The Federal Bureau of Investigation is housed under the Department of Justice with field offices throughout the country. Its agents are responsible for federal cases as diverse as white collar crime, serial killing, and espionage. Attorney General Charles Bonaparte and President Theodore Roosevelt established the forerunner of the FBI in 1908 with the designation of Special Agents assigned to the Department of Justice. Their desire to create a bureau of agents to strengthen the Federal Government's crime fighting capabilities grew out of the early nineteenth-century Progressive era's desire for reform. The Department of Justice's agents later formed the Bureau of Investigation, the United States Bureau of Investigation, and finally, in 1935, the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The American public calls the agency simply by its initials or as the Bureau.

Known individually as the dashing secret agent saving America from communism or...