SECURITY CLEARANCES, TASK FORCES, AND FBI RAs - 078

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This week on The Writer's Detective Bureau: Security Clearances, Task Forces, and FBI RAs. I'm Adam Richardson and this is The Writer's Detective Bureau.

Welcome to episode number 78 of The Writer's Detective Bureau. The podcast dedicated to helping authors and screenwriters write professional quality crime-related fiction. And this week I'm talking about security clearances, FBI Resident Agencies, which are their satellite offices, government budgets, and how chain of command works on a task force. So we've got a lot to cover this week. But first I need to thank my Gold Shield patrons, Debra Dunbar from debradunbar.com, CC Jameson from ccjameson.com, Larry Keeton, Vicky Tharp of vickitharp.com, Chrysann, Larry Darter, Natalie Barelli of nataliebarelli.com and Craig Kingsman of craigkingsman.com for their support. And huge thanks to my Silver Cufflink and Coffee Club patrons as well. You can find links to all of the writers supporting this episode in the show notes at writersdetective.com/78. And to learn about setting up your own Patreon account for your author business or to support the show for as little as $2 per month. Visit writersdetective.com/patreon.

A writer named Jason asked a series of questions for me to answer on this week's podcast. Jason writes: My near future domestic US detective is going to be working alongside an agent from a foreign organization whose operating protocols are extravagantly different. This foreign agent will be operating within my detective's own agency's jurisdiction and under his leadership, so we'll be conforming to strange, stricter standards. What I need to know is how, and under what circumstances, might something even similar to this come about? Specifically, this partnership in my book will be officially secret. It's intended to be ended once the problem that caused it to form is dealt with in about three to nine years. And I'd like to hear things like the names of departments, standards of operation or liaison offices. What would the chain of command look like and what conditions would the agency that dispatched them to investigations impose on such a partnership and its own right?

Do law enforcement agencies or even individual task forces "Hide things in the budget?" Were a state-level bureaucracy intending to add extraordinary duties in a secretive department to handle them to a local law enforcement agency, what means might they use to go about transferring the budget, keeping it hidden? And could you tell me who exactly they'd be trying to hide this from? Oversight of some sort I assume, but I've got no details. I guess I most need to know what would confine those two in that sort of position here in now, how they'd be hidden from the public and any tells that might give such a thing away so I can start warping it into something futuristic and wacky.

And then Jason goes on to say, "It's hard to tell what I find most valuable from your podcast, but I find one of the most inspiring things to be the invitation you give for the layman to dig into this sort of thing in the first place Among all the valuable information. I'd like to thank you for that the most. Had I not found your podcast, I don't know that I'd have written this ever. Thanks for the help. Doesn't quite cover it."

First of all, thank you so much for those kind words, Jason. If there's one thing, the "Why" I guess of this podcast, it's for you to believe you can tackle writing these stories. 99% of the stories involving the police are written by writers that have zero law enforcement background, so you can too. I mean, this isn't rocket surgery, as I like to say, but it is daunting if you don't know where to start, so I'm glad you've taken that leap of faith. It makes me happy to hear that you're getting exactly that out of this podcast because it means I'm doing something right at least, right?

Okay, so with regard to your story, I think I see where you're going with this and I'm going to make a few assumptions here. I'm going to assume that the futuristic foreign organization you referenced deals in some sort of specific types of cases that should probably remain a secret, whether that's sci-fi like a Blade Runner retiring Replicants or Men In Black handling space-alien immigration issues, or paranormal like FBI Special Agents Mulder and Scully handling cases deemed to be X-Files. Or maybe it's just straight-up fantasy like the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, which as any Hogwarts graduate will know is on the third floor at the Ministry of Magic. And if you don't know what I'm talking about for this last one, then never you mind my muggle friend.

I'm also going to assume that this type of investigation, whether that's aliens, paranormal, magic, or what have you, that there is some serious money behind this initiative because let's face it, it takes money to get anything done in government, especially to keep things a secret.

Now we'll get into money and budget stuff in just a moment, but first I want to talk about secrets. Official secrets like having a governmental security clearance, whether that's Secret, Top-Secret or Top Secret / Sensitive Compartmented Information, (or TS/SCI) for federal employees most of the time. This is true, at least in the United States, so I'm not sure how security clearance has work outside of the US, but for federal law enforcement agencies like the FBI, DEA, ATF, and so on. Intelligence agencies like CIA, ODNI, NCTC and of course the branches of the military all require security clearances of various types for different job functions.

