In 1970 Jack Ryan, a 32-year-old special agent for the FBI, was assigned to a stakeout set up to capture two of the nation’s most notorious fugitives: antiwar activist priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan. The Berrigan brothers had gone underground after being sentenced to three years in prison for destroying draft-board records in Catonsville, Maryland. Their mother had been admitted to a hospital in Syracuse, New York, and there was suspicion that her sons might come to visit.
Five years ago, he challenged the wisdom of an FBI investigation, and since then he’s been paying the price. In 1986 a group of peace activists vandalized military recruiting offices in Chicago to protest U.S. aid to the contras in Nicaragua. The FBI viewed the vandals as terrorists, but Ryan was convinced they were simply pacifists. In September 1987, less than a year before he was eligible to retire with a full pension, Ryan, a father of four, was fired for insubordination and for violating his oath of loyalty to the United States. Although he had put in more than the requisite 20 years of service to earn a full pension, he was nine months short of 50, the minimum retirement age.
Four years later, after completing his undergraduate degree, Ryan came to the painful conclusion that he wasn’t cut out for the priesthood. “It was 1959, before Vatican II. Looking back, it might just as well have been 1859 or 1759, because the same things were taught. Plus the celibacy thing was a big part of it.” Ryan returned home, feeling like “a real failure.” If his mother, who had begun working “dozens of jobs” to support the family, was disappointed in him, she didn’t show it. “She’s always been supportive of everything her kids do. She’s also very good at any kind of denial.”
The dream of being an FBI agent quickly collided with the reality. Just as Ryan’s time in the seminary preceded Vatican II, his first six years at the FBI coincided with Hoover’s last days, when women were still prohibited from being agents and less than one-half of one percent of all agents were black. Ryan quickly became aware of Hoover’s obsession with compiling dubious crime statistics, often at the expense of meaningful investigations. “All the bureau seemed to do when I came in was chase stolen cars. We had these menial crimes we chased after to justify our existence.” He encountered an impenetrable bureaucracy with “ungodly job titles like ‘the number-one assistant to the number-two man,’” and a dizzying blizzard of procedures and regulations, right down to having to account for every photocopy he made. For someone who had joined the nation’s most elite law enforcement organization eager to fight crime, it could have been disillusioning.
Evidence uncovered later in the 70s proved that the FBI, through its clandestine COINTELPRO and BLACKPRO campaigns, had conducted throughout the 60s a variety of illegal activities, including burglary, illegal wiretapping, false arrests, forgery, disinformation, fabrication of evidence, and creation of bogus political groups, to undermine the civil rights movement and stifle political dissent. Using paid informants with shady credentials to infiltrate groups and act as provocateurs, the FBI effectively neutralized groups such as the Socialist Workers Party. They decimated the Black Panther Party, even attempting to dupe rising Chicago gang leader Jeff Fort into killing Illinois Panther chairman Fred Hampton. (That effort failed, of course, but the job was later carried out by a special unit of the Chicago Police, working with a floor plan of Hampton’s apartment provided by a paid FBI informant who infiltrated the Panthers and became Hampton’s bodyguard.)
“You’d find yourself in a bind every month of your career. In Utica, we used to laugh about our ‘magic typewriter.’ We’d all fight for it. You’d put the paper in, type the case heading, then close your eyes. Something would always come out. That would get you something on file or a lead to send to some other office.” With agents at other offices busy writing their own reports, presumably replete with more flights of fancy, it might take two or three months to get a response. “The whole FBI was just flooded with this stuff,” Ryan says. “It had nothing to do with anything.”
