In 1903, under new laws banning 'anarchists' from living in the United States, after the 1901 shooting of President McKinley,
the US Justice and Labour departments begin keeping secret files on foreign radicals.

Theodore Roosevelt instructs Attorney General Charles Bonaparte (appointed 1906) to vigorously prosecute the public land frauds of corporate criminals and that he obtain the necessary investigative personnel. Bonaparte applies to the United States Secret Service for trained personnel to make "the proper and necessary investigation", which then assigns him a body of men.

May 27: But the House of Representatives blocks this presidential instruction, out of fear that the president intends to create an American secret police, and banns the Justice Department from spending any money on this 'Bonaparte proposal', but the attorney general evades the ban, hiring eight veteran secret service agents as permanent full-time investigators.

On July 26: 1908 (after Congress adjourns, end June), Bonaparte signs a formal order establishing a new investigative division with a 34-man force of "special agents" and appoints Stanley W. Finch as the first chief of this new Bureau of Investigation.

later, notifies Congress in his annual report in December 1908, after the fact, of the creation of this Bureau of Investigation,

and assures Congress that the Bureau would not be a 'secret police'.

October 1: In retaliation for the anti-union campaigns of the Los Angeles Times the newspaper's headquarters is dynamited by the McNamara brothers of the Iron Workers union (forced to work a 70-hour week), killing twenty-one people.

The crime is solved by private investigator William J. Burns, who in 1921 is appointed to head the Bureau of Investigation.

July 30: German agents in the US sabotage a large munitions warehouse on the western edge of of New York harbour, filled with military supplies for the European war-front against Germany. The huge explosion of two thousand tons of explosives kills seven people, shattering thousands of windows in Manhattan, scarring the Statue of Liberty with shrapnel, and causing property damage estimated at $20 million.
•  German operatives had also secretly gained control of the Evening Mail newspaper in New York for propaganda purposes.

April 6: President Woodrow W. Wilson signs an executive order giving the US Justice Department the authority to order the arrest and imprisonment, without trial, of any foreigner considered 'disloyal' to the United States.

US President Wilson releases fake 'secret' documents, pretending that the leaders of the Russian Communist Revolution are actually 'paid agents' of the German government.

This deception significantly affects the climate of public opinion in the United States toward the Russian Revolution.

January 21: Led by Senator Lee Overman of the Judiciary Committee, with open-ended access to Bureau of Investigation's records, Congress now begins hearings on the internal threat of communism. The Attorney General also authorizes the Bureau of Investigation to arrest the "slackers" who had failed to register for the military draft in 1918. Thousands are arrested.

Three mass trials are conducted under the 1917 Espionage Act* and convict 165-leaders of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) left-wing labour union (of 100,000 workers in the United States), with prison sentences running as long as twenty years.

April: Thirty-six 'anarchist' packages of dynamite pass through the US mail aimed at various US leaders, such as Justice O.W. Holmes (referred below), five members of Congress (including Senator Overman), top bankers, the mayor and the police commissioner of New York, etc.., but none of the packages for various reasons reaches its intended target. In late January a flier had appeared in the mill towns of Massachusetts and Connecticut signed "The American Anarchists", which said "Deport us! We will dynamite you!", for the deportation of Luigi Galleani (propagator of class-war against oppressive leaders) and eight of his closest associates was in process under the new Anarchist Exclusion Act.

June 2: Nine bombs explode in seven US cities placed by self-proclaimed 'American Anarchists'. But the Boston and Pittsburgh field offices of the Bureau of Investigation report that Russia is behind the bombings, and the former chief of the US Secret Service, William J. Flynn, is appointed the new leader of the Bureau of Investigation.

June 12: Bureau of Investigation agents, together with New York state police, ransack Russia's newly opened Soviet diplomatic offices at 110 East 40th Street in Manhattan, seizing reams of files, but nothing linked to the bombings is ever found.

August 1: J. Edgar Hoover (age 24) now becomes chief of the Justice Department's newly created Radical Division, overseeing hundreds of agents and informants working for the Bureau of Investigation, and has authority to call for the arrest of almost anyone he chooses, and so begins the first nationwide domestic surveillance program under the 1917 Espionage Act*, rounding up 'radicals', wire-tapping conversations at will, and opening anyone's mail.

jurist, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, wrote that the 'words' of the Socialists create –

"a clear and present danger" to the nation...

August 12: J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI now begins a "vigorous and comprehensive investigation" of any American citizens and foreigners advocating political change by force.

August 23: J. Edgar Hoover begins a series of meetings with the immigration commissioner Anthony Caminetti regarding his records of the 1,7 million born in Germany, 1.6 million in Italy, and 1.4 million in Russia, for the Anarchist Exclusion Act gives the FBI authority, with only a summary hearing and without indictments or convictions, to exile any foreigners advocating revolution.

Hoover also now sends FBI agents to infiltrate the Socialist Party and the Union of Russian Workers.

Against the above background of (1) preoccupation with perceived enemies of the State, and

(2) the lack of effective accountability to any other organ of state –

it was almost inevitable that the activities of the (Federal) Bureau of Investigation

September 3: A three-day round-up begins in public places, restaurants, bars and hotels, across Newark and Jersey City, of suspected military draft dodgers and deserters, by thirty-five agents of the Bureau of Investigation (under direction of Charles de Woody of the Bureau's New York office) assisted by the ultra-patriotic American Protective League (about 2,000 members) and military officers (about 2,350) and police officers (at least 200), resulting in the unjustified and warrant-less arrest and imprisonment of more than 50,000 men. But only about 1,500 of these are found to be draft dodgers and deserters among the many thousands accused, yet in this process tens of thousands of innocent men are arrested and imprisoned without due cause.

April 7: J. Edgar Hoover appears before Judge Anderson to answer the legal challenge of these arrested prisoners.
Judge Anderson then writes in his ruling concerning the above Bureau of Investigation action that –

(The Justice Department has never challenged this ruling of Judge Anderson).

April 29: Attorney General Palmer announces, on the basis of information from Hoover and his Bureau of Investigation, that the United States will face a nation-wide terrorist attack on May Day – a red alert of an international conspiracy to kill American leaders and destroy American landmarks.

(But May Day comes and goes uneventfully, and
Congress cuts Palmer's budget request for the Bureau of Investigation by one-third).

May 28: The "Report to the American People upon the Illegal Practices of the Department of Justice" is published,

signed by twelve prominent law school deans and lawyers,

concerning the behaviour of the Bureau of Investigation, accusing it among other of torture and illegal imprisonment –

September 16: The Wall Street bombing, near the offices of J.P. Morgan & Co., kills 38 people and causes more than $2 million in property damage ($23,500,000 today with inflation) probably as American anarchist revenge for the deportation of Luigi Galleani to Italy.

March 4: Warren G. Harding becomes US President and appoints Harry M. Daugherty as Attorney General of the Department of Justice.
May: FBI clandestine agent Clarence Hathaway attends the secret four-day meeting of the Unity Convention of Communist Parties at the Overlook Mountain Hotel in Woodstock, New York.

August: William J. Burns is appointed as Director of the Bureau of Investigation, and (misled by a fraudulent informer) blames 'Russian-backed' Communists for the Wall Street bombing.
December: President Harding issues a Christmas Eve pardon to a leader of American socialists Eugene V. Debs (he had dared to criticise the judicial injustice perpetrated against Mrs Stokes in 1918).

