Robert Riggs
There’s a bank in Quantico, Virginia that gets robbed everyday.
And I am going to take you there.
Hello. I’m Robert Riggs.
In this episode of True Crime Reporter®, former FBI Agent Don Bentley takes us inside the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia.
New Special Agents start their career there in an intensive 20-week-long training program.
Realistic training scenarios unfold in a mock town called Hogan’s Alley named after a comic strip from the 1890s.
I’ve reported there many times on stories ranging from bank robberies to weapons of mass destruction.
I’ve posted links in to those stories in the show notes.
The 10-acre training facility contains a bank, post office, hotel, laundromat, barbershop, theater, homes, everything you would find in a real urban setting.
It’s like a Hollywood set that features actors playing armed criminals.
In an homage to the deadly shootout with John Dillinger there is a mock Biograph Theater where three FBI agents ended the gangster’s reign as “Public Enemy Number One.”
My guest, Don Bentley went through all of that training and he was well suited for it.
Before the FBI, Bentley served in the U.S. Army as a pilot for ten years and flew an AH-64 Apache helicopter gun ship.
Bentley received the Bronze Star and Air Medal with V device for Valor.
He commanded a Quick Reaction Force in support of Operation Red Wings in Afghanistan.
You can hear the story of that mission on Episode 56 of Jack Carr’s podcast, Danger Close.
Carr, as you may know, is a former Navy SEAL and now a New York Times bestselling author of The Terminal List.
The Terminal List, starring Chris Pratt, is an acclaimed series on Amazon Prime.
Don Bentley is also a New York Times bestselling author of the Matt Drake series, spinning out potboilers about terrorism and intelligence operations.
In this episode, we discuss the FBI's focus since 9/11.
Robert Riggs
Okay, Don welcome to the ah podcast give us a little background before we get to your Fbi experience of how you went from flying army apache helicopters in Afghanistan to the Fbi.
Don Bentley
Sure. Yeah, well thanks for having me Robert I went to school at the Ohio State University on a R Mayor Otc scholarship and was lucky enough to get aviation afterwards and and when you are. Get slotted for aviation. You compete across the year or so of flight school to figure out what platform you're going to get to fly and I got Apache gunships, which is amazing. It is hard to have a bad day when you're flying an Apache gunship they have this. Nice little thirty-millimeter cannon that hangs beneath it and whichever way you turn your head, that cannon goes to and it just makes things disappear. It's pretty incredible, and so after doing 10 years in the army, including one combat tour to Afghanistan as a troop commander. I got out of the army and first spent 3 years working in corporate America, and I wasn't quite ready to sit in a cubicle just yet. It was an amazing company I was working for but I told my wife probably on my first or second day that I finally understood all the jokes of the movie office space now because I was sitting in this cubicle farm that just had desks as far as the eye could see and so I kind of went from chasing bad guys in Afghanistan to sitting in a cubicle and and wasn't ready to do that and so fortunately the Fbi had a program at the time that was called the tactical recruiting program. And so they were looking specifically for folks who had military or or more specifically, combat experience for two reasons. So 1 they wanted the folks who would fit that requirement to form kind of a pipeline for their hostage rescue team. And come assess for that, and then they also if you look at their hostage rescue team. There's a separate element that also has special agents that is kind of the FBI's own little air force, and so they're the ones who fly all the hostage rescue team operators and so. They were interested in me because of my background in combat experience as a helicopter pilot, and so I got to move to the front of the line if you will, as part of the process for the FBI, which, depending on how many agents they're hiring that year and what it looks like, it can last. Any. From 18 months to 2 years as you go through all the different gates. I think the crazy number they throw around is something like 250000 people each year apply to be an FBI agent, and they take around 2000 or so and so certainly.
Don
A number of those folks are probably people who grew up on the x-files and maybe have no business applying to be an Fbi agent but it's still a pretty tight cutoff. No matter how you look at it, for me that process only took about nine months or so, and so then I went from sitting in Quantico to. Going to, or sitting into cubicle rather to go into Quantico for the I think at the time it was the 20 or twenty one weeks fbi academy and then got moved after I graduated to the to the Dallas field office where I got to do a lot of fun stuff and and be on the swat team there in Dallas and so it was ah it was a pretty fantastic gig I've been fortunate enough to to work for 2 incredible government organizations one the army has as a 10 year long air cavalry officer and apache pilot and then the other being the Fbi. Yeah.
Robert Riggs
Let me take you back to the academy, which is in Quantico, Virginia. Were you in the same class, even though you're on a special track? Were you in the same class with the rookie agents that are coming in?
