The FBI Way

Inside the Bureau's Code of Excellence

Frank Figliuzzi

• Éditeur: Custom House
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780062997067
• Sujet: Business
• Sous-sujet: Leadership

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

The FBI's former head of counterintelligence reveals the seven secrets of building and maintaining organizational excellence

"A must read for serious leaders at every level."—General Barry R. McCaffrey (Ret.)

Frank Figliuzzi was the "Keeper of the Code, "appointed the FBI's Chief Inspector by then-Director Robert Mueller. Charged with overseeingsensitive internal inquiries and performance audits, he ensured each employee met the Bureau's exacting standards. Now, drawing on his distinguished career, Figliuzzi reveals how the Bureau achieves its extraordinary track record of excellence—from the training of new recruits in "The FBI Way" to the Bureau's rigorous maintenance of its standards up and down the organization.

All good codes of conduct have one common trait: they reflect the core values of an organization. Individuals, companies, schools, teams, or any group seeking to codify their rules to live by must first establish core values.Figliuzzi has condensed the Bureau's process of preserving and protecting its values into what he calls "The Seven C's". If you can adapt the concepts of Code, Conservancy, Clarity, Consequences, Compassion, Credibility, and Consistency, you can instill and preserve your values against all threats, internal and external. This is how the FBI does it.

Figliuzzi's role in the FBI gave him a unique opportunity to study patterns of conduct among high-achieving, ethical individuals and draw conclusions about why, when and how good people sometimes do bad things. Unafraid to identify FBI execs who erred, he cites them as the exceptions that prove the rule. Part pulse-pounding memoir, part practical playbook for excellence, The FBI Way shows readers how to apply the lessons he's learned to their own lives: in business, management, and personal development.

1
Code

I was a keeper of the code—the FBI’s code of conduct. For portions of my FBI leadership career, my assignment required me to apply the Bureau’s code against the proven misconduct of some of the finest people in our nation—our own agents. These talented and tenacious public servants passed the most stringent background investigations and regular reinvestigations, periodic polygraph exams, random drug tests, and arduous annual financial disclosures. Yet as high as those individuals’ standards were, they sometimes fell short of the Bureau’s standards. That’s where I came in.

A code is a system of principles or rules. Companies, communities, and countries all need a code that reflects their values if those entities, and those values, are to survive and thrive. You don’t need to be in law enforcement, intelligence, or security work to benefit from the pages that follow. In fact, this book is meant for people of all walks of life and for any group, large or small. If you adopt the concept of the Seven C’s, you can protect and preserve your values, your code, against all threats, internal and external.

Even as a young kid, growing up in a small Connecticut town, I was intrigued by the notion of an elite agency fighting for justice. We lived close enough to New York City that our newspapers and television stations were New York based. I was fascinated by reports of the FBI’s takedowns of mob families and crime bosses. The fact that its agents seemed to use brainpower to battle bad guys was an extra bonus. It didn’t hurt that the TV crime dramas of the day portrayed FBI agents as heroes who always solved that week’s mystery in an hour or less, including commercials.

At age eleven, I handwrote a letter to the head of the FBI field office in New Haven and told him, matter-of-factly, that I wanted to be a special agent. To my amazement, he wrote back with a personalized signed letter that included all the requirements I would have to meet. I think I still have that letter somewhere.

Years later, after becoming the first college graduate in my family, I entered law school. I did well in classes like Contracts, Torts, and the Constitution, but my passion was Criminal Law. I worked for the state public defender’s office during my first law school summer. While I gained a deep appreciation for the difficult task of providing a constitutionally guaranteed defense to everyone accused of committing a crime, my heart wasn’t in defense work. That fall, I learned from the law school’s career office that the FBI had a new initiative. There was an Honors Internship Program that selected a handful of students and paid them to work a summer at FBIHQ in Washington. I submitted my application the next day.

It took the whole school year to get through the background investigation. Since the Bureau viewed the internship as a new recruitment tool, the vetting process was as grueling as it was for a special agent candidate. But I made it. Every morning that summer, I walked into the FBI’s hulking headquarters building on Pennsylvania Avenue with its row of American flags flying overhead. Every evening I left the building more convinced than ever that I wanted to be an agent.

My agent application process was in full swing by the time I returned to campus for my last year in law school. Third-year law students, or “3L’s,” spend a lot of time applying, interviewing, and weighing their employment options. There are also constant questions about who’s interviewing with which firm and what salary offers are being made. Many of these discussions are aimed at sizing up your competition. From the reactions I got when I told my classmates about the FBI, it was clear I didn’t need to view any of them as rivals.