September 1: The attorney general (Daugherty) demands and wins a federal court injunction barring striking railroad workers, who were protesting a government-imposed pay cut, from taking any action in support of their demands, thus ordering 400,000 workers with legitimate legal grievances to sit down and shut up.
Bureau of Investigation agents are dispatched across the country to collect evidence of any labour union leaders conspiring to violate the court injunction. Seventeen thousand crimes are thus charged under the injunction. Daugherty collapses with a nervous breakdown and begins hallucinating of Soviet spies everywhere.

April: After US Senator Burton K. Wheeler's trip to Russia and his support for its diplomatic recognition, attorney general Daugherty denounces him publicly as "the Communist leader in the Senate".
June: Bureau of Investigation agents are sent out to Montana to concoct a phony bribery charge against Senator Wheeler, but the jury quickly acquits him.

March 1: The US Senate, in response to the Bureau's spying, resolves to investigate the Department of Justice. John H.W. Crim, head of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice, states bluntly to the Senate –

Daugherty is subpoenaed to appear before the Senate but refuses.

March 28: President Coolidge announces Daugherty's resignation, and the appointment of Harlan Fiske Stone as Attorney General.

Daugherty is eventually indicted for fraud but escapes prison after two juries deadlock.

Gabriel "Al" Capone was an infamous gangster in Chicago during the 1920s and early 30s. Referred to as Robin Hood due to his contribution to charities in Chicago, his reputation was severely tarnished following the St. Valentine's Day massacre of 1929. The FBI started investigating Capone that year after he failed to appear in court. He was soon arrested on tax evasion charges.

Twenty-month-old Charles Lindbergh Jr., son of the famous American aviator Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, was abducted from their family home in New Jersey in 1932. Following his kidnapping, several ransom notes were received by the Lindbergh family, who had an intermediary exchange cash for further instructions on how to retrieve Charles Jr. However, in May a delivery man discovered the boy's decomposed body five miles away from the Lindbergh home. Investigations into the boy's disappearance and death revealed that German-born carpenter Bruno Richard Hauptmann had committed the crime. Hauptmann was tried and found guilty of kidnapping and murder. He was executed by electric chair in New Jersey in April 1936. The case led to Congress creating the Federal Kidnapping Act, which made it a federal crime to transport a kidnapped victim across state lines.

The notorious gangster from Memphis George Kelly Barnes earned his infamous moniker because his weapon of choice was a Thompson sub machine gun. In 1933 he and his gang kidnapped oil magnate Charles F. Urschel. They collected $200,000 for Urschel's exchange, but unbeknownst to them, Urschel collected evidence of the crime during the kidnapping. This was the first major case to be solved by a fledgling FBI under detective J. Edgar Hoover. Kelly was subsequently jailed and spent the rest of his life in prison, including a stint in Alcatraz. He died in prison in 1954.

May 8: US President Franklin D. Roosevelt instructs the Bureau of Investigation to investigate 'fascism in America'.

June 19:The US Congress passes the Communications Act banning interception of telephone calls and disclosure of their contents, but the Bureau of Investigation's J. Edgar Hoover interprets this ban as only applicable (illegal) if there is a 'disclosure'.

Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, better known as Bonnie and Clyde, one of the most notorious criminal duos during the Great Depression. Although it is believed that Parker never fired a shot, they were accused of being involved in numerous robberies, burglaries, auto thefts and murders in the early '30s. The FBI (then known as the Bureau of Investigation) started investigations against Barrow and Parker in 1932 after a series of automobile thefts. On May 23, 1934, police officers from Louisiana and Texas ambushed the duo along a highway near Sailes, Louisiana. They are shot and killed after Barrow attempted to flee.

The Depression-era gangster led a group which was accused of robbing 24 banks and four police stations (apart from being involved in other illegal activities) across several states. John Dillinger managed to escape from jail twice, including once when he used a wooden gun and convinced guards that he was armed. His notoriety gained the attention of the press, and the public was interested in knowing the gang's activities. The FBI was monitoring the gang, but Dillinger had not broken any federal laws until he stole a sheriff's car and drove it across state lines. The Bureau began to close in on Dillinger and in 1934 an informant gave him up. On July 22, Dillinger was shot and killed by three federal agents outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago.

Earl Browder in Yonkers, New York, and head of the American Communist Party, runs for US president, garnering about 80,000 votes. He does the same in 1940 with the same result.

June 26: President Roosevelt issues a secret directive placing the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the army intelligence and navy intelligence, jointly in-charge of all espionage, counter-espionage, and sabotage investigations (as Interdepartmental Intelligence Committee, under chairmanship of the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover).

December 6: J. Edgar Hoover issues a confidential order to the FBI to prepare a list of Americans and foreigners who should be summarily imprisoned in the name of 'national security', such as socialists, communists, fascist followers of Hitler, and "pro-Japanese" people, which would include persons of German, Italian, and Communist sympathies, as well as editors. publishers and subscribers to all Communist, German, and Italian newspapers in the United States.

July 1: The FBI establishes the Special Intelligence Service (SIS), under Percy Foxworth, with funds from a secret account created by the US president.

August: On behalf of the FBI, SIS sets up the 'Importers and Exporters Service Company' at Room 4332, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, as a national clearing house for FBI agents to pick up their foreign cover-assignments for their secret overseas missions.

FBI set up a Special Intelligence Service to conduct operations in Latin America.

Spring: The FBI begins investigating communist influence in the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) after the US Navy asks it to look into "fifteen colored mess attendants" who protested rampant racist conduct.

End March: William J Donovan urges the President to permit him to develop special operations forces, which would take the war to the Germans in an unexpected, irregular way.

11: President Roosevelt orders the establishment of a new White House agency, the Coordinator of Information (COI), with

"authority to collect and analyze all information and data, which may bear upon the national security;
to correlate such information and data, and make such information and data available to the President
and to such departments and officials of the Government as the President may determine...."

Wall street lawyer, former assistant U.S. attorney general (under Calvin Coolidge) and executive, William J Donovan is appointed to lead the COI.

US government agencies responsible for intelligence gathering, view Donovan as an intruder into their territory, and the agencies that the COI attempts to coordinate, the FBI, Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), the War Department's Military Intelligence Division (G-2), and State department, form a loose alliance against the COI, attempting to curb the new agency's scope and influence.

The ONI and the FBI exclude the COI from operating in the Western Hemisphere.

The COI nevertheless expanded into research, analysis, and propaganda, collaborating closely with the British intelligence services (O'Donnell 2004:xiv).

7: Hawaii lay within the territory of ONI and G-2, but they failed to detect the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour.

attempt to resolve that conflict of ONI, G-2, and the FBI, with COI, Donovan proposes bringing COI under the control of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

March: Donovan begins sending teams to break into foreign embassies in Washington, pilfering cipher and code books and recruiting French and Spanish diplomats.