But those job functions are usually ones where the secrets have to do with intelligence or national security, not necessarily criminal investigations because criminal investigations will eventually be disclosed to the public through the court process, through our constitutional right to due process, technically, like being tried by our peers. Being able to confront our accusers. Rules of evidence such as the discovery process where the defense gets to see all the evidence against them. All of the things that happen as part of a criminal prosecution will reveal those secrets potentially.

Which is exactly the quagmire the feds had to navigate in the wake of 9/11. Our guys would capture suspected terrorists based upon classified information, meaning evidence we don't necessarily want disclosed in court and put them in Guantanamo Bay, meaning imprisoned but not within the borders of the United States. So arguably outside the reach of constitutional rights. And then they had to figure out some sort of due process that didn't disclose classified material but ensured that the government wasn't depriving the liberty of somebody who was actually innocent. And this is where like the military tribunal thing kind of became the stopgap initially where everyone involved, with the exception of the suspected terrorist, had a security clearance.

Now I bring this up because in your scenario, Jason, without knowing much more about what your story holds, you're dipping your toe in the secret versus public knowledge pool. So it's worth looking at your end game. Now having a security clearance means that you've been vetted, that you've gone through a background check to make sure you're worthy of being trusted with national security information or some other kind of intelligence. But just because you have a clearance doesn't mean that you then get all the secrets of the government dumped on you. You don't get to look through the JFK assassination file or get a tour of Area 51 it just means that when you get involved in investigation, you have the right to know the classified parts of an operation that are deemed appropriate for your security clearance level. So there's a difference between a right to know and a need to know.

So you may have a need to know as well because you're part of that case. So if you have a right to know all the secrets of Area 51 you would also have a need to know. You would be doing something involving Area 51 for you to be able to get that information. So just because you have a clearance doesn't mean you automatically get info. So let's say you have a Secret level security clearance, you only get to see the stuff that is classified at the secret level, not the Top Secret or Top-Secret/SCI stuff. So I hope that makes sense. And it doesn't mean that they're going to not share information. So if you're a local law enforcement officer and you're helping the FBI on a terrorism case, there's going to be stuff that's classified, but you will still get the basics. They just may not share where the information came from. That's the stuff that's going to be, classified. But you're not going to be left out in the cold when it comes to actually being able to do your job in your local community.

Now the reason why I bring this up is that 99% of the cops in local law enforcement do not have a security clearance. And as I said before, this security clearance, top-secret stuff is primarily for federal employees. So unless you're assigned to a federal task force of some kind, you aren't going to have a clearance. And the key thing or the real weight I should say, of a security clearance, is that disclosing classified information is a federal crime and you will go to federal prison for doing that. Well, unless you're a politician, normal people that have security clearances will go to federal prison for revealing classified information. So at the local law enforcement level, we don't have classified material.

We have policies against revealing confidential information, and there are state laws against illegally searching certain databases. Like if a cop runs a license plate for his retired cop now turned investigator, private investigator buddy, that's technically a computer crime, but it isn't the same as revealing federally classified material. So that's all to say that for your setup, Jason, using local law enforcement as the partner for your foreign organizations agent to partner up with may not be the best setup for secrecy unless that foreign organization has their own federal legal authority or at least is tied to an agency that does. So let's, for argument's sake, it's say it's the Ministry of Magic, a la, Harry Potter working in the muggle world and they have a magic-related investigation in some small town. It sounds to me like your concept is for the Ministry of Magic Agent partnered with the local detective.

Now, assuming I'm on the right track about the size and scope of the secret of your story, we want our agent and our local detective to protect the secret that magic is real, which is a pretty effing big secret, right? So arguably it is a secret that is a matter of national security. Imagine the implications of the muggle world learning of wizards living in their midst. I mean, imagine what world powers would do to weaponize wizardry for their own interests. So the scope of the problem being both containing the investigation at hand and keeping everything a secret is likely beyond what a local police department could contain without help. And we haven't even gotten to the budget part of the equation yet. So my initial suggestion would be to add a federal angle or a federal umbrella, if you will, to your partnership. And really this would be a task force because it's a relatively long-term, meaning multi-year, situation and this is more than just a working group where we are working a single case or a series of cases that are tied to a single person.

And by having it be a task force, you've got a budget involved so you could realistically stand up a task force between your agent -so in my scenario, the task force would be an agent or agents of the Ministry of Magic, detectives from the local police department, and Special Agents from the FBI. Honestly, I don't know that the local police would actually be part of this, but for the sake of your story, and the characters that you want to have, let's say we're going to keep them in totally doable. Now I know we tend to think of the FBI as outsiders that come into a local jurisdiction or that's the trope, I guess that there's a disconnect between the feds and the locals. But now's a good time to point out that federal law enforcement agencies have offices all over the country. There are these big field offices for sure, which are often in a big downtown office building like you'd see in the TV and movies, but the majority of the FBI agents and FBI offices are in Resident Agencies is what they're called, RAs is how we abbreviate it.

