I said that everyone has a story about Pat Kelly. Here’s one I heard from Pat’s old trainee/partner, Bob Harper. The two of them met when Bob was a small-town detective in Missouri. One day in 1969, Pat walked into Bob’s local police department on some business. Pat was unshaven, sporting his telltale bushy mustache, and wearing a shitty tweed sports coat and blue jeans. Having seen this dirty-looking dude drive up in a red convertible Cadillac, Bob already was suspicious. Pat’s firearm was visible, and that put Bob on full alert until the seasoned agent flashed his badge and credentials.
Over the next few months, Pat tried hard to recruit Bob to the ATF division of the IRS. When Bob finished his college work, he did join; in 1970 he attended the academy and was assigned to Kansas City as Pat’s trainee. Bob couldn’t wait to get his big, fancy Cadillac, shiny Treasury badge, and credentials.
The boss welcomed him to the Kansas City Office, and he and Pat sat the new agent down.
The boss said, “Son, do you have a gun?” Bob said, “Yes, I do,” and pulled out a two-inch snub-nosed .38 revolver.
The boss said, “Good, you can carry that. We are out of guns right now.”
At the time, a standard-issue weapon for an ATF agent was a Smith & Wesson Model 10 or a Model 66 .38-caliber revolver with a four-inch barrel. Needless to say, Bob’s little snubbie had significantly less power and accuracy. And, of course, he no longer had his police service pistol.
Then the boss said, “Pat, give him your badge.” Pat handed it over.
The boss sat at his desk and typed out a letter that authorized Bob to carry a gun and make arrests, signed it, and handed it to the new recruit. He told Bob, “This will have to do for now. We are out of badges too.”
When it came to his duty vehicle, Bob was handed the keys to an old, hand-me-down Chrysler still painted Border Patrol green. The boss drove the Cadillac. That is, unless an agent needed it for an undercover operation—or, I suppose, to go impress and recruit a small-town detective.
On day two of Bob Harper’s tenure at the Kansas City office, it was time to hit the streets with his training officer, Pat Kelly. When Bob asked where they were headed, he learned that Pat was going to meet a guy to buy a gun at some bar out of town. “Plan on spending the night,” Pat said.
They checked into a new Holiday Inn for six dollars a night. Bob thought this was big-time; he rarely had left his hometown. He did think it was odd when Pat told the desk clerk they only needed one room, and Bob spoke up when Pat suggested to the lady that if she didn’t have a room with two beds available, one bed would be fine. After settling on a single room with two beds, they went out, made the buy, and had a couple beers.
When they got back to the hotel room, Pat took a shower—and left the bathroom door wide open. He came out of the bathroom undressed and asked if Bob was going to take a shower before bed. Bob said no. He was feeling a little uncomfortable at this point and put his gun under his pillow. This was 1970, for chrissake, and he was from Missouri.
When Pat walked over, sat down on Bob’s bed, and pulled the covers back, Bob freaked out. He pointed his gun at Pat and asked what the hell he was doing. Pat calmly said he thought they would share a bed. Bob said, “Well, you are wrong.” Pat climbed into his own bed, and there was no more conversation about what had occurred that night, until they returned to the office, whereupon Bob went straight into the boss’s office and demanded to talk to him.
The boss shut the door and said, “I heard you did okay last night.” Bob couldn’t focus and blurted out, “That agent is gay, and I ain’t working with him.” The boss asked if he was sure, and Bob told him the story. The boss said he would get to the bottom of it; they were about to have a group meeting and could talk about it further after the meeting. He led Bob down the hall to the conference room. They walked into the room to see all of the agents from the office seated around the conference table. Standing next to the table was a butt-ass naked Pat Kelly.
