Walking Tall with America’s Finest

Rodger Grinley with gun presented to him on his retirement from the FBI.

Double agents.

Exotic locales.

Wire taps and sting operations.

Sounds like things you’d find Inspector Lewis Erskine encountering in a late-night rerun of “The FBI.”

They are, of course. But they also accurately depict life in the real FBI, said ISU alumnus Rodger Grinley.

He should know. Grinley spent 27 of his 32 years in law enforcement as a special agent with the FBI.

“I’d wanted to be an agent since I was 12,” Grinley recalled in a recent telephone interview from his home in Hawaii. “So I wrote to [J. Edgar] Hoover asking for information on how to join and got a packet back explaining what they were looking for.

“The minimum age to be an agent was 23, so I had some time to kill,” he laughed.

While a far cry from where Grinley grew up in small-town Nyesville, Ind., just 30 miles northeast of Terre Haute, life on the road as a special agent was what he’d dreamed about since becoming mesmerized by the complex cases playing out each week on “The FBI.” From 1965 to 1974 Grinley followed Inspector Erskine and his team as they crisscrossed the country, methodically solving crimes and saving lives, with the storylines based on actual cases from the FBI’s files.

“He was always flying off to conduct investigations. It just seemed like an ideal life to live,” Grinley said.

It took more than dreaming, however, to become a real-life agent. But Grinley was as determined in his quest to gain entry to the Bureau as was his hero Inspector Erskine in bringing criminals to justice.

The Road to Quantico

Grinley set out on the road to Quantico shortly after graduating high school in 1972 when he enrolled as a part-time student at American University in Washington, D.C., mainly because he was hoping to get an internship at FBI headquarters.

“It’s what the FBI recommended at the time,” he said. “My idea was to work as a fingerprint clerk, but as it turns out jobs were frozen that year and I wasn’t able to get one.”

So he instigated Plan B — switching to full-time studies at American, then transferring the next year to a more affordable ISU, where he majored in political science and minored in math.

No matter where you were studying in America, it was a great time to be a poly sci student. The political unrest of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s was still very much in play, fueled by the Watergate scandal that was unfolding right before the world’s eyes. (Ironically, W. Mark Felt, the FBI associate director later unmasked as the infamous Watergate informant “Deep Throat,” served as a technical advisor for TV’s “The FBI.”)

Watergate, et al., led to some lively classroom discussions. “I particularly remember Prof. Jim McDowell’s course on the presidency,” Grinley recalled. “He reminded me of William F. Buckley — deep voiced, extremely knowledgeable and intelligent.”

It was also the era when “Animal House”-style party mayhem prevailed on many college campuses, but Grinley was a serious student. “I was going to school on grants and loans and didn’t want to waste that money. I would feel bad if I missed a class,” he explained.

His favorite place on campus was the old State Normal Library at the Quad. It’s since been replaced with a modern facility, but Grinley has many fond memories of its spiral staircase, ancient floor-to-ceiling bookcases and the numerous hours he spent doing research there. 

Rodger Grinley while attending ISU.

After graduation his job search didn’t pan out so Grinley joined the Army, serving from 1975 to 1978. He then became a trooper with the Indiana State Police, patrolling the Indianapolis district for the next five years.

By this time Grinley had not only reached the FBI’s magic age of 23 (plus a few extra years), but he also had some great experience under his belt. So he put in his application to the FBI and was accepted.

In May 1983 he was back in the D.C. area, this time at the FBI’s famed Quantico training school for an intense five-month regimen — which, he said, after the ISP’s boot camp wasn’t so bad. Upon completion he was sent back to Indianapolis for his first posting. By 1986 he was on his way to New York City for a five-year assignment, then to Guam for another three before drawing his final posting in Hawaii.

“I could have chosen Indianapolis for my final spot, but didn’t want to just because of the weather,” he said. “I remembered some time I’d spent on assignment in Hawaii and decided to try to go back there.”

It was the right choice, he said. He remains in Hawaii to this day, even after retiring from the Bureau last year.

Reality Beats Fiction

On the FBI’s website you’ll find a page devoted to what life is like if you become a special agent.

“There is no such thing as a typical day for an FBI Special Agent,” it said. “One day you could be testifying in federal court, the next you could be executing a search warrant and gathering evidence, the next you could be meeting with a source to gather intelligence on illegal activities, the next you could be making an arrest, and the next you could be back in the office meeting with your squad and catching up on paperwork.”

“ “It just seemed like an ideal life to live.”

