by Laura Sullivan, The Baltimore Sun
QUANTICO, Va. - Every 20 minutes, something bad happens here in the town of Hogan’s Alley. FBI agents swarm the pawnshop, a man from inside the pool hall is arrested, and some guy who keeps pulling up in front of the coffee shop is thrown to the ground every time he gets out of his BMW.
Except for the fact that the same crimes keep happening over and over — and that the Dimetapp cough-syrup boxes and toothpaste containers have remained on the shelves of the town drugstore so long all the red coloring has faded to pink — the whole scenario might look real.
Hogan’s Alley is a fake town on the campus of the FBI Academy here. It is a place that conjures images of a Hollywood back lot and looks so realistic that FBI officials had to seal the mail boxes outside the post office because people kept depositing letters. And it’s the heart of the bureau’s grueling 16-week training program that since Sept. 11 has been in overdrive.
The FBI is looking to hire and train about 1,400 support personnel and nearly 1,000 new agents, part of its biggest hiring push since the Vietnam War. These new recruits, the product of a post-Sept. 11 funding package from Congress, are intended to fan out to bureaus across the country to help track down terrorists and prevent future attacks.
Patriotic fervor
So far, the agency says, it is well on its way to finding enough applicants, because thousands of people, buoyed by patriotic fervor and a new, almost instantaneous admissions form, have flooded the bureau with applications.
Just to be sure the word is out, the bureau has launched a marketing blitz, peppering newspapers and magazines with such pitches as “Wanted: Future Agents.” Yet for all their cheery, everyone’s-got-a-shot tone, the ads obscure another truth: The FBI’s hiring process is intense, notoriously long and really hard.
“It can be very difficult to get in,” said Joseph Bross, head of national recruiting at the bureau’s headquarters in Washington. “It’s a selective process.”
Many of the recent applicants who responded to the bureau’s recruiting efforts have been willing to leave established careers. Officials said even a couple of doctors and professors have applied.
Their presence is making the hiring process even more competitive for young newcomers who are already up against applicants who have waited through hiring freezes and background checks from, in some cases, two to three years ago.
The bureau has made it its mission to bring in the best by getting the local FBI offices to compete with one another to bring in the most applicants.
“You can get the numbers, but they have to get through the training,” Lynne A. Hunt, special agent in charge of the Baltimore office said. “We follow them closely. If they don’t succeed, it doesn’t look good for us.”
Indeed, as difficult and competitive as the testing process is, the training that recruits face once they are accepted into the academy is perhaps even tougher.
On the academy’s grounds, the buildings sprawl like a university campus, with dormitories (everyone gets a roommate) and classrooms, which teem with activity from sunup to late night. For the first month of the four-month program, recruits must spend weekends on campus training.
“This isn’t college,” said Joseph Billy, acting assistant director of the FBI academy. “Their jobs depend on their ability to do these things.
“We always get people who decide this is not for them, who say, ‘Hey, this really isn’t something I can handle.’ ”
The academy, which during the FBI’s recent hiring freezes had looked almost deserted, has been sending 50 new recruits through the school every two weeks almost since September. The school was set up to handle classes of just 35.
In recent months, instructors said, they have been seeing many students who talk about public service, compared with a few years ago, when recruits seemed captivated by the glamorous — and often erroneous — images of the bureau from movies and TV shows such as “The X-Files.”
The students must master the law, ethics, physical combat, weapons training — and figure out how to solve cases.
“I knew it was going to be tough, but you don’t realize until you get here that it’s going to be really, really tough,” said a 32-year-old former accountant from Puerto Rico named Felix, who was offered a spot at the academy a few weeks ago. Officials asked that his last name not be used.
“Physically, mentally, spiritually,” he said, “if you’re not ready, you won’t make it.”
Most classroom work is focused on criminal statutes, arrest procedures and liability. The firearms training will often knock out several students whose hands simply can’t pull the trigger of a gun fast enough or hold it steady enough.
Some other recruits will fail the physical training, which includes hand-to-hand combat and arrest techniques.
Bridget Cox, a supervisory special agent who coaches physical skills, said the recruits must also learn to know reflexively where their handcuffs are, how to reach their weapon and how to grab either item with either hand.
“The people who have trouble here are out of shape, overweight or ill-prepared,” Cox said on a recent day as about 100 recruits writhed on a gym floor, learning how to escape a chokehold. “You have some people who have been sitting behind a desk for eight years at an accounting firm, and they absolutely dread coming here.”
Field work
On top of it all, the agents must solve “cases.”
As a team of six agents in Hogan’s Alley piled into “Allmed Drugs” recently, Mike Phillips, an instructor and veteran agent, did not seem pleased. The team had made two arrests, but they had to fire two shots in the process.
He gathered them in front of the cash register for a meeting.
“You have to think logically,” he told them. “Let that which is most likely to occur, occur.”
Phillips questioned them about their warrants, chastised them for not calling the local police — a mistake, he says, the bureau makes too often — and told them to “use their coconuts.”
As they filed out onto the street, where contract actors milled about in character, he reminded them to figure out where the nearest hospital is.
“If you’re laying on the ground bleeding,” he tells them, “you don’t want your fellow agents standing around saying, ‘Hmm, let’s see. Who are we going to call?’ ”
The group managed to make their last arrest just as the next group began filing into town.
“This is a lot of hard work,” Phillips said as he watched the recruits. New recruits “don’t understand just how complex it can get. It’s a process, not an event, and it takes a lot of time.”
And for every class that graduates, finally receiving a slick badge in a black-leather case, it’s still not over.
“If we expected a finished product out of here,” Phillips said, “we wouldn’t need a two-year probationary period.”