The boss patted Bob on the back. Pat Kelly said, “Welcome to ATF!”*
By the time Darren and I were running around St. Simons Island with our class from hell, ATF had grown considerably—everyone got their own badge—although even in the late 1980s, a lot of the time agents flew by the seat of their pants and fixed whatever got broken along the way. Or at least we tried to. En route, ATF developed a whole bunch of written rules and policies. Headquarters didn’t just randomly make up these policies. Many of the guidelines for work in the field were clearly the result of botched operations or incidents of the past. One area of learning experience for ATF and its agents was improving the practices and technology for long-term undercover operations. Undertaking such operations has never been easy. The logistics alone are mind-numbing. It involves real people leaving real friends and family behind for an indeterminate period of time. Today, ATF has an entire branch in headquarters dedicated to the undercover effort. There is a small army of support personnel to smooth out the process. Jimm Langley and three of his colleagues at the time—Steve, Turbo, and Tim—didn’t have any of that infrastructure to rely on when they took on one of the first and one of the largest infiltration cases of the day, maybe in history. These were four highly motivated but diverse personalities. Steve had come to ATF by way of the US Army. Like Jimm and me, Turbo hailed from US Customs. Timmy came to us from the US Marshals. I met him when we both were assigned to the San Francisco field division. After my first time working with him, I was convinced of two things: One, I wasn’t the craziest agent in the field division. Two, he scared the shit out of me.
There is nothing like riding a motorcycle down the highway at one hundred miles an hour and knowing that absolutely nothing is going to happen to you. No ticket, no fine, and no annoying and costly court date. This was the situation for this intrepid quartet of agents—it literally was their job. The foursome had made great strides infiltrating an outlaw biker gang known as the Warlocks. Founded in the late 1960s, by the early 1990s the notorious club had claimed South Florida as its own. Our guys had gotten so deep in the organization that they were being given ever-increasing responsibility in the club’s business.
A fledgling member of a motorcycle gang gets to do the real shit jobs. This prospect or probate period usually lasts one year, depending on the new guy’s loyalty and performance in the club. During that year, he can expect to be the grunt for every scumbag who is a patched member. The new guy is lower than whale shit. He will fetch beers. He will clean motorcycles. He will be expected to stand guard duty over clubhouses and/or parties. He will be expected to throw down with the patched members if there is a fight with rivals, often referred to as a “mud check.” All this is intended to test the new member’s loyalty to the club. At the end of his prospect period, he receives his “cut,” the three-piece patch worn on the back of a biker’s vest, and becomes a full patched member. It doesn’t take much imagination to understand how harrowing this can be for undercover agents, who are guided by volumes of “manual orders” they must comply with while pretending to be thugs.
Most biker clubs have mandatory runs, usually to put on a show of force at big gatherings. During one particular “Bike Week” in Daytona, Tim was designated to drive one of the “crash” or follow vehicles. These are vans or trucks that follow the club at a safe distance and carry the group’s narcotics and weapons, and they also are used to transport broken-down bikes. Yes, it’s an FNG’s* job, but one that does impart some trust and responsibility. In this case, the van Tim would drive was in fact an ATF undercover vehicle, registered to a fictitious person. A week or so before the run, one of the club’s officers freaked out because the van’s registration had expired.
Since various states have different rules regarding undercover vehicles, it’s a bureaucratic nightmare to renew the registrations for these vehicles. The Warlocks chapter officer insisted that Tim’s van have a legal appearance before the run. The agents contacted the Miami field division operations officer and raised hell with him. “We need that fucking registration sticker ASAP,” they said, or something along those lines.
They were advised it was going to take a while.
RatSnakes think fast and act fast. Jimm took the license plate off his vehicle and photocopied it. He then cut out the sticker portion of the tag and used a marker to color it yellow to correspond with the current year’s designation. He taped the fake sticker to the UC van’s license plate. Problem solved, or so the agents thought.
As wave after wave of bikes left two by two from the Warlocks’ clubhouse, followed by a couple crash vehicles, the boys were feeling pretty good about themselves. An official run with a major criminal club is quite the accomplishment, and they would be included in all the festivities and meet other club members. The weekend would be filled with guns, bombs, and drugs. It was the perfect place for the UC agents to advance the criminal investigation. They practically had stars in their eyes.
It was a dark, rainy morning when the club left for Daytona. They all knew that virtually every mile from Miami to Daytona would be covered by police. Any time a major Outlaw Motorcycle Organization (OMO) event comes to the attention of law enforcement, all resources are directed at surveillance and fugitive arrests. Roadblocks and tactical teams always are on hand just in case something breaks out between rival clubs. That is why the club officer insisted that the van’s registration be up to date. The Warlocks knew that their every action was being scrutinized, and the cops were waiting for an opportunity to pounce.
About thirty miles outside Daytona and about ten miles behind the main pack of bikes, Tim was cruising up I-95, cranking the music and wondering how much evidence he and the guys would be bringing back with them. He glanced in the rearview mirror to see not one but three police cruisers behind him with their lights flashing. One of the club’s “ol’ ladies” had been designated to keep Tim company on the ride. Playing the role of a biker thug, he turned to her and said, “Let me handle this. You just sit there and shut the fuck up.”