Don Bentley
Oh yeah, and just to be clear. We were all rookie agents. So once you get to Quantico, it doesn't matter what your background was or how you came into the academy. In fact, in my class, and I don't know how many we started with, maybe 40 or 50 folks. We had everything from, um. Prior military Green Berets and AirForce Recon special operations folks to elementary school teachers and kind of everything in between and so the bureau casts a very wide net, and the reason for that is because although most people know the FBI as kind of the organization that went after Al Capone and tried to shut down corruption in Chicago now the Fbi that that is only a small part of what the Fbi does, and so when you're in Quantico, you're assigned what's 1 of 5, what they call career paths, and number five 5 criminal is one of them. But only one of them, and so you have criminal counterintelligence, intelligence counterterrorism, and cyber and so all of those if you look at least 3 of those so intelligence, counterintelligence, terrorism, and I guess 4 of them because cyber has a national security aspect too. 4 of those 5 are very heavily focused on national security on counterterrorism, on counterintelligence, and so they want the traditional model of an FBI recruit was somebody who was prior law enforcement or maybe was an accountant or a lawyer and they still hire an awful lot of those but they also hire a lot awful lot of engineers and soldiers and teachers and kind of everything in between it really is ah a pretty incredible organization. Both from. The work that they do and then the very interesting people that they hire as well.
Robert Riggs
I've done a number of stories there for television. Plus, I've had a number of friends who went to the academy for law enforcement, where law enforcement is selected to come back and go through, and I was always struck by the depth of the training. I've never seen any organization like it for the depth of training they do, and of course I saw it every time I was there. We shot something on Hogan's Alley And they have a mockup of the Biograph Theater where John Dillinger was killed. Tell us about what goes on at Hogan's Alley.
Don Bentley
Hogan's Alley, as you said, is a little town in the middle of Quantico where you die more times than any person has a right to die. And in fact, I remember. Going back there after I graduated and still feeling the twinge as you went through Hogan's Alley because the FBI is very good at it, and they kind of do this in parallel in the academy. It's number 1 training you to be. FBI agent, and they bring in, as you alluded to, the best in the world in each of the disciplines as you're getting trained, and so you would, you know, rather, whether it's agents that have worked some incredible cases that they come in and tell you about partners from other folks in the intelligence community just. In general you were you were constantly humbled by the quality of the instructors that you had there, and so on the one hand while they're building you up to this thing that you're going to become an FBI agent at the same time. They're very careful to also build within you the risk and what it means to be an FBI agent and how that shakes out in real life, and so that takes a number of different forms. So when you did when you would in the in the in the gym almost every day or every other day when you're doing defensive tactics, which is kind of a combination of what in the military we call combatives and and officer safety and everything from you know how do you appropriately handcuff somebody, to you know, just high-risk tactical situations to how to fight and how to fight multiple people, and what that actually looks like. Oftentimes, at the end of those sessions, you'd come together as a class, and they would show you dashboard cameras from police stops that went wrong, and it was to both learn from that and to drive into you the seriousness of the business that you were about to get into. When you crossed the street and went to Hogan's Alley, that was taken a step further, where what you learned in the gym was then put into practice in scenarios that were taken from real-life incidents that happened, and so it could be anything from that. There are a series of houses at Hogan's Alley and your job is to go up and. And what seems like something very innocuous. There's somebody in the house that you want to talk to to just do an interview and you knock on a door and and somebody answers with a gun sticking in your face as they come out and so it's it's it's designed to test and stress you. And to take what you've learned kind of in in a sanitized environment if you will in the gym and then and then put that into practice in real life and so on 1 hand you graduate from the academy I think feeling very confident in your abilities and also very wary at the same time because over and over again, you've gone through the scenarios where things things have gone wrong where agents before you in the field faced sometimes devastating consequences for for a lot of times things were that were out of their control. But again, the business of law enforcement, and the business of being an FBI agent, I think, is only second to leading men and women in combat. I remember, as an Army officer, we used to talk all the time about the burden of knowing that America's mothers and fathers had given you their sons and daughters into your care, and that what that meant like, to lead them in combat and being an FBI agent was very similar from the standpoint of you were now going; your job was to go into harm's way. I had a Special Agent in Charge who described FBI agents as the kind of crazy people who would run into a bank as a bank was being robbed, as everybody else was running away, and that was very much what they wanted you to be, but they also very much wanted you to understand the seriousness of what came with that.
Robert Riggs
I remember that there was a bank there, and everybody said it was the most robbed bank in America, where they'd have to roll up on a bank robbery and then they had to learn how to process evidence and take statements. You name it. Everything imaginable.
