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The FBI captured Russian spy Rudolf Abel - who was portrayed in the 2015 Tom Hanks film “Bridge of Spies” - because an FBI informant within Abel’s circle, named Reino Haynaham, talked.
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Yet even during the Hoover years, informants were key to more standard FBI national security investigations. In the Hoover era, there was little to no oversight in the use of informants, let alone more intrusive investigative techniques. If an FBI probe is particularly sensitive and potentially involves “ a greater risk to civil liberties,” then FBI agents are required to seek higher levels of authorization for their use. Precisely because of these Hoover-era abuses, special investigative regulations were put into place about the use of informants in the 1970s.
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Hoover’s actions were violations of Americans’ civil liberties and the trust placed in law enforcement. The Hoover FBI also used informants in these efforts to monitor, for example, FDR’s foreign policy critics, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., student radicals and the anti-war movement, and to keep tabs on the LGBT community. Edgar Hoover (1924-1972), the FBI conducted unchecked political surveillance operations. That was not always true: During the tenure of FBI Director J. There are investigative guidelines and congressional oversight mechanisms to prevent it. Today’s FBI does not practice political espionage at the behest of presidents or anyone else, and informants are not part of anything like that. These included Trump campaign co-chair Sam Clovis and Trump foreign policy advisers Michael Flynn, Carter Page and George Papadopoulos. Most significantly, he happened to have been in a unique position where he had connections to Trump campaign officials who all had different types of Russian contacts. It’s unsurprising, then, the FBI used Halper in its counterintelligence probe. Stefan Halper has been identified as the informant who helped the FBI’s Russia investigation. He was also a man who long served the U.S. He worked variously for Republican presidents including Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. In President Trump’s self-described "spygate,” the FBI’s informant was a retired international affairs professor at Cambridge University named Stefan Halper. Informants run the spectrum of motivations, from selfless to selfish. Still others acted out of a personal sense of patriotism or were criminal conspirators looking for a deal with prosecutors. He called and visited the FBI about this. Others became informants because they were strong anti-communists during the Cold War, like Warren Scarberry, an informant I uncovered who believed he saw in the Mattachine Society of Washington the work of Communists. Alfred Gross, who had previously worked with the FBI and who in 1952 regarded a gay civil rights group he met as threatening because he viewed them as mentally ill. Sometimes, they seek out the FBI and offer their services to an FBI agent handler out of concern for what they’ve seen. In writing my book “Hoover’s War on Gays: Exposing the FBI’s "Sex Deviates” Program,“ I uncovered the identities of many FBI informants. Most often, informants cooperate because they’re concerned with something they’ve seen or heard. Informants are people who are already in a position to know or learn information and who willingly cooperate with the FBI. The FBI does not “place” or insert informants, as it would do with undercover FBI agents. As sources of information they are what counterintelligence professionals sometimes call “assets,” not spies.
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Informants - an informal term for what the FBI really calls Confidential Human Sources - are, and always have been, one of the most basic sources of information in FBI and police investigations.