by Donna Andrews of the Femmes Fatales.
My local chapter of Sisters in Crime paid a visit to the FBI on Friday. No, we're not being investigated, interrogated, indicted, or anything else dire. We were visiting The FBI Experience, the Bureau's new self-guided tour.
The old tour was started in 1937 and expanded in 1975 when the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building was opened. But security concerns after 9/11 forced its closure. A public tour wasn't reopened until 2014, and the current tour, the FBI Experience, designed with expert help from the Smithsonian, was opened in July 2017.
The tour is advertised as self-guided, but I was delighted to find that we weren't simply left alone to ponder the exhibits. Several docents--two retired FBI special agents and a retired Prince George's County police captain--accompanied our group, explaining some of the exhibits and answering any questions we had. I find myself wondering if they found our questions a little stranger than usual—after all, we were a posse of writers. That means we were all on the lookout for possible plots, and tended to ask questions about ways we can have our bad guys get away with murder—at least temporarily. Like until page 299 of a 300 page book.
Then again, maybe they were expecting questions like that—they'd been forewarned that we were writers. (Old timers in the chapter still talk about the time we'd arranged a tour of a local jurisdiction's morgue. No one had warned the staffer that he was escorting a group of writers—which leads me to wonder what kind of people other than writers visit morgues en masse? At any rate, some of the tour participants' questions began to alarm our guide, and he was about to cut short the tour until someone thought to explain—after which he demonstrated a lot greater enthusiasm for questions about how our killers could baffle the medical examiner.)
We got a kick out of the fact that one of the exhibits, showing how crime scene investigators use rods to figure out where a bullet was fired from--featured a bookshelf full of mostly mystery books. Can you spot the familiar faces in this shelf? (Jeff Deaver and Jan Burke, for starters.)
We were told that the old FBI tour featured the bad guys the FBI had caught more than the men and women who catch them—the new tour remedies that, focusing more on how FBI personnel are recruited and trained and what they do. Although it was still cool to see relics from some of the more famous crimes the Bureau has investigated: One of the bugged phones from the Watergate investigation. A creepy Barbie doll that the BTK killer sent to the police. The bullet-riddled boat in which the Boston Marathon bombers were captured. And a part of the fuselage of one of the planes that crashed on 9/11—for the FBI, the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania field where United Airlines Flight 93 went down were three of the largest crime scenes ever investigated.
In fact, the aftermath of 9/11 was a leitmotif of the entire exhibit, and not just because it marked the point when the agency changed its focus from reactive to proactive. There's a Wall of Honor commemorating the 36 agents “killed as the direct result of an adversarial action” and the 30 agents and one professional staff employee who “gave their lives in the performance of a law enforcement duty.” Most of the deaths in the second category resulted from plane or car crashes in the line of duty, but since 2007, five agents have died of cancers that were either precipitated or accelerated by exposure to air at one of the three 9/11 crime scenes—a number that seems sadly likely to increase in future years.
On a happier note: it was a great tour—many thinks to Libby Klein, our chapter program chair, for organizing it, and to Terry, Tom, Brian, and the other docents for answering so many strange questions. Before we left the building, a bunch of us had our pictures taken behind J. Edgar Hoover's old desk . . . if I can figure out whose phone that photo's in, I'll ask them for a copy and post it here.
In short—if you're visiting Washington, the FBI experience is well worth the time. But you can't just drop in—you have to submit an application and pass a background check to get in, so start planning a couple of months before your trip. More info here.
That does sound fabulous. I’m very jealous.
Posted by: Mark | February 11, 2019 at 08:30 AM