster, and his predecessor, Clarence Kelley, did move the bureau forward. Under their leadership, the FBI seemed to get past Hoover's longtime fixation with pimply faced car thieves and bank robbers to make major inroads against tougher targets: organized crime, drug trafficking, and public corruption. Hoover had shied away from the mob and other tough cases (to the point of even denying that the Mafia existed) because they weren't as likely to produce the statistics he loved to trot before Congress. But the recent patterns of racial harassment and groundless spying make some critics think that, for all Webster's good press, Hoover's fingerprints linger.

"You start to feel," says Patricia Motto, attorney for a black agent now suing the bureau for discrimination"like you're fencing with Hoover's ghost."

It's a tempting conclusion, but it's wrong. The days when liberals could conveniently trace all the FBI's bigotry and paranoia to the malevolent mind of "The Boss" are gone. And in a way that's too bad. At least then, you knew where to point the finger. These days, instead of swift action we get promises of new studies and future improvements. Ironically, it might take a dose of one of Hoover's best qualities, his dominating leadership, to rid the bureau of his worst ones.

For Mat Perez, the turning point came in 1984, at a meeting with top FBI officials in Washington. Perez, a special agent since 1963, had been one of the FBI's prominent minority success stories. He'd risen through the ranks to become special-agent-in-charge (SAC, in bureau lingo) of the San Juan office, before moving to the assistant special-agent-in-charge (ASAC) post in the much larger Los Angeles division in 1982.

Then the trouble started. Perez says his boss, Richard Bretzing, the Los Angeles SAC, treated him with contempt and denounced him to his face as a "special representative" of minorities. Perez was convinced that Bretzing was shutting him out of important management matters primarily because he was Hispanic. The Equal Employment Opportunity complaint he filed in late 1983, plus a subsequent one in 1984 charging that Bretzing had retaliated, led to a Washington meeting in the office of Edwin Sharp, the FBI's assistant director of administration. Perez says he offered suggestions for reforming the EEO process, but Sharp and others dismissed them out of hand. "They laughed at me," he says.

By the time Perez had wound his way through the administrative process without satisfaction, his campaign became a rallying point for virtually the entire Hispanic force. His discrimination suit was accompanied by dozens of sworn statements from Hispanic agents urging the court to let a class action go forward. When even more came forward in the next few months to buck the bureau's fierce fraternal code, Judge Bunton was persuaded.

The Hispanics' chief complaint is that they're invariably pulled off their regular cases and dispatched to monitor Spanish conversation wiretaps in drug cases-whiletheir white colleagues who speak Spanish aren't. In bureau parlance, it's known as the "Taco Circuit." Forget that this means working 12-hour shifts in a cramped van for much of your career. Since this duty often takes agents out of town for up to three months at a time, their regular cases get reassigned. The result is that Hispanic agents don't get to "hold the ticket" on enough cases to rack up the arrests and develop the informants needed for promotion.

Part of the problem is that the FBI didn't begin to integrate until relatively recently. Hoover made no bones about wanting an All-American white force; until Robert Kennedy pressured Hoover to hire minorities, the only blacks were Hoover's personal servants, whom he christened "honorary" agents. Real progress took place...