At Least 40 Federal Agencies Now Conduct Undercover Operations

“Undercover work, inherently invasive and sometimes dangerous,
was once largely the domain of the F.B.I. and a few other law
enforcement agencies at the federal level,” Eric Lichtblau and
William Arkin
note in The New York Times. “But outside public view,
changes in policies and tactics over the last decade have resulted
in undercover teams run by agencies in virtually every corner of
the federal government.” At least 40 federal agencies now conduct
such operations.

Here are some of the Times writers’ examples:

At the Supreme Court, small teams of undercover
officers dress as students at large demonstrations outside the
courthouse and join the protests to look for suspicious activity,
according to officials familiar with the practice.

At the Internal Revenue Service, dozens of undercover agents chase
suspected tax evaders worldwide, by posing as tax preparers,
accountants drug dealers or yacht buyers and more, court records
show.

At the Agriculture Department, more than 100 undercover agents pose
as food stamp recipients at thousands of neighborhood stores to
spot suspicious vendors and fraud, officials said.

They go on to discuss several undercover operations that went
poorly or otherwise attracted controversy. Some of those are
well-known, such as the
Fast and Furious scandal at the ATF and the FBI agent who

posed an an AP reporter. (*) Others are more obscure but no
less interesting:

Across the federal government,
undercover work has become common enough that undercover agents
sometimes find themselves investigating a supposed criminal who
turns out to be someone from a different agency, law enforcement
officials said. In a few situations, agents have even drawn their
weapons on each other before realizing that both worked for the
federal government.

“There are all sorts of stories about undercover operations gone
bad,” Jeff Silk, a longtime undercover agent and supervisor at the
Drug Enforcement Administration, said in an interview. “People are
always tripping and falling over each other’s cases.”

Mr. Silk, who retired this year, cited a case that he supervised in
which the D.E.A. was wiretapping suspects in a drug ring in
Atlanta, only to discover that undercover agents from Immigration
and Customs Enforcement were trying to infiltrate the same
ring.

Read the rest
here.

(* If it’s OK for an FBI agent to pursue a suspect by posing
as a reporter, can a reporter try to land an interview by posing as
an FBI agent? Asking for a friend.)