June 13: The US President agrees to this change, and the name of COI is changed to Office of Strategic Services (OSS), but part of the change is the loss of their Foreign Information Service (FIS), and nearly half of COI staff are moved into the newly created Office of War Information (OWI), but the FBI continue to prevent OSS counter-espionage operations in the Western Hemisphere.

the belief that Washington journalist Inga Arvad is a German spy, the FBI place her under surveillance, tapping her romantic phone calls with John F Kennedy (24), and bugging the hotel room where the two had sex.

espionage investigation against Marlene Dietrich is ordered from 1942 to 1944 by J. Edgar Hoover.
Dietrich had attempted to win the trust of FBI officials by volunteering to spy for America instead. Her role involved "collecting observations about subversive activities in Europe" while on trips to the front to entertain the troops.

saboteurs are secretly landed in the United States from two German submarines (including George Dasch who had married an American citizen during his earlier days in the US, and Ernest Burger a naturalized American) at Amagansett beach, Long Island; the others at Jacksonville, Florida.

and Burger decide to defect, contact the FBI but are not believed, so on June 18 they go to FBI headquarters and demand to see J. Edgar Hoover, then show him the cash with which they had been supplied ($82,350), and give the FBI all information on the German sabotage operation.

Insanely criminal, the FBI then charge them with High Treason and they are tried before a secret military tribunal and sentenced to death.

(The FBI lie and pretend that they were arrested June 22, four days after they defected, to gain credit).

The CIA’s precursor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), creates the Simple Sabotage Field Manual, a classified booklet describing ways to sabotage the US’ World War II enemies. OSS Director William J. Donovan recommends that the sabotage guidance be declassified and distributed to citizens of enemy states via pamphlets and targeted broadcasts. Many of the sabotage instructions guide ordinary citizens, who may not have agreed with their country’s wartime policies towards the US, to destabilize their own governments by taking disruptive actions. (Read the original manual, 2.5MB PDF)

May 12: US President Truman writes in his diary –

January 15: Elizabeth Short known as The Black Dahlia, On this date in 1947, the body of Elizabeth Short, posthumously known as "the Black Dahlia," was discovered severed in half in a vacant lot in a Los Angeles neighborhood. She was 22 years old and was working as a waitress. The incident was widely reported due to the gruesome nature of the crime. The case garnered nation-wide attention and around 150 suspects were questioned. Ultimately the case ran cold and remains unsolved to this day.

January 25: In Florida – American mobster 'Scarface' Al Capone dies unmourned and virtually penniless, age 48, of brain haemorrhage, after release his from Alcatraz in 1939. He had been fined $80,000 and sentenced to 11 years in prison in 1931 for income-tax evasion.

August: The FBI pressures the Rome correspondent of The New Republic to spy on American KGB agent Michael Straight.

The FBI recruits Russian Jewish Communist 'Jack Childs' (Chilovsky) as a paid informant, and later convinces his brother Morris (Moise Chilovsky, who served as editor of the Daily Worker newspaper) to join him as a paid FBI informant.

March 29: Ethel and Julius Rosenberg are convicted of espionage for sending atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. At the time, the U.S. was the only country with a nuclear weapon. The Rosenbergs appealed the conviction and the case eventually moved to the Supreme Court, which upheld the death penalty for the couple. During the appeals process sympathy grew for the couple and Pope Pius XII called on then President Dwight Eisenhower to stay the execution. Eisenhower denied all requests for clemency and the couple were executed by electric chair at Sing Sing prison in New York on June 19, 1953.

The FBI sets up "a program of intelligence collection that later becomes known as Program C" which includes efforts to break into Soviet and Soviet-bloc embassies and consulates in New York, Washington, San Francisco, and other cities, in an attempt among other to steal the secret codes and ciphers of America's enemies.

August 28: The FBI initiates operation Cointelpro ('Counter-intelligence Program'), sending anonymous hate mail, tax audits by the Internal Revenue Service, and forged documents, designed to sow and fertilize distrust among left-wing political factions in the United States.

2: J. Edgar Hoover sends a memo to his FBI field staff warning that the Communist Party is seeking to infiltrate the NAACP –

"The Negro situation is a paramount issue" for the Communists.

June 21: Soviet KGB Colonel 'Abel' (Wllie Fisher, born 1903 in Newcastle-on-Tyne, UK) is arrested in New York and held for interrogation in the Atlanta federal penitentiary. (In February 1962 the US swaps him in Berlin for Francis Gary Powers, the American CIA pilot of a downed U-s spy plane, who had failed to use his CIA-issued suicide pill).

In 1953 a 14-year-old paper boy for the Brooklyn Eagle was paid by one of his clients with a 1948 nickel, which turned out to be hollow. When the boy dropped it, the nickel broke and there was a small photographic negative inside it. The boy spoke about the coin to the daughter of a New York Police Department employee, who informed the FBI of the negative. The Bureau spent four years trying to decipher the coded message on the negative. However, in 1957 a KGB agent named Reino Häyhänen defected in Paris and gave the FBI information needed to crack the code and uncover the names of his two contacts in New York (one had already made his way back to the Soviet Union). In October of 1957, Rudolf Ivanovich Abel was indicted on three counts of espionage and sentenced to prison. In 1962, Ivanovich was exchanged for CIA pilot Francis Gary Powers, who was imprisoned in the Soviet Union.

In Apalachin, New York State – Mafia leaders converge on an invitation-only event. After a New York State Police sergeant stumbles across the invitation, road-blocks are set up, and more than sixty mobsters are eventually rounded up and identified, including Joseph Bonanno, Joseph Profaci, and Vito Genovese. The FBI does nothing.

John F Kennedy becomes Attorney general.

13, when senator John F Kennedy (JFK) wins the US presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention, the FBI reports to Hoover that the senator had socialized with Frank Sinatra in New York, Las Vegas, and Palm Springs during the campaign, speculating that Sinatra was using his influence with Kennedy on behalf of the American Mafia and that Chicago mobster Momo Salvatore (Sam) Giancana and JFK both shared the sexual favours of Judith Campbell.

February: The FBI installs wire-taps and bugging devices in the congressional office of House Agriculture Committee chairman Harold Cooley, the home of the committee's clerk, the Dominican Republic's embassy and consulates, and the law offices of the lobbyists of Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republic state president).

US Congress passes legislation at the request of Robert F Kennedy that elevates much of the Mafia's criminal activity to federal status. Interstate racketeering (known as ITAR) now comes under federal jurisdiction.

January 8: J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI informs the US Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy, in writing that Stanley Levison, the advisor and speech-writer of Martin Luther King, is a 'secret agent of international communism', based on information from his secret source 'Solo' (a Russian Jew Moishe Chilovsky/Morris Childs and his brother Jack Chilovsky/Childs).

October: Joseph Valachi testifies before Arkansas Senator John L. McClellan's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the U.S. Senate Committee on Government Operations that the Mafia does exist in America. Mob boss Vito Genovese places a $100,000 bounty on Valachi, but he dies of a heart attack in 1971 before it is collected.

November: The Federal Bureau of Investigation (under William Cornelius Sullivan), concerned that the Reverend Martin Luther King (after his "I have a Dream" speech in August 1963), may use his growing influence in support of communist interests in the US, sends him an anonymous insulting letter pretending to be from a black American, accompanied by a tape recording supposedly compromising his sexual integrity, threatening to expose him, and implying that he should therefore commit suicide within 34-days.

The letter and tape package is opened by King's wife Coretta, but he concludes it is a deception of the FBI.

Sullivan later writes to Hoover in this connection –

(quoted by Sullivan himself in his autobiography The Bureau: Thirty Years in Hoover's FBI.)