Sounds like something the scriptwriters for Inspector Erskine might have penned. So, did real life live up to fiction’s allure?

Yes, Grinley said. And the excitement started immediately.

“After Quantico, I was getting my affairs in order for Indianapolis when I was suddenly off to Denver on a drug investigation. I was only back a few days before I was sent cross-country to help with another investigation.”

He also traveled to towns in Indiana —Terre Haute among them — on temporary assignments. “The time I spent in the Indy office was very little,” he recalled.

Through the years Grinley’s work took him to exotic locales, too. In March 1995, two Americans were gunned down in Karachi, Pakistan, while on their way to work at the U.S. Consulate.  Grinley was part of the FBI team sent to aid Pakistani police in the investigation. A year later an American citizen was kidnapped in New Delhi, India, and Grinley was called in for that duty, too.

“I was single with no family, so being tapped for assignments was not uncommon for me, especially during the holidays,” he said.

His most exciting case, however, played out on home turf in New York City.

It was 1986, Ronald Reagan was president and the United States was still fully engaged in a Cold War with the Soviet Union. The Strategic Defense Initiative — nicknamed Star Wars — was the most obvious icon of potential hostility between the two superpowers.

Industrial and scientific espionage were key weapons in the Cold War, and Grinley was right in the thick of things.

“My squad was assigned to Line X of the KGB, with Line X standing for the polytech and scientific operatives of the KGB,” he said.

At the time, Gennadi Zakharov was a Soviet physicist and the USSR’s scientific affairs officer with the United Nations.

“He was also a KGB agent who recruited an engineering student [known later in the media as C.S.] at a local university to do ‘research’ for him,” Grinley continues. “Over a three-year period he paid the student’s tuition and then, on graduation, helped him obtain a job with a defense subcontractor. Zakharov would then question the student about his work, trying to gain confidential information.”

“There is no such thing as a typical day for an FBI Special Agent.”

Zakharov didn’t know was that the student had become a double agent for the FBI and was leading him on. Before long Zakharov asked the student to obtain classified documents on the design of a U.S. Air Force jet engine.

“So the FBI got with the Air Force and obtained a top-secret engine manual they wanted built. We couldn’t use a non-classified item, as that would not have worked,” Grinley said.

Today’s Internet is rife with dramatic accounts of the FBI sting that brought Zakharov down. Wikipedia reports: “During their encounter in the subway station, C.S. handed over an envelope that contained classified documents describing United States Air Force jet engines in exchange for $1,000 in cash. Immediately after the exchange, agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation swarmed around Zakharov, subduing him and shackling him in handcuffs. It was only then that Zakharov discovered that C.S. was working undercover with the FBI and that his plan to steal secret technical information from the United States had failed.”

The most stressful part of the takedown, Grinley said, was that they were using an actual top-secret document as bait and, although Zakharov had limited diplomatic status, which meant he could be arrested, if he made it to the Soviet Consulate he would have immunity. That was why he chose the subway for the meet.

“The trick was to make sure we could arrest Zakharov fast enough, before he got on the train, to be able to get the manual back. So we had two agents assigned to arrest him and three to get the manual back.

“It was a heart-stopping moment when Zakharov saw he’d been set up and tossed the manual off the platform. But the agents jumped down in time to retrieve it and not get crushed by the incoming train.”

Grinley’s assignment was to watch the vehicle Zakharov had driven to the scene and, once he received word that the manual and Zakharov were secure, to move in immediately and confiscate the vehicle for a search.

“It was all carefully timed and extremely exciting,” Grinley said. “It lived up to the portrayal in ‘The FBI’ show. The only difference between TV and reality,” he adds, “is that the TV show wraps up each case in an hour. The Zakharov case, for example, took three years.”

Things became even more tense when, shortly after Zakharov’s apprehension, the KGB retaliated by arresting US News & World Report correspondent Nicholas Daniloff on charges of espionage. A stalemate began, but two weeks later the two countries negotiated an agreement in which Daniloff was allowed to leave the Soviet Union without charges, Zakharov was allowed to leave the U.S. after pleading no contest and Soviet dissident Yuri Orlov was released to the West. (In a later autobiography, Daniloff denied being a spy.)

The Zakharov incident also led to a new policy on how the Soviets could replace agents in this country, Grinley said, with the U.S. government putting limits on how long they could take to do it. Although they were limited on the number of consulate staff members (many of whom were KGB agents) allowed in the United States at any one time, the Soviets would often have an overlap of outgoing and incoming people. This kept the KGB unit well staffed. But once the limits were imposed, Grinley said, “For the next several years, there was a skeleton crew of agents in the KGB service, which greatly hampered their espionage activities.”