So RAs are smaller satellite offices that are out in the local community. So while it may seem obvious that the FBI would have field offices in Omaha, Nebraska: Seattle, Washington; or Memphis, Tennessee, you might not realize that there are FBI offices in Grand Island, Nebraska: or Olympia, Washington: or Cookeville, Tennessee. My point here is that FBI Agents, FBI Special Agents are local. In fact, you might be surprised how close you are to the nearest FBI office. You can either look in the front of your phone book, you know that book that gets thrown at your doorstep every two years before ending up in a recycling bin because Google or you can go to fbi.gov and click on the Contact Us page and you'll see a map with all of the big field offices across the United States. And if you click on the field office that's nearest to you in the lower right corner of that Field Office page, you'll see a list of all of the Resident Agencies that fall under the umbrella of that big field office.

Those are those satellite offices in the cities that they're located in. I'd be willing to bet you have won a lot closer to you than you realize. So anyway, I hope this helps dispel the idea that FBI agents only come from Quantico, Los Angeles, or New York by black helicopters and just drop in. But they're actually already local to your communities and therefore are great locally-grounded characters that you can include in your stories. So for you Jason, it gives you two things: One: it gives you teeth to keeping secrets and Two: a place for the money funding your task force to be realistic. Outside of the CIA, budgets are not hidden from view. Since law enforcement is funded through tax money, public money, there is a lot of transparency and a lot of bureaucracy and most of that bureaucratic red tape that we all complain about actually has to do with how we run government, financially speaking.

So I mean actually it's, it's so complex that you can earn a master's degree in Public Administration just so you can understand the concept of how to get things done. But the reason that exists is because it's important. So when a city council votes to fund the police department's budget for the next year, which is not cheap, it's not like the police chief gets a blank check for X number of millions of dollars and then gets to decide, "Hey, you know what? Rather than paying my employee salaries, I'm going to buy one of those Italian police, Lamborghini police cars. Like I saw an Instagram." There are certain threshold dollar amounts that need approval by the city council for a police department (or a board of supervisors at the County level for a sheriff) to not only approve purchases but also to accept monies coming in. So whether that's donation money or grant funding, which- federal grant funding would be the more likely scenario for you.

When the methamphetamine crisis hit the US in the mid-2000s there was a push to work meth-related drug investigations. So Congress came up with some money to push out to the federal, state, and local agencies to pay for those investigations. And in that case, the local departments would apply for these meth grants and ask for money to pay for additional detective salaries, or surveillance equipment, or detective vehicles, or whatever. And then once the money came in, that grant had some sort of oversight in the form of requiring reports on the case metrics back to that federal agency that doled out the grant money, to prove that the money was really being used to work more meth-related cases and taking meth off the street. Like how many meth labs were shut down, how many arrests were made, that kind of thing. But approval to seek those grant monies and accept it when it came in, had to be done through the police chief and the city council and then ultimately the city's payroll and auditor's office and all that kind of stuff.

There are a lot of moving parts when we're talking about money. So for your story, Jason, the money could be less obvious if it was part of the FBI's operational budget, which is much larger than that of a small police department. And really there are two types of folks that would be looking at the budget. The first would be the government employees involved in the financial operations, like "Janice in Accounting." And the other would be anyone that was sniffing into a story, like a reporter or a concerned citizen that was using Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests or Sunshine Law requests upon the agency to get that information. So FOIA F-O-I-A and Sunshine Law are good terms to Google to go down that rabbit hole.

Now there are limits to what law enforcement agencies have to provide. Like ongoing criminal investigations are exempt from disclosure, but budgetary stuff will definitely be provided to the person requesting it. So to keep things secret at the budgetary level, they just need to fund it through regular channels and keep the actual case assignments a secret because the bean counters won't necessarily know what the agents or detectives are actually working on unless it's some sort of grant funding like reporting requirement. And in this case, I mean this is a whole other rabbit hole you don't even need to go down. So honestly, I probably just lost a few listeners just talking about budget stuff right now. So while it's great info to know about and to keep in the back of your head as you're writing your story and to keep it honest, it's probably one of those things that could easily slow your story down and bore your reader if you aren't careful. So anything more than one or two sentences about budgets and funding should get the ax from your editor. But I really appreciate the attention to detail.