The KGB had ‘data’ indicating Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy, according to a top secret memo sent to the White House by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
The 1966 FBI note – forwarded to Johnson’s aide Marvin Watson – quoted a Russian mole as reporting that Moscow believed JFK’s murder was a ‘well-organised conspiracy on the part of the ‘ultra-right’ in the United States to effect a ‘coup.’ ‘They seemed convinced that the assassination was not the deed of one man, but it arose out of a carefully planned campaign in which several people played a part,’ says the memo. The potentially explosive document

is just one of 2,981 never-before-seen records relating to the JFK assassination released early 27 October 2017.

CIA and FBI agents have been given an additional six months to comb the remaining documents and make possible redactions.

Congress passes the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act.

March 8: The self-styled 'Citizen's Commission to Investigate the FBI' breaks into the FBI office in room 204, Media, Pennsylvania (outside Philadelphia) across the street from the county courthouse and steals about 800-files, copies them and releases them to members of Congress and the press, which included fragmentary records of FBI undercover operations to infiltrate twenty-two college campuses with informers, and the wire-tapping of the Philadelphia chapter of the Black Panthers.

May: In Boston – Jimmy (Whitey) Bulger (born 3 September 1929) provides extensive inside information on the Irish gang war dominating the city's underworld to FBI agent Dennis Condon, but in September Whitey withdraws his cooperation.

November 24: Dan B Cooper (mid-40s in a business suit with a black tie and white shirt) buys a cash one-way ticket on Flight 305, leaving Portland, Oregon, bound for Seattle. Cooper appears to vanish into thin air 10,000 feet above dense Washington State forestland with $200,000 in cash, appearing to pull off a heist so daring that he would eventually be considered the most infamous hijacker in American history. After ordering a bourbon and soda, he passes a note to a stewardess that explains he has a bomb in his briefcase. "The stunned stewardess did as she was told," the FBI statement notes. "Opening a cheap attaché case, Cooper shows her a glimpse of a mass of wires and red colored sticks and demanded that she write down what he told her. Soon, she is walking a new note to the captain of the plane that demands four parachutes and $200,000 in twenty-dollar bills."
After landing in Seattle, Cooper allows 36 passengers to leave the plane in exchange for cash and several parachutes. He instructs the pilot to take off again and head for Mexico City. A little after 8 p.m., between Seattle and Reno, Nevada, Cooper launches himself from the back of the plane with his money in hand. He is never seen again.

June 19: The US Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision after the Watergate break-in, bans warrant-less wire-tapping of Americans. The Court's Justice Lewis Powell writes –

September 15: Veteran FBI agents Liddy and McCord are indicted for the bugging of the US Democratic Party headquarters, but no action is taken.

September 25: Based on the pseudo 'prophecy' of psychic-clairvoyant Jeane Dixon from his secretary Rose Mary Woods, President Nixon issues a secret presidential directive commanding an all-out counter-terrorism campaign.

October: Consequently the FBI raids Palestinian American groups across the United States (seven conducted by the secret Squad 47 of the FBI's New York office, under command of John Kearney), and illegally burglarize files of the Arab Education League in Dallas.

July 9: Clarence M. Kelley is sworn in as director of the FBI in the place of J. Edgar Hoover.
December 5: Kelley writes to his 8,767 agents of the Bureau ordering them to refrain from –

Fourteen years after the crime in 1963, the FBI begins prosecution of the four Klu Klux Klan members who bombed the non-racial 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four and wounding twenty two.

January: In New York City, U.S. – South African naval officer, Commodore Dieter Felix Gerhardt (Дитер Герхардт), head of their Simonstown Naval base, is arrested for spying on behalf of the Soviet Union.

His cover is blown by Soviet double agent Vladimir Vetrov (given the codename "Farewell" by France's DST intelligence service).

Vito 'Roberto' Palazzolo (Robert von Palace Kolbatschenko) alleges that the FBI confused him with Vito Girolamo Palazzolo, thereby ruining his reputation.

documents revealed in April 2016, known as the Panama Papers, show that Palazzolo used the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca to shield seven tax-haven companies companies in the British Virgin Islands from Italian, South African and Namibian authorities, as well as his business connection with

Namibian businessman Zacharias Nujoma, the youngest son of former President Sam Nujoma of Namibia

October 29: In Medford, Massachusetts – For the first time, the FBI secretly records a Mafia induction ceremony, in which Vinnie Ferrara, J.R. Russo, Bobby Carrozza, Raymond J. Patriarca (boss of New England Mafia territory, and son of deceased Raymond L.S. Patriarca), and 13 other Mafia members, in the dining room of a member's home, to induct four new members.

Hanssen works for the FBI and at the same time works as a spy for the Russian KGB until 1991 when the USSR collapses and he is transferred to the Russian Intelligence Agency.
He gave three types of information to the Soviet Union: –
• Assets – He disclosed to both the Soviets and Russians the list of American assets in the USSR and Russia and three people were known to have been executed due to this;
• Monitoring – He disclosed how the FBI were monitoring both countries to gain intelligence;
• Secret Operations – He disclosed operations by the FBI to stay on both country’s toes. (For example, he told the KGB that the FBI were building a billion dollar tunnel underneath the US-Soviet embassy to track the Soviets. The tunnel never was completed due to this.) His actions were a major breach in national security from within and exposed many flaws in the FBI.

In 2001, Robert Hanssen is charged with selling U.S. secrets to Soviet and Russian sources.
He is sentenced to life in a US federal prison without parole.

November: Emad Salem, recruited as an FBI informant by Nancy Floyd, begins collecting intelligence that a major bombing is being planned. Although not knowing that the target would be the World Trade Center, he supplies the FBI with the names and identities of every one of the men involved in planning and preparing the major Al-Qa'eda terrorist bombing.

June: The FBI drops Emad Salem as an informant (on an allegation by 39-year-old Carson Dunbar, chief of the FBI's foreign counter-intelligence squad in New York, that Salem 'could be' a double-agent), so terminating his investigation into the planned bombing. Agent Nancy Floyd later comments on the decision to drop Salem –

The US Congress had orders that all records relating to the investigation into Kennedy’s death should be open to the public, and set a final deadline of October 26, 2017, for the entire set to be released.

January 19: FBI Director William Sessions is accused of official misconduct, by trying to shave his income taxes, using government funds to build a $9,890 security fence at his home, blocking investigation of an alleged 'sweetheart deal' on his home mortgage, and arrogating his powers of office for personal pleasure and comfort. But Sessions refuses to resign.
President Clinton appoints Janet Reno as Attorney General, and then she subsequently complains of gross inefficiencies in FBI behaviour (sitting on strategically sensitive information with even knowing that they had it).

February 26: A 1,500 pound bomb explodes under Tower One of the World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring 1,042.

April 19: In Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, American patriot Timothy McVeigh of the Branch Davidian sect blows up the nine-story federal government headquarters, killing 168 people and wounding 850, to commemorate the 1993 Branch Davidian disaster in Texas (The Waco Davidian compound bursts into flame caused by FBI tear-gassing).

June 21: President Clinton signs secret directive PDD 39 stating –

    puts the FBI in charge of detecting hidden arsenals of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons with –

As the FBI has less then five agents dedicated to weapons of mass destruction, the Attorney General Reno asks Congress for 175 more, and gets them.