Betrayal

The enemy was not always foreign, Grinley and his colleagues learned. Some of the FBI’s darkest hours occurred when fellow special agents Earl Pitts and Robert Hanssen were revealed as traitors who had compromised many of the FBI’s double agents. Grinley knew both men and, like several others in the New York office, some of his operatives were among those affected by the betrayal.   

“I had two or three double agents who would go for a couple of months, then all of a sudden I never heard back from the Soviet who was working them. We were scratching our heads about what we were doing that compromised them. We found out years later it was Robert Hanssen.”

Rodger Grinley now retired in Hawaii.

In 1997, Pitts was sentenced to 27 years for conspiring and attempting to commit espionage. Five years later Hanssen — considered one of the most damaging spies in U.S. history — pled guilty to 15 counts of espionage and conspiracy for passing classified information to the Soviet Union and, later, Russia, during a 20-year period. He was given life in prison.

That same year, the government appointed a Webster Commission to examine FBI security and how Hanssen and Pitts had managed to go undetected for decades. It came back with a series of recommendations, including the formation of a security division within the Bureau to conduct background checks on employees. Grinley, a trusted agent, was reassigned from polytech and scientific work to this new division.

“It was very demanding,” he said, but it was necessary work and he was willing to do the job. He found no more spies, but he did uncover an employee in the Honolulu office who was providing inside information to her husband, who was involved in an illegal drug operation.

Using the computer they were able to track her activity.

“It took a few months before I hit the jackpot – the smoking gun of her husband and the names of other people we weren’t aware were involved until then. Eventually we obtained warrants for all their arrests,” Grinley recalled. “She pled guilty to providing sensitive information and was terminated from the FBI and given four months in jail. In all, five people in the drug circle in Honolulu were arrested and convicted.”

The FBI — and Grinley — Today

After 9-11, the way the FBI operated changed, Grinley said.

“We got out of the bank robbery and drug business. Our criminal cases for the most part now are dealing with public corruption (fraud), kidnapping and extortion,” Grinley said, “where before it was half criminal and half counterintelligence. Now it’s more like 25/75, with most of the resources dedicated to counterterrorism.”

What can a regular citizen do to help?

“Just ratchet up your awareness,” he advised. “Like they say, if you see something suspicious, report it. It can’t do any harm.”

Grinley joined the ranks of regular citizens when he retired in 2010 after 27 years in the Bureau. Does he miss the excitement?

Not really, he responds.

“I remember the days of sitting on a live wire while watching the New Year’s Eve fireworks.  I just want to take it easy, relax and make up for all those years working long hours, weekends and holidays.”

Shortly before Grinley talked with ISU Magazine he and a group of retired FBI agents went to see “J. Edgar,” Clint Eastwood’s biopic of the life of the man who is undoubtedly the FBI’s most famous character.

So what did he think?

“Leonardo DiCaprio will get an Academy nomination,” he said. “We all had some problems with the movie’s storyline, but DiCaprio’s portrayal was great.”

Grinley never met Hoover. He died while Grinley was still a student at American University. But Grinley remembers going out to watch the funeral procession and the fact that, 11 years later to the day, he was sworn in to the FBI.

Despite all the speculation about Hoover being a cross-dresser and his sexual orientation, the entire time Grinley was in the FBI he never heard any such rumors from those who worked under him. But they all agreed that he was a very demanding director who ran a tight ship.

“You lived up to his high standards. He wouldn’t tolerate anything less,” Grinley said.

 “But there were plenty of stories,” he added. “Like the scene in the movie where he’s dressing down new recruits. In the Academy, the story was that one day Hoover got on an elevator with an agent counselor and two of his students. Hoover never said a word, but he later called the counselor to his office and told him that one of the students looked like a truck driver and he wanted him fired.

“The counselor couldn’t figure out which student Hoover was talking about, so he fired them both. After that, everyone tried not to get on the elevator with Hoover,” Grinley laughed.

Aside from watching out for whom you get on the elevator with, Grinley’s advice to a would-be agent is, simply, go for it.

 “You’ll work long hours, but it’s very rewarding. And it can have major implications for the country as a whole, just like the Zakharov case when we were working with President Reagan, Secretary [of State George] Shultz, etc., providing information so they could make decisions that in some cases were changing the course of history.

“There’s nothing better than getting to be a part of something like that.”

Laurel Harper is a freelance writer from Louisville.