Undercover Agents Quotes
In 1927 Astor with other wealthy Americans (including Kermit Roosevelt, Marshall Field III, David Bruce and Winthrop Aldrich) founded their own private espionage agency, ROOM, which was utilized heavily by FDR:
In earlier years it was common practice to use undercover agents to hand out disinformation pamphlets and false rumors to confuse and diffuse crowds gathering for demonstrations. The policy was abandoned. In 2006 a September 11 report surfaced {589485} where the practice had been recommended to be resurrected. The official spokesman denied that it had, but worded the denial in a way that led many to believe that the practice had been resumed. Note that he did not say that non-police officers did not do this for the police department. That left the door open for non police officer agents of the department to spread disinformation at the behest of the police department. It employed thousands of civilian, non officer personnel, and always had many paid informants and agents.
Kennedy was not being literal, but was sarcastically joking about the overemphasis that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI leadership was placing on investigating civil rights leaders and communists instead of investigating the hundreds of Southern murders and assaults on civil rights workers and organized crime. The FBI leadership was itself quite racist at the time, and Hoover never wanted to take on organized crime. He did not regard organized crime as an existential threat to the United States (the way he did about civil rights demonstrations) and he feared that with the big money available to organized crime, many of his agents would be corrupted.
Magruder and his boss OSS Director Donovan did not believe that the military services, the State Department nor the FBI could or should properly be breaking the laws of foreign nations which would be virtually certain if one was spying in foreign nations. They advocated the formal extension of a the wartime OSS which became the CIA. Magruder convinced Secretary Lovett and this was important in establishing a CIA successor to the OSS.