July 3: George J. Tenet takes office as deputy director of the CIA, and subsequently the agencies trades counter-terrorism chiefs: four senior FBI agents are seconded to the CIA and four CIA officers are deputized at the Bureau.

September: The FBI opens a criminal case against Osama bin Laden (describing him as a wealthy financier bankrolling terrorism), using al-Qa'eda defector Jamal al-Fadl, who had stolen $110,000 from bin Laden's account in Khartoum, who described in detail bin Laden's plans to attack America. (But, by the year 2000 the FBI still has only one analyst working on al-Qa'eda).

February 23: Osama bin Laden (al-Qa'eda) and Ayman al-Zawahiri (Egyptian Islamic Jihad) join forces and send a proclamation from Afghanistan –

December 4: The heading of the daily brief of the US President reads

from evidence supplied by Egyptian Intelligence, and so Richard Clarke, Clinton's terrorism 'czar', asks the FBI's Dale Watson to alert* New York City police and the Federal Aviation Administration* accordingly.

In the USA – Berkeley's Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins publish a well research book (Crime Is not the Problem) in which they found definitively that "Rates of common property crimes in the United States are comparable to those reported in many other Western industrial nations, but rates of lethal violence in the United States are much higher."
This is most probably due to the higher level of gun ownership and the lower level of regulation control (contrary to the National Rifle Association view).
In 2005, Harold Pollack, co-director of the University of Chicago's Crime Lab, states –

April 7: In Lahore, Pakistan, FBI Director Louis J. Freeh personally presents General Musharraf with an 'ultimatum' for the arrest of Osama bin Laden. But Freeh's arrest-'ultimatum' is therefore laughed at in Egypt, and so declined.

September 11: Four passenger airliners are hijacked by 19 al-Qa'eda terrorists and flown into buildings in suicide attacks. Two of the planes, American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, are crashed into the North and South towers, respectively, of the World Trade Center complex in New York City. Within two hours, both 110-story towers collapse with debris and the resulting fires causing partial or complete collapse of all other buildings in the WTC complex, including the 47-story 7 World Trade Center tower, as well as significant damage to ten other large surrounding structures.
A third plane, American Airlines Flight 77, is crashed into the Pentagon (the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense) in Arlington County, leading to a partial collapse in its western side.
The fourth plane, United Airlines Flight 93, is targeted at Washington D.C., but crashes into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after its passengers try to overcome the hijackers.
In total, 2,996 people die in the attacks, including the 245 civilians, a law enforcement officer, and the 19 terrorists aboard the four planes.
It was the deadliest incident for fire-fighters and law enforcement officers in the history of the United States, with 343 and 72 killed respectively. The attacks also caused at least $10 billion in property and infrastructure damage

December 1: FBI agents raid Zionism's AIPAC offices and seize computer equipment and files of Howard Kohr, the Executive Director, Richard Fishman, Managing Director, Renee Rothstein, Communication Director and Raphael Danziger. All suspected of being 'cut-outs', agents who had picked up secret information from Lawrence Franklin (U.S. DOD employee) and passed it on to Israel.

17: In response to the 2001 September 11 attack, the director of the FBI, who previously had briefed the US president on any issues that arose from within the FBI, now reports, in terms of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of Congress, to the Director of National Intelligence, who in turn then reports to the president.

Friday, September 23: In Puerto Rico, ten FBI–snipers and a support team (sent by Luis Fraticelli) land by helicopter to assassinate Cuban-trained Filiberto Ojeda Rios (age 72) for coordinating a bombing at Fraunces Tavern in 1982 (and directing a Wells Fargo bank robbery in Connecticut in 1983), but initially land at the wrong address. They eventually locate their target, and

the following day discover his body, killed in their first assault in which one FBI agent was wounded.

November 6: FBI agent John J. Connolly Jr. of Boston, USA, is convicted of second-degree murder for plotting with mob-boss James 'Whitey' Bulger to kill a man who was set to cooperate with investigators against them.

June: In Boston – The FBI arrests KGB/FSB/SVR agents Russians Andrei Olegovich Bezrukov (alias Donald Heathfield) and Elena Vavilova (alias Tracey Foley) in front of their Canadian-born sons Tim (20), now Timofei Vavilov, and Alex (16) now Alexander Vavilov. An exchange is arrangement with the Soviet Union for certain Western spies arrested there, and they arrive in Moscow, via Vienna, on 9 July, wearing the orange prison jumpsuits they had been given in America.

intelligence service colonel Aleksandr Poteyev blows the cover of a group of Russian sleeper agents working in the US, including undercover Russian agent Anna Chapman.
He is later sentenced in absentia by a Russian court to 25 years behind bars for treason.

On Thursday 7 July 2016 Poteyev is reported dead in the US. Putin had warned that "traitors always end in a bad way".

November 7: A new set of guidelines for intelligence investigations is issued.

The websites of Kim Dotcom are seized by the FBI in raids on Mr Dotcom's business empire, alleging that his Megaupload service is a haven for software pirates and copyright thieves (the legal action that starts with the raids has yet to be resolved). These websites, are overseen by the FBI's Cyber Initiative and Resources Fusion Unit (this unit replaces the content of the sites with banners that they had been taken over by the FBI), then become used to direct visitors to sites peddling porn, fake security software, ad-ware and bogus special offers, as a consequence of the FBI's failure to renew its ownership of a separate site – cirfu.net (currently run by Syndk8 Media, based in Gibraltar).

The seized sites are suspended in 2015 and no longer show any web content.

January: Lieutenant Colonel Jason Amerine is abruptly escorted out of the Pentagon where he worked (he had led an Army team ordered to bring home Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, a mission that was then expanded to include several civilian hostages held by Taliban-aligned militants in Pakistan). The Army now informs him that its Criminal Investigation Command (CID) has opened a case against him. His pay is halted, and his retirement is put on hold. US Representative Duncan Hunter (Marine veteran and Republican member of the House Armed Services Committee) says this is a hit job by the FBI, payback for infringing on the Bureau's hostage-recovery turf. The FBI redirect questions back to the Defense Department. (See: June Senate hearing, below).

April: Poles are outraged when FBI director James Comey, in a speech at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, lists Poles among the war's perpetrators. Then-president Bronislaw Komorowski calls the comments "an insult to thousands of Poles who helped Jews," while Prime Minister Ewa Kopacz says: :"To those who are incapable of presenting the historic truth in an honest way, I want to say that Poland was not a perpetrator but a victim of World War II."

Inc. secretly builds a custom software program to search all of its customers' incoming emails for specific information specified by U.S. intelligence officials.

Testifying at a Senate hearing with the contorted title,

"Blowing the Whistle on Retaliation: Accounts of Current and Former Federal Agency Whistle-blowers,"

Amerine states –

(in a July 10 letter to Republican Senator Grassley's Judiciary Committee, the Pentagon confirms that the FBI was in fact the back-channel trigger against Amerine.)

June 2: The US Senate passes USA Freedom Act by 67-32 thus paving the way for telecom companies to assume responsibility of the controversial phone records collection program, while also bringing to a close a lapse in the broad NSA and FBI domestic spying authorities.

