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FBI history series starts on BBC Radio 4 [audio 15min]

"In the Beginning" is Part 1 of Tom Mangold's new 10-part series looking at the first 100 years of the FBI. Mangold narrates the story and also talks to past – and serving – agents. The series takes listeners from the Bureau's inception in 1908, when it had only a handful of members with jurisdiction over just seven federal crimes, to its 21st-century international fight against cyber crime and the"war on terror". For a century, the FBI has brilliantly marketed itself as the epitome of crime-fighting and its agents as the best in the business. The well-publicised campaigns against gangsters such as John Dillinger,"Babyface" Nelson and Bonnie and Clyde made the Bureau famous. But the hype has not always been matched by results. Over the course of the series, Mangold looks behind the famous badge – Fidelity, Bravery and Integrity – and catalogues the disasters and successes, the humiliations and the triumphs, the dodgy tactics and the brilliant undercover operations which have forged the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mangold is an award-winning journalist and author of The File on the Tsar, an investigation into the murder of Tsar Nicholas II by the Bolsheviks; The Tunnels of Cu Chi, a Vietnam War book; Cold Warrior, the biography of CIA counter-intelligence chief James Jesus Angleton; and Plague Wars, an investigation into biological warfare.
Read entire article at BBC Radio 4 "The FBI at 100"