They couldn’t understand why in the world I would want to do something like this. “Are you really going to play cops and robbers?” “How will you live on a government salary?” I told them I’d get by somehow. A few years after I was settled in at the Bureau, my phone started ringing. Some of my former classmates, now fed up with the lack of ethics they saw at their firms or companies, and already tired of the plodding path to a partnership, were asking how they might join the FBI. They were looking to become a part of something bigger, with a better, stronger code.

Learning the Bureau’s code started early at the FBI Academy. For me it was day two. There were fifty new agent trainees (yes, we were called NATs) in class 87-16, the numerical identifier for the sixteenth class of 1987. The first day of training was largely administrative, with reams of paperwork, insurance forms, payroll and savings plans decisions, dorm room assignments, a tour of the facility, doling out gear and clothing, and the like. One of the only physical tasks we performed that day was the “trigger-pull test.” On day two, several of my classmates were missing. Let me give you the background.

Our issued sidearm was the Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver. The .357 was a hefty mass of steel that was virtually impossible to conceal under a suit unless the observer was blind. Later in my career, the FBI would transition to lightweight semiautomatic pistols. Today’s semiautomatic single-action pistols are made with plastic composites, requiring minimal strength to shoot, but the S&W Magnum weighed more than two and a half pounds loaded. And it required at least nine pounds of pressure to pull the trigger.

If you want to get a feel for the trigger-pull test, find a full bottle of wine, grasp it with both hands, and fully extend your arms out in front of you. Hold that position for thirty seconds. That’s the weight of the gun and the length of the test. Next, to get a feel for the pounds of pressure needed to pull the trigger on the .357, grab a full gallon of milk, curl your index finger inside the gallon’s handle, and using only the center of your fingertip pad, lift the gallon up off the kitchen counter repeatedly, as many times as you can, for half a minute. Now do the same with the index finger on your weak hand. I’ll understand if you want to open that wine bottle after trying.

During initial processing in their local field office, new agent candidates would undergo a battery of exams, including psychological, medical, and fitness. Before they were ever sent to the academy at Quantico, Virginia, the applicants also needed to pass the trigger-pull test to ensure they had what it took to shoot the Magnum. The test required you to “dry fire” an empty weapon by pulling the trigger at least twenty-nine times within thirty seconds with your strong hand, and at least twenty-seven times in thirty seconds with your weak hand. If you couldn’t do it, you might be given grip exercises to work on, and your test would be rescheduled, but eventually the local applicant coordinator had to certify that you passed the trigger pull before sending you off to the academy. The rub was, these recruiters were under intense pressure to meet their hiring goals at the time, so trainees began arriving at Quantico without fully passing the strength test.

The unit chief in charge of NATs at the academy was approaching his boiling point over the number of trainees showing up who could not pass the trigger pull once they arrived. We had no idea of this backstory when we walked into class on our second morning and saw six empty seats.

The unit chief later explained he was furious at the field office recruiters who had either been careless with the test results or had not tested their recruits close enough to their departure time to Quantico. He was teaching the recruiters a lesson by withholding credit for hitting their numbers until their candidates could successfully complete a do-over. While this integrity lesson was aimed at agent recruiters, the message to us NATs was equally clear—cutting corners or tweaking results was against the code.

A similar code existed out on the firing range. When I joined in 1987, NATs fired thousands of rounds of ammunition during what most experts believe is the best firearms training in the world. New agents had academics and classroom time at least half the day, every day. The other half of our time alternated between either defensive tactics or firearms training. The opening day on the shooting range was for me, as with many of us, the first time I had fired a handgun. After shooting at the paper targets downrange (and hopefully striking your target and not the one in the next lane), we would hear the voice of God, also known as the lead instructor, loudly over the PA system. Perched high in his covered observation tower, binoculars at the ready, the instructor would announce, “Ensure your weapons are safe, empty, and holstered and move forward to score your targets.” It was then we realized we were on an honor system.

Unless we were firing a “course of record,” a periodic test for an official score, it was on us to pull the pen clipped to our shirt, mark a line through each hole in the target, and scrawl our score in large numbers for an instructor to document as he or she walked across the lanes. If your score didn’t seem to match the holes in your target, the instructor would recount your calculation. This soon became more frequent as our accuracy improved, and it became harder to distinguish separate and distinct holes when our “groupings” became tighter and tighter. Eventually we started shooting holes through holes and our silhouette targets looked less like they had the measles and more like they were missing an organ. If an instructor believed you had deliberately raised your score, he would issue a warning. If you were foolish enough to again betray the trust placed in you to accurately score your target, you would pack your bags.