The American Civil Liberties Union praises the passage of the USA Freedom Act as "a milestone",
but points out that there were many more "intrusive and over-broad" surveillance powers yet untouched.

Press (AP) reports that the FBI is operating an air force with scores of low-flying planes across the US carrying surveillance video and cellphone surveillance technology – all hidden behind 13 fictitious companies (FVX Research; KQM Aviation; NBR Aviation; PXW Services; etc.) that are fronts for the FBI surveillance program.
The FBI has asked AP not to disclose the names of these fake companies, saying that would saddle taxpayers with the expense of creating new cover/fake companies to shield the FBI's involvement, and could endanger the planes and integrity of the surveillance. The AP declined the FBI's request because the companies' names – as well as common addresses linked to the Justice Department – are listed on public documents and in US government databases.

A 2010 federal budget mentions at least 115 planes, including 90 Cessna aircraft, in the FBI's surveillance fleet.

October: After the hack of CIA Director John Brennan's personal email account and telephone service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation issues an alert to all government employees advising them to change their passwords and be cautious about suspicious emails and other phishing attempts.

7: A former US Secret Service agent is jailed for six years for stealing electronic currency while investigating the Silk Road online marketplace. Shaun Bridges took $820,000 (£546,000) in bitcoin after accessing Silk Road. He admitted money laundering and obstruction charges in August. As a member of the US Secret Service, Bridges was part of a task force investigating the Silk Road marketplace, which was used by some to trade illegal items. It was closed in 2013 following raids by the FBI and other agencies. Bridges stole the online currency and tried to pin it on a witness who was cooperating with the investigation, prompting Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht to take out hits on the witness' life. A Drug Enforcement Administration agent on the Silk Road task force, Carl Force, was charged separately with selling information about the investigation and pleaded guilty to extortion and other charges. He was sentenced to six years in prison in October.

In federal court in North Carolina, charges are filed against Hikmatullah Shadman of Afghanistan who gave at least two US soldiers (Robert Green and David Kline, who both pleaded guilty) bundles of $100 notes to win inflated deals to supply transport and heavy equipment when the the men were deployed to Afghanistan in 2009. His whereabouts are unknown. Justice Department officials had earlier frozen more than $63million (£42.5m) in bank accounts controlled by Mr Shadman, a logistics and construction company owner, thought to be one of the first asset freezes of its kind involving an Afghan contractor. Green received several payments of between $30,000 (£20,000) and $50,000, at his request, while Kline (his superior) received about $50,000.

January 26: at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, a standoff with the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) by local ranchers Robert “LaVoy” Finicum (55), Ammon Bundy, his brother Ryan Bundy, and others, who had stopped paying BLM their grazing permit fees as a protest, the FBI shoot Finicum dead (he appeared to reach for a handgun) and arrest eight others.

16: In the USA – Apple defies a U.S. court order obtained by the FBI, to write software so as to allow them a back-door into the iPhone 5c encryption of Syed Rizwan Farook, arising from his 2015 San Bernardino terror attack (killing 14).
Apple therefore states, in an open letter to its customers, that –

Time Cook further asserts that the FBI was asking the company to make "the software equivalent of cancer".

Later, Google, Facebook, and Twitter all express support for Apple's defiant refusal to weaken encryption.

Since September 2014, data on the latest Apple devices – such as text messages and photographs –
have been encrypted by default.

In the light of America's Department of Justice filing a court motion to force Apple to conform to the FBI demand,

But, John McAfee of McAfee Associates says that he had offered the FBI to open everything on the cell phone of the San Bernardino killer within three weeks, but that having a software back-door into cell phones would jeopardise civil liberties and pubic safety. In addition, a device sold by Fone Fun Shop for £120 (US$171) cracked an iPhone password in just six hours, and the FBI's budget could have sustained that.
Until 2013, it was commonplace for Apple to help the government extract data from locked iPhones. But following several high-profile data breaches and the Edward Snowden surveillance leaks, Silicon Valley began adding stronger encryption and privacy features to its products. Apple, among other things, engineered its new phone software such that it could no longer extract data for authorities.

iPhones can be accessed by Apple without a user’s pass-code, through a troubleshooting feature that overrides security measures, in order for new software to be installed. It is this loophole that has been the subject of an ongoing battle between Apple and the Department of Justice centring around the iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino killers. But in December 2015 Apple began working on a solution to the security gap even before the San Bernardino attacks, to make iPhones impossible to break into using current methods.

28, Evening: Eventually, the US Justice Department lawyers deceptively write in a court filing that they no longer need Apple’s help in getting around the security countermeasures on Syed Farook’s device. The Japanese company, Cellebrite Mobile Synchronization Ltd. worked with the FBI to crack the iPhone.
In a responding statement, Apple says: "This case should never have been brought... This case raised issues which deserve a national conversation about our civil liberties, and our collective security and privacy.

Apple remains committed to participating in that discussion."

At the FBI’s request, the US supreme court rules that federal judges should be able to issue hacking warrants to federal law enforcement for anywhere in the US if the suspect has tried to hide their location. Additionally, the FBI can get authority to infiltrate any computer – regardless of the owner – if it has already been taken over by hackers. The changes to so-called “rule 41” go into effect 1 December unless Congress acts to block them. The move has set up a showdown with Senator Ron Wyden, the most senior Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, who is marshalling the opposition on Capitol Hill, and plans to introduce a bill blocking the court’s move.

21: In Virginia – The U.S. court rules that the FBI can hack into a computer without a warrant -- a move which is troubling privacy advocates. The judge, Henry Morgan, ruled that even though the FBI obtained a warrant to hack into the suspect’s computer, none was needed.

25: The FBI says it is investigating the hack involving the Democratic National Committee (DNC) after a cache of emails was leaked in advance of Hillary Clinton’s nomination as the Democratic Party’s nominee for President this week, an incident that has been linked by some to the Russian government. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump have publicly traded compliments, while a number of advisors on Trump’s campaign have now, or in the past, have had financial interests in Russia or have been sympathetic to Putin’s policies. For instance, Trump’s campaign chair Paul Manafort previously worked as a consultant for Viktor Yanukovych, the former Putin-backed president of Ukraine who was ousted in 2014. So American law enforcement and intelligence officials suspect that Russian military intelligence (the GRU), carried out the hack of the DNC email server, though no one has been able to suggest how the material got into the hands of WikiLeaks.

American intelligence officials state that the Russian government was almost certainly responsible for the DNC hack, and the New York Times reported that 'Assange' (Vladimir Putin) timed the release of the leak to maximize the political damage to Hillary Clinton.

14: Director James Comey states, during a conference at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, that putting a piece of tape over his personal laptop's webcam is a common sense and one that most should take. But many found this ironic from Comey, who this year launched a high profile battle against Apple to gain access to data locked inside of the iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino, California terrorists. Many have viewed that fight as a referendum on digital privacy.

Senator John McCain passes a dossier of documents to the FBI director, James Comey, alleging secret contacts (dating from 20 June to 20 October 2016) between the Trump campaign and Moscow, and that Russian intelligence had personally compromising material on the president-elect himself. One report, dated June 2016, claims that the Kremlin has been cultivating, supporting and assisting Trump for at least five years, with the aim of encouraging "splits and divisions in western alliance".
The dossier was assembled by respected former British spy Christopher Steele of Trump's frolics with prostitutes in Moscow, his real estate deals that were intended as bribes, and coordination with Russian intelligence of the hacking of the Democrats.

