Mulder, Where Are You?
by Clay Risen

It's been a big, bad month for the FBI. What started as a trickle out of the Phoenix field office has turned into a torrent of evidence showing just how much the Bureau knew about Sept. 11 preparations, versus how little it knew about what it knew. This on top of the May 10 sentencing of Robert Hanssen, a former agent and the most dangerous mole in the history of the intelligence community. Oh, and, of course, "The X-Files" folded.

For nine seasons, "The X-Files" was a bastion of pro-FBI sentiment. Not "pro" in the sense of positive, but "pro" in that it made the Bureau look potent. Capable, if not always of good things. Mulder and Scully ran around hunting aliens and other such paranormal events, all the while being watched by shady, powerful higher-ups who, in turn, reported to a star chamber of would-be world dominators. The show was gripping, enough to put the fear of black helicopters into even the most pro-big-government liberal.

Chris Carter's "The X-Files" was complete nostalgia, a combination of 1950s sci-fi camp and 1960s anti-government paranoia, glossed over with sexy actors and cool minimalist furniture. Its motto was "fight the future," but it relied on a vein of anti-FBI conspiracy theories rooted in Kennedy assassination coverups and COINTELPRO wiretapping, a vein reinvigorated by Ruby Ridge and Waco. And it wasn't just the X-Files — there were other TV programs, like "Profiler" and "The Pretender," films like Conspiracy Theory and Men in Black and a pop culture sub-jargon drawing on everything from the Illuminati to fake moon landings.

Much of the anti-government fear was just rump Cold War paranoia, the need for an all-powerful, all-evil enemy to pose a threat to middle-class America. Drug dealers — and, at the time, Middle Eastern terrorists — were too abstract. But the government is something everyone has gripes about — it makes you pay taxes and stand in long lines at the post office. Resurrecting fears of Hoover's America, combined with a little 1990s sheen, was the answer.

But as the recent revelations of Bureau ineptitude pre-Sept. 11 have once again made clear, the image of the FBI as panopticon is far, far from accurate. There was the Wen Ho Lee case, in which agents (and the New York Times) fingered a Los Alamos scientist for a spy based on little more than his ethnicity. There was the Hanssen case, followed by evidence of missed opportunities to nab him, as a result dooming several of the country's top operatives. There was the failure to turn over thousands of pages of evidence during the Timothy McVeigh trial, delaying his execution.

Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller III have blamed the Bureau's recent dim-wittedness on the 1976 COINTELPRO restrictions that, among other things, prevented agents from monitoring communications without a cause. But as Sy Hersh reveals in the June 3 New Yorker, today's Bureau is also strapped with an insular culture and technological backwardness that blocks interaction with other agencies and places large obstacles in the way of intra-Bureau cooperation — for instance, in the few weeks after Sept. 11, speedy file transfers were hampered by out-dated computers and a lack of multimedia equipment at most field offices.

Sept. 11 has brought all this to the fore, but it's been there for years, running alongside but rarely crossing paths with Chris Carter's vision. Now they're switching places — "The X-Files" was on the decline long before Sept. 11, but it's hard to make the case that it would still be pulling in the viewers had it been at the top of its game eight months ago. Today's hit shows are "CSI: Crime Scene Investigators," "West Wing" and "The Agency," programs that depict various levels of law enforcement and government power in a more human, if not positive, light.

And just as cabal chic, rooted in the realities of 1960s Bureau rights abuses, comes to a close, the administration is loosening the restrictions that were put in place to stop those very infringements. Ashcroft can assure us that activities like wiretapping Martin Luther King Jr.'s phone or infiltrating the SDS won't occur this time, but by easing those limits, such assurances may be the only thing we have. Now, instead of an inept Bureau with a powerful pop-culture doppelgänger, we've got FBI-friendly TV shows masking an increasingly powerful, but otherwise unreformed, Bureau. The thick irony would be amusing if it weren't so real. Fear of increased FBI activity is probably just as paranoid as it was when "The X-Files" began, but all the same, it would be nice if Mulder and Scully had waited a few years before going after the black helicopters.

E-mail Clay Risen at risenc@yahoo.com.