The FBI uses many confidential informants but their quality varies and what happens to them can be tragic, writes Brett Forrest
disappeared in Russia. Reilly’s last known location was in the southwest of that country, where he mixed with men endeavoring to cross the border into Ukraine and fight the war against Kyiv. Deepening the mystery of Reilly’s vanishing was his role with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Over the decades, some FBI agents developed a pattern of playing fast and loose with these resources, authorizing cooperators and informants to commit crimes or entrap investigative targets. Such indiscretions drew rounds of Congressional and Department of Justice censure restricting the FBI’s use of outside help.
“Confidential human sources have access to criminal actors that allow the FBI to safeguard against national security threats, criminal activity, and potential harm to the American people,” the FBI said in a statement to the author. “Information from confidential human sources and members of the public is critical to the work of the FBI.”
Reilly worked for agents in the FBI’s Detroit office, luring investigative targets, mostly in counterterrorism. He worked both online and in the field. Like other CHSs, he received effectively no training from the FBI. Agents, nonetheless, encouraged him to assume hazardous tasks. FBI regulations themselves are fluid. If one reads deeply enough into the Bureau’s many handbooks and policy manuals, it can become difficult to understand which rules apply, which rules an agent may flout. Occasionally secreted amid the Bureau’s many regulations are permissions to break them. Some FBI guidelines indeed permit agents to communicate with CHSs who are traveling for duties abroad.
Had Billy Reilly traveled to Russia on an FBI errand and somehow gone rogue? Or was the truth more troubling?Bureau managers and case agents had learned a difficult lesson during the mid-1990s revelations of the James “Whitey” Bulger case. The one-time leader of Boston’s Irish mob, Bulger had committed heinous crimes while he was an FBI informant.
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