A series of phone calls take place between Sergey I. Kislyak (Russia’s ambassador to the United States) and Michael T. Flynn (who is poised to become Mr. Trump’s national security adviser). The calls begin shortly after Mr. Kislyak is summoned to the State Department and informed that, in retaliation for Russian election meddling, the United States is expelling 35 suspected Russian intelligence operatives and imposing other sanctions on Russia. Kislyak is irate and threatens forceful retaliation.

Mr. Kislyak, after leaving the State Department meeting, calls Mr. Flynn, and that the two talk multiple times in the following 36 hours.

(American intelligence agencies routinely wiretap the phones of Russian diplomats, and transcripts of the calls show that Mr. Flynn urged the Russians not to respond, saying relations would improve once Mr. Trump was in office.)

Evgeniy M. Bogachev (living in a resort on Russia's Black Sea coast) is the most wanted cybercriminal in the world, although regarded as a hero in Rusia. His cyber attacks go under a program called GameOver Zeus, or GOZ, and another program, known as "ransomware", would freeze victims' computer files and threaten to destroy them unless an online ransom was paid (WannaCry currently attacking British NHS computers). The wave of cyberattacks, which affected dozens of countries, apparently exploits a flaw exposed in documents leaked from the US National Security Agency. [On December 18, 2017, the United States government (through Trump's homeland security adviser, Tom Bossert) blames North Korea for this WannaCry computer worm that affected more than 230,000 computers in over 150 countries, in order to increase world opposition to North korea.]
The Bureau has announced a $3 million bounty for Bogachev's capture, the most ever for computer crimes, and has been trying to track his movements in hopes of grabbing him if he strays outside his home turf in Russia.
He has been indicted in the United States, accused of creating a sprawling network of virus-infected computers to siphon hundreds of millions of dollars from bank accounts around the world, targeting anyone with enough money worth stealing – from a pest control company in North Carolina to a police department in Massachusetts to a Native American tribe in Washington.

the Obama administration announces sanctions against Mr. Bogachev and five others in response to intelligence agencies’ conclusions that Russia had meddled in the US presidential election.
Publicly, law enforcement officials said it was his criminal exploits that landed Mr. Bogachev on the sanctions list, not any specific role in the hacking of the Democratic National Committee.

January 20: In the USA – Chinese-born American citizen, FBI officer Kun Shan Chun (aka "Joey Chun", 47, arrested in March 2016) is found guilty of espionage on behalf of China (beginning in 2006 to 2015, when an under-cover FBI agent met with him) in Manhattan. Chun pleads guilty and is fined $10,000 and two-years in prison by US District Judge Victor Marrero.

4: James Comey, the director of the FBI, asks the US justice department to publicly reject claims, made by Donald J Trump, that Barack Obama ordered his phones to be tapped during the 2016 election campaign. Trump said –

5, the White House asks Congress to investigate the allegation, despite James Clapper, Obama’s director of national intelligence, saying nothing matching Trump’s claims had taken place.
The FBI and Congress are already investigating Russian interference in the election, and American intelligence agencies have concluded that hackers acting on behalf of the Kremlin broke into Democratic party servers in support of Trump.

In the USA – US diplomat Candace Marie Claiborne (60) is arrested for passing information to two Chinese agents (the money they gave her was in exchange for US secrets), while working for the US State Department in China. She took cash and an iPhone for herself, but most of the funds went to an unidentified man half her age with whom she lived in Beijing and Shanghai. The Chinese agents paid for his fashion school tuition, apartment rental, a sewing machine, vacations, and other needs as requested by Claiborne, according to a complaint unveiled in the US federal district court in Washington, DC.

9: In the USA – President Donald Trump fires FBI Director James Comey allegedly over incompetence in the investigation of the Russian hacking of Hilary Clinton's emails. Donald Trump later says he was thinking of "this Russia thing" when he decided James Comey’s fate – contradicting the White House rationale that he fired the FBI director for mishandling the Clinton email investigation.

After being fired, Mr Comey claimed the president had sought his loyalty and said he hoped he would drop the Flynn investigation. "I took it as a direction," Mr Comey said while giving testimony at Capitol Hill. "I took it as this is what he wants me to do," he said, adding: "I didn’t obey that."

Marcus Hutchins, the 23-year-old British security researcher who was credited with stopping the WannaCry outbreak in its tracks by discovering a hidden "kill switch" for the malware, has been arrested by the FBI over his alleged involvement in another malicious software targeting bank accounts. According to an indictment released by the US Department of Justice, Hutchins is accused of having helped to create, spread and maintain the banking trojan Kronos between 2014 and 2015. The Kronos malware was spread through emails with malicious attachments such as compromised Microsoft word documents, and hijacked credentials such as internet banking passwords to let its user steal money with ease. Hutchins, who is indicted with another unnamed co-defendant, stands accused of six counts of hacking-related crimes as a result of his alleged involvement with Kronos. “Defendant Marcus Hutchins created the Kronos malware,” the indictment, filed on behalf of the eastern district court of Wisconsin, alleges.

A new lawsuit is calling for the FBI to produce all written or oral instructions of advice they gave Sessions or his staff to back up the attorney general’s claims.
"At a time when the president and his allies are under investigation for possible improper contacts with representatives of Russia’s government," said Michael Keegan, President of People For the American Way which is leading the suit, "it is imperative for the American people to know whether the attorney general is speaking accurately about omissions in his security clearance form."

"These documents should be easy to produce,” Keegan said. “We look forward to receiving them promptly from the FBI."

Authorities are trying to determine why Stephen Paddock killed 59 people in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. The Las Vegas gunman transferred $100,000 (£75,000) to the Philippines in the days before the attack and planned the massacre so meticulously that he even set up cameras inside the peephole of his high-rise hotel room and on a service cart outside his door, apparently to spot anyone coming for him, authorities said Tuesday. Meanwhile, investigators are taking a harder look at the shooter's girlfriend (Marilou Danley, 62) and what she might have known about the attack at a country music festival, with the sheriff naming her a "person of interest" and saying the FBI is bringing her back to the U.S. from the Philippines on Wednesday for questioning (Sheriff Joseph Lombardo).

The number of injuries is at 489, 317 of those have been discharged from hospital. Deaths at 59, including the suspect.

stormed Paddock’s hotel room, they found 23 guns, some equipped with "bump" stocks that can allow guns to fire at a more rapid clip, along with thousands of rounds of unused ammunition. Police also found a slip of paper in the room, which is visible in photos that have circulated online; while authorities have not said what was on the paper, Lombardo said it was not a suicide note. In Paddock’s car, investigators also found several cases containing the chemical tannerite, an explosive, along with an additional 1,600 rounds of ammunition. At Paddock’s homes, authorities found dozens of other guns, additional ammunition and more tannerite. All told, police have recovered 47 guns in the case, most of them bought since October 2016, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Lombardo said police had focused on why Paddock bought 33 rifles between October 2016 and last Thursday, when he checked in at the hotel, and were exploring whether something happened that compelled him to buy so many guns over that time period.