Don Bentley
They were this very, very good in that, in kind of the crawl, walk, run phase where they would teach you stuff like I said in the gym or in the classroom and then you would use that in Hogan's Alley in the scenarios, which would continuously become more complex and build upon themselves. What was really neat is that, at the same time you as an agent are going through it, there's a second class of analysts that are going through at the same time and learning how to be analysts and so at the end they actually put you together in this capstone exercise in which you as an agent are. Acting on intelligence that the analyst has given, and so you're going up and grabbing bad guys, and you actually go interrogate them, and so you huddle with the analysts to figure out what the best way to do that is and what you're trying to get out of the interrogation, and everything that's done is videoed, and so you. Your classmates get to watch it afterwards; you do too. The role players who are playing the bad guys come in and say Okay, here's where you went wrong as you were doing the interrogation or " Here's the other part and so it was like I said the amount of I used to say as a helicopter pilot. You know, the reason why Army Helicopter Pilots are the best in the world is that the military can afford to let you come close to, or in some cases break, that helicopter in training that you get to push it to the absolute limits that you don't do. Just hear about an autorotation or practice that you do an autorotation all the way to the ground, even if that means bouncing the helicopter up as you do that? The FBI followed a very similar course, where the amount of resources dedicated to your training is phenomenal, and you get to be the very best in the world. Not just because of the caliber of people, but because of the resources that the government brings to bear as they're training you for that job.
Robert Riggs
So I recall some scenarios when I was there that really put everybody under stress and they had bad guys and bad girl actors, and the agents would arrive at a house have to try to search the house. These people will be hidden in there, and the regular pistols were loaded with paint rounds, and people wore Shields and masks. But I remember seeing some of the, you know, the agents in training just getting hosed, making mistakes. And thank God this is for learning. It just struck me that they went to that kind of expense of bringing in actors that did this regularly.
Don Bentley
Absolutely, and not just actors that were, you know, necessarily folks that they hired off the street or something that you would get to interview people of Middle Eastern descent. The role players would have the language skills they needed; it was here that lessons were learned across the intelligence community. After 2001, the FBI went through a reckoning of sorts, if you will, because they might have been a member of the intelligence community beforehand, but up until then the FBI was focused on being a law enforcement organization, a criminally focused law enforcement organization. And so what that means in terms of running and recruiting what in the FBI or in law enforcement you call sources, or what in the intelligence community you call assets. It was still very much in the manner that was kind of the old cop school. Okay, I want this guy to work for me. I'm going to roll him up because he did something wrong, and I'm going to say you can either work for me or go to jail, and there's certainly some validity to that. It's worked for a very long time, but when you look at counterintelligence and counterterrorism, that isn't how it works most of the time; the people you're trying to enlist to help you haven't done anything wrong, and you're trying to establish rapport with them. You're trying, and so honestly the FBI then started to rely on some other members of the intelligence community who had done that for a long time and said, " Hey, here is a better way or ah or another tool in your toolkit to look at running and recruiting sources; here's how you run people and so that you know I went through the academy back in 2010, and so it was very much we were the beneficiaries. Ah, that and of 9 years of lessons because of the War on Terror, and so it was very much a reorganization and how the FBI did business and, more importantly and more fortunately for people like me, a way in which they taught that skill so we were.definitely the beneficiary of that hard-won experience.
Robert Riggs
And so after flying with the FBI and the hostage rescue team and stuff, you came to Dallas; you were in counterintelligence, anti-espionage, correct?
Don Bentley
I was accepted into the academy. But after the academy, I went to the Dallas field office, and so, as a new agent, you're assigned a squad, and I was very fortunate that I was assigned to something called the fig or the fig intelligence group, or the field intelligence group. When you come to a field office. The SAC, which is the special agent in charge. The person who runs the field office they can move you into a different career field if necessary, and so what I started was the intelligence career field instead, and so that's a very broad term but what I got to do was focus mainly on on counterintelligence and foreign intelligence and so it was my job to go out and and recruit and run people who could answer questions that we were interested in and and you can kind of imagine the the range of those questions could be people who had access to to kind of interesting information from their background to current questions that you're trying to resolve that that are things that that the national command authority is interested in. It was a great assignment as a new agent because you're given carte blanche to say, here are the questions that we need answered; here are some people that can potentially answer them. Go out and make that happen, and so you would do that, and your job, as I said, is to run and recruit those sources and then come back with what's called source reports that you would enter into the computer and do write-ups of the meetings you have, and hopefully those source reports are then answering critical questions. It was a ton of fun, and it was very built upon kind of what you learn in the academy and those critical skills, as I said before, that were very much influenced by 9/11 and the years after that.
Robert
I used to be on staff on a congressional committee, and you realize there's a war going on out there very quietly; everybody goes home, goes to sleep, watches our TV shows gets up goes to work but there is a war going on in the background that they have no idea that they have a peaceful night's rest and safety for their children because of it give us a sense of what goes on in the background for intelligence.