This is where it went from bad to worse. Tim figured he would walk to the back of the van, away from the club’s “girl,” and smooth things over. He couldn’t come out of role. That would have been disastrous. But he would smooth talk the cops and be on his way.
Not so fast, Two Dogs.
When the officers approached the vehicle, they ordered both Tim and the ol’ lady out of the van at the same time. They searched Tim and the girl, and then walked them back to the front of the police car. At this point, the officer doing all the talking pointed to the rear of the van and asked, “So what the fuck do you think happened here?” Tim looked and saw a long yellow stream of water running down the back of the van. The rain had caused the ink from the marker to run down the license plate. With the biker chick standing right there, Tim couldn’t explain his subterfuge to the officers. He was arrested and handcuffed. Worse, the police towed the vehicle containing much of the club’s supplies. They also placed the young lady in the back of the squad car to give her a ride to the police department where she could call someone to come and pick her up.
The issues arising from this unanticipated arrest of an undercover, which were many, caused Tim to make a decision. For one thing, when he returned to the club after making bail, he would need to have a defensible story about how he got the van and most of the club’s property back. Meticulously ironing out these details would require involvement from a much higher level in the chain of command within ATF.
When Tim got an opportunity to be alone with the arresting officer, he said, “You have to call this number, and do it right now.” The officer was hesitant. He wasn’t going to be told what to do by some biker scumbag. Eventually, Tim’s demeanor and insistence gave the officer pause, and he made the call. Once the ATF supervisor was contacted at the number Tim gave the cop, things moved quickly. Arrest records were created for completely fictitious persons, with corresponding fingerprints. There was hoax bail. In other words, preserving the agents’ undercover status became a real nightmare. Fortunately, that is what ATF does, and they worked the problem. This did not, however, save Tim and Jimm from taking a beating for putting the club’s run in peril.
This Warlocks case not only was legendary, it provided critical lessons that served as building blocks for future similar operations. The case culminated when several South Florida SWAT teams and the Miami ATF Special Response Team (SRT) descended upon the entire club when they were leaving a patched member’s funeral. Dozens were arrested, and many were sent to prison. Many years later, ATF would again set their sights on the Warlocks, but that’s a story for another day.
While the Warlocks case was advancing, I was teaching new operators at the academy. By this time, I had taught dozens of basic academy classes and several advanced UC schools. One of my classes was loaded with some pretty good operators in their own right. Many would go on to be legendary undercovers, others not so much. Unlike the early days, this class had many female agents as well.
One of the instructors happened to be a longtime buddy of mine. Carlos S. (not Box) and I went way back. He recently had gotten divorced and was on the prowl. One of the women in this class was very attractive, not coming with very many cases under her belt and, as I recall, she was, like others, sent to pad her résumé. She was prissy, with perfectly painted nails and high-end clothes, and would show up for surveillance practical exercises wearing high heels. She seemed to think she was too good to do undercover work. All that didn’t sit well with the instructors, male or female. Hell, the females disliked her even more than the males because women had a hard time being taken seriously in the beginning, and this chick just furthered the stereotypes.
Yep, she was a real bitch. She went so far as to say she only dated doctors and lawyers and would never date a cop. That didn’t win her any friends, for sure. She completed the school, and to this day, she is the only student to ever give me a bad evaluation. What makes that hilarious is what happened next.
After the class had ended, I was sitting at my desk one day and the phone rang. It was Carlos calling to shoot the shit and talk about what a debacle that whole class had been. Well, of course, I turned the conversation to this female agent—I’d caught him chatting her up a couple times. I even had asked him once, while at the school, if he was going to try and hook up with her. He hinted that he might, and it didn’t come up again. I was curious how that all turned out, so I did what Vince does. I blurted out, “Dude, did you ever close on that crazy bitch?” It got quiet, and he let on that he had. I laughed and said something like, “Well, at least you don’t have to talk to her ass now that you’re back home.”