President Trump orders the release of more than 2,800 records related to the John F. Kennedy assassination, but bows to pressure from the CIA, FBI and other agencies to delay disclosing some of the most sensitive documents for another six months. Even so, the thousands of pages that are published online by the National Archives Thursday evening describe decades of spies and surveillance, informants and assassination plots.

American President Trump's former campaign manager (between June and August 2016) Paul Manafort, and his former colleague and business associate Rick Gates hand themselves over to the FBI on this day to face 12 charges approved by a federal grand jury on Friday 27 October but not unsealed until this Monday morning. The special counsel Robert Mueller said that $75 million flowed through the pair's offshore accounts and that Mr Manafort laundered more than $18 million. The two men are also accused of engaging in a multi-million dollar lobbying campaign in the US at the direction of the former President of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych. The special counsel said that $75m flowed through the offshore accounts belonging to Mr Manafort and Mr Gates.

The pair are accused of laundering money from 2006 until at least as recently as 2016.

Separately, former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos is pleading guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russians. Papadopoulos' plea occurred on October 5 but was unsealed Monday 30. In court papers, he admits lying about the nature of his interactions with "foreign nationals" who he thought had close connections to senior Russian government officials.

In Sacramento, California – The FBI announces that it found a martyrdom letter and several guns in the home of a former Marine who may have been planning a Christmas Day attack on a popular San Francisco tourist destination (Pier 39). Everitt Aaron Jameson (26), a Modesto tow-truck driver, was therefore charged with attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization. Discharged from the Marine Corps for failing to report that he had history of asthma, the San Francisco terror plot suspect allegedly believed "Christmas was the perfect day to commit the attack."

January 13: A former C.I.A. officer suspected by investigators of helping China dismantle United States spying operations and identify informants has been arrested, the Justice Department said on Tuesday. The collapse of the spy network was one of the American government’s worst intelligence failures in recent years. The arrest of the former officer, Jerry Chun Shing Lee (53) capped an intense F.B.I. inquiry that began around 2012, two years after the C.I.A. began losing its informants in China.
Investigators confronted an enduring mystery: How did the names of so many C.I.A. sources, among the agency’s most dearly held secrets, end up in Chinese hands? Some intelligence officials believed that a mole inside the C.I.A. was exposing its roster of informants. Others thought that the Chinese government had hacked the C.I.A.’s covert communications used to talk to foreign sources of information.
Still other former intelligence officials have also argued that the spy network might have been crippled by a combination of both, as well as sloppy tradecraft by agency officers in China. The counterintelligence investigation into how the Chinese managed to hunt down American agents was a source of friction between the C.I.A. and F.B.I.
Mr. Lee, who left the C.I.A. in 2007, has been living in Hong Kong and working for a well-known auction house. He is apprehended at Kennedy Airport in New York on Monday 16 and charged in federal court in Northern Virginia with the unlawful retention of national defense information. He appeared in Brooklyn federal court on Tuesday and is being held there while awaiting transfer to Virginia. He does not have a lawyer, a Justice Department official said.

The F.B.I. apparently learned that Mr. Lee was traveling to the United States and scrambled to charge him on Saturday.

A Justice Department spokeswoman (Sarah Isgur Flores) said Thursday that it's unclear whether a text message between two FBI employees referring to a "secret society" was serious or done in jest.

Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, long criticized by Presudent Trump, abruptly resigns.

President Trump is expected to agree to the release of a four-page memo by Californian Republican (House Intelligence Committee’s chairman) Devin Nunes alleging wrongdoing by FBI officials improperly using a secret surveillance program, known as FISA, to target the Trump presidential campaign in 2016, in that Bureau officials overstepped Agency rules in their investigation of Carter Page, a former Trump campaign aide, and his ties to Russian officials, while carrying out their probe of foreign interference in the 2016 presidential election.

President Trump approves release of the above memo without redactions. The four-page, newly declassified memo, written by the Republican staffers for the House Intelligence Committee, said the findings "raise concerns with the legitimacy and legality of certain (Justice Department) and FBI interactions with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC)," calling it "a troubling breakdown of legal processes established to protect the American people from abuses related to the FISA process.’"
The memo accuses former officials who approved the surveillance applications — a group that includes former FBI Director James B. Comey, his former deputy Andrew McCabe, former deputy attorney general Sally Yates and current Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein — of signing off on court surveillance requests that omitted key facts about the political motivations of the person supplying some of the information, Christopher Steele, a former intelligence officer in Britain.
According to the memo on October 21, 2016 a warrant was sought and obtained for electronic surveillance of Carter Page, a volunteer adviser to the Trump campaign who had traveled to Russia. The warrant was sought under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Such warrants have to be renewed in a secret court every 90 days.
Each time there has to be a "probable cause" shown, and submissions to the court are classified.

15: U.S. national security officials say the FBI, the Homeland Security Department and intelligence agencies have determined that Russian intelligence and others are behind attacks on the American energy sector. The U.S. officials the energy industry targets were chosen deliberately. The officials say the Russians obtained access to the energy system and "conducted network reconnaissance" of industrial control systems that run U.S. factories and the electricity grid.

The officials say they've helped companies kick the Russians out of all systems currently known to have been penetrated.

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions fires the FBI’s former No.2 official Andrew McCabe, prompting McCabe to say he is being targeted because he is a crucial witness into whether President Donald Trump tried to obstruct the Russia investigation.

McCabe says he believes he is being politically targeted because he corroborated former FBI Director James Comey’s claims that Trump tried to pressure him into killing the Russia probe.

Rafael Caro Quintero, the one-time head of the Guadalajara drug cartel in Mexico, who is wanted in the 1985 kidnapping and murder of a Drug Enforcement Special Agent Enrique Camarena "Kiki" Salazar has been added to the Federal Bureau of Investigations most wanted fugitives. The FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Marshals Service and the Department of State “are committed to bring to justice this dangerous criminal and cartel leader responsible for the brutal murder” of Camarena, said FBI Deputy Director David L. Bowdich. The State Department has offered a reward of up to $20 million for information leading to his arrest. Authorities arrested Caro Quintero in Costa Rica in 1985 for Camarena’s torture and murder and extradited him to Mexico. After he was sentenced in 1989 to 40 years in prison, the Mexican government confiscated his wealth. His holdings at the time included a property owned by an offshore company set up by Mossack Fonseca, the now defunct Panama law firm whose files were the basis of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalist Panama Papers investigation. The property was handed over to Costa Rica’s government, which then passed it to Costa Rica’s National Olympic Committee. in March 2005, Costa Rican Olympic officials asked Mossack Fonseca to help them obtain clear title to the property. A lawyer working for Mossack Fonseca told the Costa Rican visitors that the offshore company’s shareholders would have to decide. A document in Caro Quintero’s company files labeled “Case details shareholders” contained only a notation: “No data found!” But the lawyer wrote in an internal email exchange that it “appears the real owner of the estate, and therefore of the company, was the narco-trafficker Rafael Caro Quintero.”

Arron Banks was secretly in regular contact with Russian officials from 2015 to 2017, according to a cache of emails apparently not seen in those Transatlantic investigations until they were published in Britain on Sunday, June 10. Banks, who ran the Leave.EU campaign group, was one of the first foreign political figures to visit Donald Trump – accompanying Nigel Farage to Trump Tower – soon after the shock presidential election of 2016. Farage is reportedly a "person of interest" in the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation.