www.fbi.gov www.fbi.gov www.fbi.gov Prior to 1908, the Justice Department had no organized force of investigators to gather evidence. It relied on detectives hired from the Secret Service and, for a while private detectives. Under President Theodore Roosevelt, this began to change. The vigorous application of older laws and the increase in new ones that occurred during his administration began to tax the Justice Department's ability to detect crime. The bill as passed in the Senate did not have the Secret Service provision. A conference committee was convened to reconcile the difference and, at the House's insistence, the Secret Service amendment was re-added to the final measure.15 The Conference Report on the bill was passed overwhelmingly with little fanfare on May 17, 1908. The President quickly signed it; his complaints were insufficiently strong to risk significant appropriations for key programs. A veto would likely have been overridden anyway given the margins by which the measure passed.16 The Congress adjourned for the summer. The provision regarding the use of Secret Service operatives would take effect at the start of the new fiscal year, July 1, 1908. Bureaucratic Wrangling over Counterintelligence, 1917--18 As the United States prepared to send troops to fight in France in 1917, the country faced a serious intelligence failure: foreign agents had been acting largely with impunity on domestic soil for three years. Treasury Secretary William Gibbs McAdoo made ...