Can spies work for the FBI?

Answer 1

The FBI has paid informants, who are not agents, and undercover agents who try to infiltrate criminal gangs and organizations, mostly within the US. There is usually an FBI agent attached to and serving at every US embassy in foreign nations, but there is also a CIA person at every embassy, and if the FBI agent picks up any information of an intelligence type he is supposed to pass that information along to the CIA person. WITHIN THE US the FBI is the counter intelligence agency, meaning, one of the jobs of the FBI is to catch the spies of other countries operating within the US. So what we have is a situation where the CIA and a couple of dozen other agencies do the spying for the US outside the country, while within the US the FBI is trying to catch foreign spies. In most other countries these two functions are combined in a single agency, which might be the better idea. The CIA and the FBI are jealous of each other, and do not always share information as one might hope. Sometimes one has information and it does not occur to that one that the other might want or need to know it. The result is, the US is often surprised, and not in a good way. One of the reasons for having an intelligence apparatus to begin with is to prevent nasty surprises, after all. This split personality of the US when it comes to intelligence/counter intelligence goes back to the days of the founding of the OSS, which was the predecessor of the CIA. This was done when Franklin Roosevelt was president, during WWII. There was a need for more intelligence than was being delivered from Army Intelligence and Navy Intelligence, and Roosevelt liked to set up rivalries, in the hopes that a rivalry would stimulate both rivals to greater efforts. The FBI had been around for a while, and its head, J. Edgar Hoover, was a master at promoting himself and his Bureau in the press. Hoover was the head of the FBI for fifty years, and died in office. Most presidents were afraid to try to fire him. So Roosevelt set up the OSS to gather intelligence, and keep that function out of Hoover's control. Hoover was not always the best or most honest investigator - he spent more than thirty years claiming there was no such thing as the Mafia, for instance, and therefore, no need to try to catch Mafia guys. From the start of this arrangement any cooperation between the FBI and the OSS, and later the CIA, has been on a case by case basis, instead of a routine thing. So its turned out to be a horrible idea, but we've labored under the disadvantages it puts us under for seventy years now, so no one is likely to change it.