Carlos was in Miami and that agent was from somewhere up north. It got real quiet again, and he said, “Well, yeah, I probably still have to talk to her.” I asked, “Why would you do that?” He said, “Because we are getting married.” I thought he was joking and I started laughing my ass off. When I finally realized he wasn’t joking, I said, “Well, I guess I won’t be getting an invite to the wedding.” He said, “Naw, probably not, brother.” I am happy that I was wrong, because they stayed married to this day. She remained true to her original attitude about undercover work but did rise through the ranks.
For all my trash talking, make no mistake: Being an undercover agent is damn hard. Being a female undercover agent is six times as hard. Being the first ever female ATF undercover agent brought unimaginable stress and pressure to perform.
In 1972, Jo Ann Kocher made history as the first female ATF agent to be sworn in. She has told me over the years that it was the best day of her life. She successfully completed training and entered the field. Her fellow agents were cordial and welcoming, but she could tell all eyes were on her. They all had seen the press release with Jo Ann being sworn in at the main Treasury office. None of them had been flown to the main Treasury to be sworn in. None of them had been featured in a press release. Jo Ann reported to her new office dressed exactly as she had when she was sworn in: professional dress, pumps, and that hideous 1970s beehive hairdo. Her revolver in her purse.
Jo Ann knew she eventually would be asked to do undercover work. She always wondered if she could. Hell, we all did, but none of us ever were going to be the first of our gender to do it. She would be—on one hot and humid day in August 1974, barely two years on the job. Jo Ann was sitting at her desk when her supervisor came over to her and said, “Call Bill, the boss of the White Plains office. He needs you for an undercover operation this afternoon.” That day, Jo Ann was wearing a short blue-and-white dress with a matching ribbon that tied into a bow at the back of the waist. Pantsuits were her usual attire, except for raid and arrest situations, when she wore jeans and a T-shirt. She didn’t have time to go home and change.
Bill told her she would be playing the part of a girlfriend at a motel where another ATF agent was to meet someone who was selling guns illegally. Her attire wasn’t a problem at all, except she had nowhere to conceal her gun. (Because she was the first, ATF had not yet begun to address simple but unique situations related to female UCs, such as where they would keep their gun.) Jo Ann remembers deciding that she would have to keep her purse near her at all times.*
She drove to White Plains with visions of Peggy Lipton’s Mod Squad escapades flittering in her head. When she got there, she met with the boss and Kelly, the case agent who would be making the buy. She remembered meeting Kelly from her first week as an agent. Back then he had short brown hair and was clean-cut. He now had a full beard and nearly shoulder-length locks. It didn’t surprise her. Many undercover agents looked and acted like “bad guys,” but she wondered how she would fit in this clandestine part of law enforcement. Would she need to change her personality and act tough? She always had prided herself on her femininity and didn’t want to change, even for the sake of a role. Playing a girlfriend might just be the ticket she needed, at least to get a start.
She joined several other ATF agents and local police officers at the briefing. Agent Kelly told them he’d been dealing with a violator named Perry for several weeks now. Perry was a businessman who’d been collecting and selling guns for some time and was now into weapons prohibited by ATF laws.
“I bought a sawed-off shotgun from him a few weeks ago,” said Kelly. “He wants to sell me another gun this afternoon.”
Jo Ann sat there, wide-eyed, as Kelly explained they would be meeting at a motel in Westchester County. Instructions were in the agents’ briefing packages. Kelly’s team had done surveillance on the area and were confident it was a place where they could meet safely, transfer the gun, and arrest Perry with minimal risk.
“I’ve told Perry that I’m meeting my chick at the motel and invited him to come over with the gun. Jo Ann will be playing my girlfriend,” Kelly said.
Jo Ann was trying to remember everything she learned in training as Kelly said that the signal for the bust would be when he closed the trunk after transferring the gun to his car.
“Don’t mess this up,” she remembered thinking.
In school she’d been taught that the undercover agent always gave a predetermined signal to the covering team when it was time to make the arrest. In this case, Kelly would not be wired, so the signal would have to be visual rather than spoken.
She got up the nerve to ask a question. “What kind of gun will you be buying?”
“A bazooka,” came the answer.
A bazooka is a portable shoulder-fired missile weapon, in other words, a military-style anti-tank rocket launcher.
Jo Ann’s mind raced. “A damn bazooka?” she thought.
This was not going to be a typical first undercover buy. When they got to the bland, two-story concrete motel, they checked into a room on the first floor and parked the undercover government car right in front. Kelly took the covers off one of the queen-sized beds and rumpled the sheets to make it look like it had been used. He also took out a half-full bottle of scotch, placing it and several glasses on the dresser. He poured the liquor and water over ice in two of the glasses. Jo Ann could have used a drink to calm her nerves.
