The History and Operations of the FBI: 40 Surprising Facts

The FBI had a 12-page file on George Carlin because he made jokes about government.

27. In 2013, the government of Iceland asked several FBI agents to leave after they lied to the local government and told them they were investigating terrorist hackers. It turned out they were investigating WikiLeaks.

28. 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed sent the FBI on wild goose chases, literally, by claiming that some geese in Central Park had explosives stuffed up their a*s.

29. A security guard named Richard Jewell discovered a pipe bomb at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta and alerted police. He helped evacuate the area, was later considered a suspect by the FBI and presumed guilty by the media. He was exonerated when a homegrown terrorist confessed 9 years later.

30. In 2010, the Walt Disney Company nearly sold the ABC network. The sale was canceled because of an FBI investigation into insider trading.

An FBI agent named Robert Hanssen sold secrets to the Soviets and Russia for 22 years, and when caught said, "what took you so long?"

32. In 2013, after receiving a warning from the FBI on his PC, Jay Matthew Riley turned himself into police for possessing child pornography. The warning was fake and generated by a worm that had infected his computer.

33. A wanted pimp named Dante Dears had such a sophisticated pattern lock on his android phone that the FBI was unable to crack it. They had to serve Google with a warrant to try and help them.

34. A former FBI agent named John P. O'Neill was obsessed with Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda and warned of the threat of an attack on US soil. He took a job at the World Trade Center in the summer of 2001 and died on September 11th.

35. In 1971, a small group calling themselves the Citizens' Commission to investigate the FBI broke into an FBI office in Philly, stole over 1000 documents, exposed the extreme surveillance program COINTELPRO, and then sent these documents to the press, leading to the FBI shutting it down.

The FBI used mail delivery robots (Marvin) in their field offices that navigated the buildings by using cells of black lights to follow an invisible fluorescent paint sprayed onto the carpet to designate its route.

37. A set of notes, written in an unknown cipher, was found in the pocket of a dead man (Ricky McCormick) in 1999 and the FBI and leading cryptographers have been completely unable to crack the code.

38. The inventor of Tickle Me Elmo (Mark Johnson-Williams) was suspected by the FBI of being the Unabomber.

39. Mob boss John Gotti would offer coffee to the FBI agents assigned to tail him.

40. In 2006, the FBI convicted a crime family using evidence collected by remotely enabling the microphone on a cell phone. This is called a "roving bug."