Don Bentley
from a general perspective, that can run a pretty big gambit, and so it can be only everything where Dallas actually had a number of pretty high-profile cases where there were folks who were jihadis who were planning attacks of mass destruction there in the Dallas area, whether it was bombings or things like. As an agent, you always want to have the case that you're building around that particular Individual or that particular organization, and then the best way to have information around that is to have somebody who is a source, and whether that's somebody within that targeted organization, whether it's somebody that has knowledge, and so you have a lot of times you'll have an agent who's building a case, and you'll have another agent who's potentially. Um, running the source who's providing information against that or for that case, and that can be both from a criminal perspective and from a counterterrorism perspective. You also have counterintelligence, which is still a huge focus area for the FBI, where foreign entities are trying, either through espionage or industrial espionage, to steal. Not just what you think of as traditional military or traditional intelligence secrets. But how do we do things that are very hard to do? if you look at what kind of highly technical industries are located in a particular city, they are probably being targeted by foreign nationals who want to. Figure out, you know, if there's a specific way in which you forge metals and it's done very well and very unique to the United States, the industrial intellectual property is something that a foreign nation would want, and China is a big practitioner of stealing the commercial IP of us companies. So not the traditional one that you think of having a mole inside the CIA, but still very much something that the FBI works on from a counterintelligence perspective. And from an intelligence perspective, similar things if you have folks who have come to the United States and had access to information, whether it would be, you know, from jihadi terrorists that are working in Syria to a rogue nation who is working on a weapons of mass destruction program. Those are all national questions that folks who are decision makers want answers to and want information about, and is somebody who runs and recruits sources. It's your job to go find those people. And to establish those relationships and then turn them into people who provide information for the kind of questions that you're trying to answer.
Robert Riggs
I'm sure some people listening would say, " Wow, Dallas, Texas, down in the heart of Texas, but I don't think people realize we have an international airport. We have an interstate highway system that intersects here with all parts of the country, so it becomes a logical place for this kind of thing.
Don Bentley
Yeah, absolutely, and there's a lot of high-tech industry in Dallas, Texas as well. As I said, when you have kind of the nexus of those things, that's going to be a target for bad actors for sure.
Robert Riggs
Then you transitioned to political corruption. I did a number of reports that got the FBI involved, and people went to prison because of them. Give us a sense of what the objective is on these and why it's so important to get a handle on corruption in our political system.
Don Bentley
The FBI is charged with investigating those violations, and so very much what you're trying to do when you work is to look and say, hey, have there been benefits that have been exchanged? Is an entity profiting off of decisions that an elected official has made potentially, and does it look like here was a payoff from that entity to that elected official?
Don Bentley
You and I were talking a little bit before we started the podcast. You have to weigh 2 different things in there with political corruption investigations. If you are looking, an investigation just means there is a question out there that you're trying to answer. It shouldn't ever be construed as proof of criminal activity. But when it comes to political things and investigations. Just the fact that if I'm running for office and it comes out in the press that I'm under investigation. That has a detrimental effect potentially has a detrimental effect on the election, and so it's something as an agent who was charged with investigating political corruption. It was something that was always in the forefront of your mind: what you wanted to do was to be able to do the investigation. But at the same time, not taint the person or organization being investigated with that reputation because what you didn't want to do was to tarnish somebody who was innocent or to unduly influence an election because if you've done that. You've defeated the whole purpose of having an investigation into political corruption to begin with and so it was one of the probably one of the most heavily scrutinized investigations just from that standpoint. You wanted to be very slow and very deliberate and have lots of folks checking on the work you were doing so that you know if you were wrong, if there was nothing there that you would You would The last thing you would ever want is to, unduly influence an election by. By it it coming out that a person or an entity was being investigated. So yeah, it was it was It was pretty fascinating work.
Robert Riggs
As a reporter, it was probably among the most difficult investigations the FBI conducted, but the FBI was the watchdog on government corruption.
Don Bentley
If you look at what a politician is paid to do, he or she is going into office to represent a particular constituency, and so it's often very hard to say If I am Congressman from XY and Z District and I go to Congress and come back with a bunch of contracts for folks in my district, I've done my job right? I mean, that's what I get paid to do: represent them and to benefit them, and so it's often very hard, and it should be. There should be a high standard to say you know what does it look like, and from business as usual for politicians versus what is very clearly um corruption, and so it's part of that process like I said, and why, frankly, so many people review the case Files and review the investigations that you're doing is to say. You know is this really corruption. Is it business as usual, is it something that's not merited at all? And certainly, you know, politics is a rough-and-tumble sport, right? And so if you can get your opponent tainted with they're under investigation or you can leak something to the news, and people are going to do that, and so you have to be always very, very wary of that as an FBI agent to say hey, where did this tip come from? And what is the benefit of the person who's providing the tip? Is it real? Is it something where the whole objective is just to get into the press that so-and-so is being investigated by the FBI because it benefits the person who did that?
Robert Riggs
In our next episode, Don Bentley reveals how one of his books about Ukraine became a case of life imitating art.