The range also taught us a lesson in humility and responsibility. We might all be elite FBI special agent candidates, highly educated, often with advanced degrees and professional experience, but we were still expected to clean up our own mess. By that I mean, when you fired hundreds of rounds of ammo during just one firearms session, you produced hundreds of empty brass shell casings ejected from your weapon throughout the length of the course. These spent casings littered the long asphalt shooting lanes and burrowed into the surrounding grass like loose change fallen on shag carpet. The bits of brass were not only a slip-and-fall hazard as we sprinted from yard line to yard line, but they were also a valuable commodity for the Bureau to sell for scrap metal or reuse. During breaks in the action, the senior instructor would announce over the loudspeaker, “Police up your brass,” and we would scramble to retrieve our casings, which while still hot, might have seared into the soft soil.

You could tell a lot about someone by how thoroughly they approached this otherwise meaningless requirement. A shooter who thought the task was both literally and figuratively beneath them, and who might leave many of their casings hiding below the grass blades, would eventually be betrayed by the glint of sudden sunlight off the brass, the resulting flashes silently signaling a poor attitude to the rest of the class. To unknowing passersby, dozens of stooping bucket-wielding figures bobbing in a field to pluck something from the earth might look like farmworkers during crop harvest. But in hindsight, I could see it was all a part of our developing understanding of a Bureau value: sweat the small stuff and get the job done right, or not at all. Whether we realized it or not, the code was working its way into the conscience of the class.

Anyone serious about integrity needs a clear code of conduct. At the FBI, integrity features not only in the Bureau’s core values but also in its official motto, “Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity.” Unambiguous, well-marked guideposts increase the odds that individual behavior will complement, rather than compromise, core values. If you haven’t established basic behavioral benchmarks in your business, organization, team, or family, you should. They don’t have to be numerous; in fact, they shouldn’t be. Too many rules can very quickly turn into no rules at all. Determine what type of conduct so undermines whatever you or your group stands for that it poses an existential threat. Communicate those “danger zones” clearly and frequently. Whoever it was who said “If you don’t stand for something, you might fall for anything” was right on the money.

All good codes of conduct have one common trait: they reflect the core values of an organization. Companies, schools, teams, or any group seeking to codify their rules to live by must first establish core values. The FBI’s approach to maintaining its code starts with its eight core values:

• Rigorous obedience to the Constitution of the United States
• Respect for the dignity of all those we protect
• Compassion
• Fairness
• Uncompromising personal integrity and institutional integrity
• Accountability by accepting responsibility for our actions and decisions and the consequences of our actions and decisions
• Leadership, both personal and professional
• Diversity

Typically, the source of our standards is external. They might be handed down from on high, perhaps from our parents or religious figures, a business leader, a coach, or others who influence us. When that’s not the case, standards might instead be generated and reinforced from the bottom up, a much more unpredictable integrity model that may not reflect the best interests of the organization. Much later in my career, I was appointed the FBI’s chief inspector, responsible for program and performance reviews worldwide. I occasionally observed FBI squads and, at rare times, even entire field offices, where a bad leader enabled an undesirable culture and where eventually, before long, core values were not only abandoned but reset to the lowest common denominator.

Sometimes those leaders, squads, or even offices became toxic, and individuals were removed or reassigned to keep their aberrant values from reaching critical mass. In rare, limited circumstances, I’ve seen federal agents mistakenly overvalue indictments and convictions to the point they were willing to do or say almost anything to win in court. Those agents didn’t last long largely because their peer group, the OPR, or the criminal justice system set them straight and booted them out.

A team, a business, and especially a government can quickly disintegrate when its leader values only the win, not how the win is earned or whether people or values are trampled along the way. Members of such groups have a choice to either reinforce their collective values by pushing back against the leader or to succumb, letting his or her twisted values become theirs. An organization like the FBI that develops deeply entrenched values and internal enforcement processes is far less likely to see its ethical guardrails demolished, even when those barriers get dented.

In an op-ed in the New York Times on May 1, 2019, former FBI director James Comey wrote about the phenomenon of executives whose own codes are tested by a leader who may not have one. Comey observed from his own time around President Donald J. Trump, “Accomplished people lacking inner strength can’t resist the compromises necessary to survive Mr. Trump and that adds up to something they will never recover from. It takes character like (former defense secretary) Mattis’s to avoid the damage, because Mr. Trump eats your soul in small bites.” Comey was talking about having a code, the kind of personal and organizational values needed to survive withering attacks.

The FBI’s collective conscience was embodied in its Office of Professional Responsibility. I served as head of OPR’s adjudication unit for the eastern half of the United States after initial assignment as a street agent, two years as a counterintelligence supervisor at FBIHQ, and three years supervising squads dedicated to economic espionage and violent crime in San Francisco. In my OPR role and in other more senior leadership assignments, I grappled with often agonizing disciplinary decisions involv...