She knew her role as Kelly’s girlfriend was mainly for show and backup, if needed. But she didn’t want to do anything that would ruin the investigation. Perhaps naively, she wasn’t at all concerned for their safety. Several other ATF agents and local police officers were secreted around the motel complex.
When Perry knocked on the door, shortly after they got there, she froze for a few seconds. Kelly looked at her briefly before opening the door. She wondered if he could tell she was nervous.
Perry was not what she expected. A man in his late twenties, he had long sideburns and a receding hairline. He was well dressed and polite. He and Kelly exchanged a few pleasantries, and then Kelly pointed to Jo Ann. “That’s my chick, Jo Ann.” Perry glanced at her, and the two men immediately started to talk about the price of the bazooka. They agreed on the price and they all went outside to Perry’s car. Jo Ann kept her white purse close to her side, slung over her right shoulder, in case she needed to get to her gun quickly.
Perry opened the trunk of his car, and she saw her first bazooka.* The weapon was more menacing than she thought it would be. It was longer and thicker than the pictures she had seen. Kelly inspected it, found it to his satisfaction, and gave Perry the money. Together they lifted the weapon out of Perry’s car and carried it to Kelly’s government vehicle.
At that moment, Kelly closed his trunk and shouted, “Federal agents. You’re under arrest.” Jo Ann reached for and produced her small revolver from her handbag. She didn’t need it. Agents and officers came from everywhere. One was standing on the second-floor landing of the motel, pointing a shotgun at them. Perry instantly realized what was happening and gave up without a struggle. He seemed stunned. They went back to the office, where Perry was processed and interviewed. Bill, the boss, and Kelly thanked Jo Ann for her participation and told her she did a good job. Basking in the praise, she headed back to her office.
Jo Ann’s career with ATF continued for another twenty-four years, including numerous surveillances, arrests, search warrants, and undercover assignments in New York and around the country as well as supervisory roles in Hawaii and San Francisco, where she became the Assistant Special Agent in Charge (ASAC) of the San Francisco Field Division from 1996 to her retirement from ATF in 1999.†
While Jo Ann was blazing trails on the East Coast, Bonnie would be the first female hired on the West Coast. Bonnie came to ATF directly out of college with no prior police experience. Having women in the ranks was such a new thing to ATF that they were freaking out, according to Bonnie. She later would find out that prior to her arrival, the San Francisco SAC held an all-hands meeting. “If any of you try to get in her pants, just leave your gun and badge on my desk,” the male agents were told. Bonnie remembers that at first the other agents would barely say hello to her out of fear for how it would be perceived.
Her first UC was with Bill Bertoloni, an ATF legend. He said it would be an easy job for her to cut her teeth on. She would play the girlfriend and just watch how it was done. Bonnie was pretty excited. When they met up the morning of the deal, Bill had lost his voice, completely. With his laryngitis, Bonnie figured they would cancel the deal. Instead, Bill told her that she would take the lead. Bonne was scared shitless, but she sucked it up. They met the violator, bought the gun, and she had instant credibility with other agents from then on.
Bonnie would go on to distinguish herself with more demanding UC operations, further solidifying the worthiness of female agents in a historically all-male agency. She was called upon when San Jose State University experienced a bomb attack in the mid-1970s. Investigations had developed a suspect but no clear-cut way to approach him to garner proof. Bonnie looked at the problem from a new and different perspective. The suspect had a girlfriend who was renting out her studio apartment. Bonnie befriended the girlfriend and rented the studio. The girlfriend said Bonnie should make herself at home and feel free to use anything in the apartment. While digging around the apartment one day, Bonnie scored. The bomber had sent a typed letter to the university, claiming responsibility. Bonnie found a typewriter in the small attic. It was sent to the ATF laboratory for forensic examination, and bingo, it was the typewriter used by the bomber. Case solved.
After proving herself for over five years, Bonnie was tasked with a job that had her going home in tears. Having grown up in Sacramento, California, she was of course familiar with the reputation of the Hells Angels club. Bill Bertoloni was one of the undercovers on a racketeering and conspiracy case against the club in 1979. The groundbreaking RICO case (so-called for the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1970) included two waves of prosecution conducted out of the San Francisco US Attorney’s Office. The first phase was the prosecution of club members with direct evidence against them in the form of firearms, explosives, and narcotics buys. This phase took over two years. The undercover agents worked out of the US Attorney’s Office and lived in hotels. This stretched the ATF budget for lodging and per diem, and Bill and the other agent eventually were sent home.
