Bryan Denson - FBI Files--Catching a Russian Spy--Agent Leslie G. Wiser Jr. and the Case of Aldrich Ames

Take a close look at the badge on this page.

The shield is gold plated, stands two and a half inches tall, and comes with a solemn pledge. The FBI agents who carry these badges promise to defend the Constitution. They promise to protect Americans from all enemies. They promise to protect us no matter who our attackers might be, and where they might strike.

Fourteen thousand special agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, backed by 21,000 support personnel, carry those badges. They work night and day in every state, territory, and corner of the world. They live by the FBI motto: Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity.

In the early days of the organization, Americas worst threats were at home. In the 1930s, gun-toting gangsters with names like Al Scarface Capone, Charles Pretty Boy Floyd, and George Machine Gun Kelly Barnes got rich robbing banks, kidnapping children for ransom, and operating illegal bars and casinos. The FBI declared war on these public enemies and succeeded in taking many off the streets. But in the last half of the twentieth century, Americans faced new and greater dangers in the homeland.

Highly organized street gangs, the mafia, outlaw bikers, and domestic terrorists became targets of the bureau. The most dangerous were white-supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. From the civil rights era into the 1980s, those secretive groups terrorized and sometimes killed people of color with fists, firearms, and explosivesand still do even today. By the late 1990s, the FBI declared Americas leading domestic terrorist threat to be underground groups such as the Earth Liberation Front, which firebombed businesses and government agencies it accused of harming the natural world.

Then, in a single morning, the FBIs mission changed forever.

On September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda terrorists boarded four jetliners on the East Coast. Once in the air, they seized control of the planes. In eighty-one minutes, they flew them into the World Trade Center towers in New York, the Pentagon in Virginia, and, thanks to intervening passengers, a field in Pennsylvania. Those men, on a suicide mission, murdered nearly three thousand innocent people. It was the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. historya foreign assault on American soil.

The attacks of 9/11 changed the FBI overnight. Agents still catch bank robbers, kidnappers, and other criminals, but their primary mission today is to protect Americans from terrorists, spies, organized crime, public corruption, cyberattacks, and assaults on our economic, military, and political systems.

Books in the FBI Files series spotlight the FBIs most amazing cases since the bureau began on July 26, 1908. You will meet some of Americas worst villains and the heroic men and women who brought them to justice. And you will understand why FBI agents live by the motto Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity.