The Naked Society. Vance Packard

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СКАЧАТЬ with a vested interest in anxiety among business managers work strenuously to keep reminding the nation’s industrialists of the untrustworthiness or undependability of a good many employees. The president of the giant William J. Burns International Detective Agency wrote an article for Business Management that was entitled: “Does Your Plant Invite Theft?” He offered a 27-point check list of danger spots that needed to be watched, and called attention to the value of undercover operatives.

      And a giant investigative firm based in Miami, the Wackenhut Corporation, has been bombarding managements with a brochure headed: “How Secure Is Your Business?” It asks: “Are your employees thoroughly screened before they are hired? . . . Have your offices been checked for the presence of electronic listening devices?” etc.

      The growth of investigation as a full-fledged and potent industry has been greatly assisted by a new and unprecedented phenomenon. That is the fact that many thousands of men who have received thorough and intensive training in surveillance and investigative techniques by the U.S. Government have made themselves available in the possibly greener pastures of private enterprise.

      Such highly trained investigators include not only former military and Central Intelligence Agency specialists in espionage, policing, intelligence, and counterintelligence but graduates of such other intelligence agencies as the Secret Service, former Treasury agents, former General Accounting Office watchdogs, civil service investigators, postal inspectors, and special agents of the FBI. These graduates number in the tens of thousands. Some have gone into jobs completely unrelated to their government specialties, but many thousands are making at least some use of their government training in watching or handling people in their new careers.

      One of the nation’s more fabulous private investigators, John Cye Cheasty of New York, is a graduate of the U.S. Secret Service, the Internal Revenue Intelligence Unit, and Navy Intelligence units. (He attained the rank of commander in the Navy.) In commenting on the techniques he uses as a private investigator when he is developing reports on business executives or candidates for executive jobs, he said he felt that investigators such as himself could do the job better than the usual representatives from a company’s personnel department. He explained:

      “We have ways of getting information, ways of interviewing, that are different than the ways used by personnel departments. We can get to people we want to see faster because we have learned our techniques in the service. We have learned techniques for commanding attention, commanding the truth, and commanding the information without seeming to be aggressive or imperative about it. We can move in and take over an interview and get what we want.”

      The role of the ex-FBI special agents in U.S. society offers an interesting case in point since they command, however justifiably, the most awe from the public. Industry courts them for all sorts of roles. In 1962 the Wall Street Journal carried the headline: MORE COMPANIES FIND MANAGEMENT TALENT AMOUNG EXFBI AGENTS.

      There are now apparently at least three quarters as many ex-FBI agents as active FBI agents in the U.S. Approximately 6000 men are active agents, and the membership of the Society of Former Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (national headquarters: 274 Madison Avenue, New York) is near 4500. Presumably not all former agents have bothered to maintain membership. The society prints a newsletter that serves as a sort of grapevine for the organization.

      Among the ex-FBI agents are clergymen, admen, writers, professors, ranchers, bankers, oil operators, dentists, and a number of corporate presidents. They include at least one neurological surgeon. And of course there are a great many accountants and lawyers. The 1961 directory of the society listed as members two governors (New Mexico and North Carolina) and the attorney general of Florida (who gave as his regular occupation “special investigator”).

      An interesting concentration of ex-FBI men, incidentally, has existed, at least until very recently, on the working staff of the American Security Council (Chicago), a militantly right-wing organization that is supported by several thousand companies and other organized groups. It disseminates information about what it considers to be statist and Communist conspiracies; publishes reports on national and international military and political developments as seen by its business or military-oriented analysts; and in the recent past it has provided information on names of employees or applicants submitted to it by corporate personnel officers of many of its member companies.

      Our main interest in the Council, however, is in the following fact: As of 1962, its president, its administrative director, and its Washington bureau chief were all listed as ex-FBI men in the 1961 directory of the Society of Former Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Inc.

      The Society of Former Agents is considerably more than a fraternal organization. It is also a clearinghouse for information about jobs available, and it offers a directory of trained investigators available for special projects in just about every corner of the U.S.A. In the geographic part of the directory there is an asterisk after the name of each member who has indicated he is “available for work.”

      In Indiana, for example, about half of all the society’s members are “available. “They are located in seventeen towns and cities. In New Jersey the “available” members can be reached in forty-six towns and cities. And in California there are ex-agents “available for work” in seventy-three towns and cities.

      One of the more interesting entrants among the ex-agents who indicated in the 1961 directory that they were “available for work” was a police captain in Knoxville, Tennessee!

      A random sampling of the 1961 directory suggests that several hundred of the former special agents are in charge of handling personnel at business corporations as either security officers, personnel directors, labor-relations directors, or industrial-relations directors. The Ford Motor Company, incidentally, had 39 ex-FBI special agents on its payroll in some capacity.

      A check of all the society members who left the FBI in the years 1930, 1940, 1950, and 1960 reveals that 35 per cent of those who now have active careers are in jobs involving investigation, policing, or security enforcement.

      Some of the former FBI men have banded together to form their own nationwide organizations for investigative assignments. One is Fidelifacts, a loose network of more than 200 former FBI agents. They operate on a franchise basis and either pay each other for investigations or have an exchange arrangement. (The name was recently changed from Fidelifax to Fidelifacts because people seemed to assume that Fidelifax should be a photocopying company.)

      Fidelifacts has full-time offices in such places as Boston, Stamford, Albany, Baltimore, Richmond, Atlanta, New York City, Detroit, Las Vegas, Miami, Chicago, Charlotte, Garden City, Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Billings, Akron, Houston, Syracuse, and Minneapolis. It has in addition many part-time “resident reporters” operating in areas not yet large enough to support an office.

      An outfit that has benefited spectacularly from the romance of the FBI label is the Wakenhut Corporation, headquartered in Coral Gables, Florida. It is such a fast-burning business rocket that it is still something of a mystery to a number of people in the investigative field. In less than a decade it has grown from four private eyes into the fourth largest investigative and security organization in the nation, with a staff of 3500, complete with a lie-detector division.

      All its announcements, and all public reports about it that I have seen, have stressed the fact that it was founded by ex-special agents of the FBI and is led by ex-FBI men. This is correct. George Wackenhut, a husky, jut-jawed, energetic man with a bone-crushing handshake, founded the organization in 1954 immediately after serving a three-year hitch with the FBI. Three of his colleagues also were former agents. And several of his top executives today are ex-FBI agents. But the client signing a large contract with Wackenhut Corporation in the expectation that he would be getting the exclusive services of ex-FBI men would be disappointed. СКАЧАТЬ