And lastly, what would the chain of command look like? One of the involved agencies would be the lead agency, so you'd be playing by their rules and the supervisor of that unit would be from that lead agency. When I was assigned to a narcotics task force with a few other local detectives from outlying agencies, the lead agency for the task force with the California Department of Justice. And our supervisor was a Special Agent-in-Charge or a SAC that worked for California DOJ. So the DOJ had specific policies that applied to everyone working on that task force, even though I technically didn't work for DOJ. So for instance, the DOJ requires everyone to wear a ballistic helmet during search warrant service, which is one of those, duh, that's a smart idea thing.

But at my agency, that actually is not a policy. I mean it's a smart thing to do, but there's nothing in writing that says you shall wear a helmet anytime you're serving a search warrant. But being assigned to a DOJ task force meant I had to follow those DOJ rules. And while I was there, that DOJ SAC was my boss. I was still employed as a detective at my home agency and you know I had my own chain of command and a Sergeant that approved my timecard, but that Sergeant and chain of command wasn't who I reported to for operational stuff. So it would be very much the same kind of situation for your scenario, Jason.

But since I don't really know what kind of scenarios your task force is working, I can't really offer too much insight into how they receive information on new situations. If this is a reactionary kind of thing, like a new incident occurs and then somehow the task force gets notified and they roll out to handle it, because that's kind of different compared to a drug task force where we worked proactive investigations. We weren't waiting for crimes to be reported to us. We were out there doing surveillance, running informants, chasing down who's who in a targeted organization, rather than waiting for someone else to call into 9-1-1 to report something. So for you, Jason, I guess the question on whether they're set up to be reactionary or proactive will kind of dictate how they would go about doing their job.

Oh, and to get back to the constraints that your team has, the questions are really what are they legally empowered to do? In other words, what's their authority? As a local law enforcement officer, I have peace officer powers of arrest for any state crime within my state, but as a special agent of the federal government, they have the authority to investigate all federal crime, not exclusively assigned to another federal agency, or at least the FBI does. Which, if you want to fact check me is Title 28 Section 533 of the US Code and a whole other slew of authorities and you can find that on the FBI's website, which I'll link to in the show notes, and the show notes are writersdetective.com/78.

Oh where was I? Oh, and one other just kind of trivial, not trivial, it's pretty important, but trivia fact is the legal definition of Special Agent, which you hear about all the time when we're talking about FBI and all the other federal agencies and even some state agencies, so like the Department of Justice here in California, they use the term Special Agent. But the legal definition of Special Agent and where that comes from. Just doing my own research. It probably predates this, but I found a June 1907 Michigan Law Review document that defined a Special Agent as "someone acting under limited and circumscribed powers. The limitations being either imposed by the principal or naturally inferred from the nature of the act to be done." And this definition was applied to differentiate Special Agents from General Agents.

So General Agents being ones not bound by limitations on authority. And we aren't talking specifically about law enforcement here. We're talking about agents working on behalf of Union Telegraph Company or Maryland Casualty Company, which I assume we're both businesses involved in lawsuits back in 1907. But like in a more modern fashion, we use the term agent for things like a real estate agent where that real estate agent has the full authority of working on behalf of the property owner or the property seller/buyer. So when we say Special Agent of the FBI, we're harking back to that legal understanding that they are not General Agents of the federal government with the full authority of all federal laws and all federal powers. Their powers as an FBI Special Agent are limited to those of the FBI's authority. So I hope that makes sense. So the constraints of your task force, Jason, will largely be what they have the legal authority to do.

And then of course, any progressive complications you want to throw at them from their bosses about their secrets being revealed, or being over budget, or the ramifications of what they've done in their work thus far. The key thing to remember though is that whatever they are doing, it needs to be legal. I can put you in handcuffs and take you down to the station to investigate a crime that is already on the books. Doesn't matter what it is, as long as it's a state crime. I'm allowed to do that if I have probable cause. But if I do the same thing to Draco Malfoy to investigate whether he's practicing the dark arts of magic, that's called kidnapping in our muggle courts. So you just kind of make sure that whatever situation you're putting them in is still keeping the good guys, the good guys. So I hope this helps Jason and I can't wait to hear what you come up with.

Thank you so much for listening this week. This show is powered by your questions. So just like Jason, send them to me by going to writersdetective.com/podcast and don't forget, work on growing your mailing list. It is the single most important thing you can do to build the money making side of your author business. The only tool I use is ConvertKit. And you can now use my affiliate link to get a free Convert Kit account that includes landing pages and unlimited emails to your first 100 subscribers. All you need to do is go to writersdetectivebureau.com/ckfree. So sign up right now.

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