The second phase involved prosecuting historical cases that had developed out of the original case. However, that part wasn’t explained to Bonnie clearly. When she formally was assigned to the new Hells Angels task force and appointed to lead the second phase, she went home thinking she was going to be expected to work undercover with the Angels. For days, she was scared at the thought of being raped by a bunch of drug-crazed bikers. Eventually, her role was clarified; her sole job was to assist in the prosecution efforts through follow-up investigations and evidence presentation that did not include undercover work. She served in that capacity for two years before leaving ATF for the US Customs service. When I asked her why she left, her answer was simple: She thought ATF had the best agents but the worst managers.
Bonnie went on to use her ATF experience to help develop and enhance the US Customs undercover program. But before leaving ATF, Bonnie made her mark. It was the 1970s, when radical groups were popping up all over the country, including in San Francisco and Berkeley. A San Francisco police substation had been blown up, and there was a failed attempted bombing of the ATF office. Having jurisdiction in explosives cases, ATF jumped into the fray.
Members of the counterculture Weather Underground, including prominent member William Charles “Bill” Ayers, were fugitives and believed to be operating in the San Francisco Bay Area. FBI intelligence suggested that some of the women in the group might be lesbians and hiding within the gay community in San Francisco. Bonnie and another female agent were given government investigative funds and told to mingle in the gay community, at the time still considered a radical group. The agents were looking for specific women who were on the run. Their operation was not successful, but Bonnie will forever remember hanging out and dancing in the rowdy “no boys allowed” bars of that past decade.
Bonnie, Jo Ann, and many other female agents would take the reins over the years that followed those early days. They actively participated in advancing the undercover programs within ATF, both for the females who followed as well as their male counterparts. This was uncharted territory for everyone. You are only as good as your partner, and with the growth of the bureau, there would be more and more scenarios requiring a larger role for females. When ATF agents starting dipping their toes into the narcotics world, female UCs again proved their worth and equal willingness to confront evil.
By this time, I hope it’s clear that undercover work is not math or chemistry; it is an art. There can be wrong answers. But almost any answer could be right depending on the scenario facing a UC, the experience level of a UC, and, hell, even the mind-set of the bad guy. In this chapter, I’ve tried to describe what it was like to be an agent during the bureau’s early years and how certain mentalities about undercover work advanced over time. Then and now, being the UC on a case involves another layer of responsibility. For example, our reports had to be precise and exact. The case agent or surveillance agents could write less-detailed reports, for example: I saw the violator show up and walk into a hotel room, and then I saw the violator leave. He was carrying a package. This type of generalization normally was sufficient because multiple agents saw the same thing, and it was undisputed.
However, the UC was often the only person to see the violation of law, hear the dialogue, and be able to testify to exact details that established the elements of the crime and therefore guilt. Sometimes, and I stress sometimes, we were lucky enough to have audio and video recordings. But more often than not, the equipment failed, we lost battery life, or we were able to record only intermittent parts of a transaction. When that happened, it opened a Pandora’s box for the defense attorneys. The case agent and the UCs were generally the ones to get beat up the most on the witness stand.
A DEFENSE ATTORNEY MIGHT ASK SOMETHING LIKE THIS: Isn’t it true, Agent Cefalu, that you lie for a living? How is it possible that at the very moment you say my client admitted whatever, that the wire cut out?
OR THIS: Agent Cefalu, I see in your report you had a telephone conversation with my client, but you didn’t record it. Is that because you were trying to entrap my client and didn’t want the jury to hear my client decline your offer?
If there were multiple defendants being tried together, the defense attorneys would come one after another, with no other goal than to discredit the UC. Experienced UCs already would have addressed the answers to such questions in their notes, reports, or trial preparation. But it can be very draining to be attacked for hours during a public hearing.
