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The FBI that Turner entered in the late '70s was just six years removed from the age of J. Edgar Hoover, the director-for-life who raised the agency to a law unto itself--master of politicians' secrets and self-anointed hellhound on the trail of America's deviants and dissenters, be they purported Red spies or civil rights agitators. The historical picture of Hoover's near-50-year reign that has coalesced in the generation since his death yields two consistent themes: the director's unsurpassed prowess as a bureaucratic in-fighter, and his absolute obsession with promoting his own image and that of the Bureau, which were after all synonymous. Hoover managed appearances and kept them starkly at odds with reality when necessary, with a zeal and ruthlessness that perhaps only a man like himself--a gay, cross-dressing paragon of patrician authority--could have grasped, much less mustered. During his time and afterward, one institutional imperative trumped all others. The FBI's reputation for being everywhere, and doing its job infallibly, was to be sustained at any cost.
This was the canon that Jane Turner and the other FBI whistleblowers--a group that presently numbers around half a dozen; all of them within the past decade, two of them from the Bureau's Minneapolis division--violated most grievously by their actions. In Turner's case, the irony was palpable: It was precisely her faith in the Bureau's motto of "Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity" that made her so slow to fathom how her efforts were being received by management. She told herself that her troubles were all a misunderstanding that someone in the FBI chain of command would rectify in the end. Only a true believer could have failed to see so much writing on the wall, she agrees now. "What was stunning to me," she says, "was that my beloved FBI put me in a situation where I had to choose between the Bureau, which I loved, and doing the right thing. It would have been simpler for everyone involved to address the problems."
TURNER'S FIRST FIELD POSTING after the academy took her to the Seattle division, where she entered the career management program and continued her studies in the then-emerging specialty of psychological profiling. She participated in the pursuit and arrest of the spy Christopher Boyce, a case later made famous by Robert Lindsay's book The Flight of the Falcon and a feature film starring Sean Penn and Tim Hutton. (The Boyce case is significant because years later, the FBI, in its efforts to discredit Turner, would cite her story of being present at the Boyce arrest as evidence of a personality disorder marked by fabrication and grandiosity--even though she possesses a letter of commendation from then-Attorney General William French Smith, and her role is documented in the Lindsay book.)
After four years, Turner was transferred to a bigger field office in accordance with FBI policy. Turner drew New York City, where she became one of the first women to work the drug squad and the organized crime unit. She taught profiling to local police and worked such high-profile cases as the Chambers/Levin "Central Park preppie" murder and the New York state abortion clinic bombings. Then, in 1987, Turner applied for and won a senior resident agent position at the FBI's Minot, North Dakota, outpost, working the Fort Berthold and Turtle Mountain reservations. (Her first supervisor, Turner says, referred to the agents in North Dakota as his "Indian fighters.") Turner liked the notion of being the first woman SRA to work the reservations. A native of Rapid City, South Dakota, Turner knew the culture of the area. She set about building liaisons to local law enforcement and officials of tribal government--several of whom would later call her the finest FBI agent ever to work the region.
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http://www.citypages.com/databank/25/1244/article12538.asp
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