As the bureau grew in stature and budget, it began to undertake larger and more intricate infiltration-type cases. This required much more manpower, much more money, and a buttload more exposure for its agents. Staying in a long-term role created a host of potential problems both personally and professionally. The field divisions had to commit their UC and cover team agents to an open-ended commitment. That meant that if a field division gave up five agents to a UC operation, that division was down five agents for the duration of the case. Those agents weren’t working cases for their bosses; they were working them for somebody else’s boss. Historically, ATF has been a statistic-based agency. That is to say, everyone from the lowest agent to the SAC is judged and evaluated on the number of cases taken on and the number of bad guys that go to jail. Taking away the number of cases those five agents could have produced at home significantly dropped that field division’s numbers.
As ATF took on larger, more complex inter-field division cases, the bureau needed to address some pitfalls. One of the biggest issues that began to occur was agent long-term exposure and potential burnout or compromise. In response, ATF expanded on the “undercover pool” concept that had been initiated in the 1980s. Mental health/welfare protocols were developed to address the effects of long-term exposure on agents and their families.
After the independent Treasury report on the ATF investigation of Vernon Wayne Howell (a.k.a. David Koresh) and the sect known as the Branch Davidians, a “control agent” scenario was devised and became a required protocol for any long-term undercover operation.
In the early 1990s, ATF undercovers infiltrated the Branch Davidians group, who were based at the so-called Mount Carmel Center outside Waco, Texas. The investigation of the notorious Seventh-day Adventist splinter group led by Koresh (preceded by his rival, George Roden) for illegal manufacture and possessions of firearms and explosives occurred over nine months prior to ATF serving arrest and search warrants that led to a planned raid on the Branch Davidian compound on February 28, 1993. After sect members were tipped off about the raid, a shoot-out ensued, resulting in the deaths of four ATF agents, with seventeen other agents wounded. Six Branch Davidian members were killed during the shoot-out. The Department of Justice tasked the FBI with attempting to resolve the standoff to avoid the appearance that ATF wanted revenge. The subsequent fifty-one-day standoff led by the FBI culminated in dozens more deaths when sect members who were barricaded inside set fire to the compound.
After the failed raid and loss of life, there were demands for congressional hearings. The US Treasury Department commissioned a comprehensive study of the investigation and operation related to the Branch Davidians. Experts from all fields related to each portion of the investigation weighed in. Although some of the findings are subjective and have been challenged, it was a well-done report, albeit the consummate Monday-morning quarter-backing. The report specifically challenged portions of ATF’s ongoing undercover planning and execution. Although the Waco operation had been approved at the highest levels, the panel found certain aspects of the UC plan insufficient. They did not find fault on behalf of any of the undercover operators, only in some of the assumptions the plan relied on.
Reports aside, the emotional toll of the Waco case on agents was incredibly high. Prior to the seven-week standoff, ATF undercover agents already had spent months away from their families, working on an investigation that ended violently and tragically. The control agent protocol was implemented to recognize and help compensate for collateral damage to agents’ well-being during long-term investigations. Basically it meant that if an agent spent a particular length of time of uninterrupted UC or suffered a traumatic incident during a UC, there would be an independent set of eyes on him or her to ensure the agent’s and their family’s well-being. It was a tricky prospect to be a control agent. Imagine suspecting some sort of meltdown of your assigned UC agent and having to be the one to make the call to shut it down and pull the agent out. What if you were wrong, and the agent and his wife were just having typical marital problems, and you shut down a case that the agent had been successfully working for months?
I intentionally never worked as a control agent; however, one source of pride for me and many was having a role in developing a peer support program. ATF didn’t create the concept, but I think we perfected it. As ATF agents, we suffered an inordinate number of lethal encounters. ATF recognized the damage and potential byproduct of leaving its agents out there to figure it out and fend for themselves after such an encounter. Through the peer support program, experienced agents who had survived such encounters were trained and available 24/7 to respond to agents after such incidents. The program was so successful that ATF received funding to offer its peer support agents to outside agencies. The program was adapted to be used in the undercover pool, and a clinical psychologist was hired to train and support the peer support agents. I could grumble about ATF management doing what bureaucrats do and creating more policies than anyone needed, but I was privileged to be part of the peer support team and saw its value on many occasions.
* As the bureau progressed, so did its attitudes and policies.
* Fucking new guy.
* Even today, it’s less common for female violators to wear guns, so a female UC potentially can attract more attention if she’s seen carrying a weapon.
* I spent twenty-seven years doing this shit and never bought a bazooka.
† I was excited to hear that Jo Ann is planning to write a book in the future chronicling her exploits as ATF’s first female special agent.