‘black-bag job’: meaning and origin

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The colloquial U.S. expression black-bag job, its abbreviated form bag job, and its variants, have been used to designate a covert intelligence operation involving illegal entry into premises, carried out especially by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Such operations were declared to be unconstitutional in the USA in the early 1970s.

The expression black-bag job occurred, for example, in the following by Vince Wade, about William Don Tisaby, an African-American former FBI agent, published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis, Missouri, USA) of Wednesday 25th April 2018 [page A19, column 3]:

Tisaby also made enemies—in the FBI. Several white FBI supervisors and managers were miffed when Tisaby refused a command to enter an apartment to look for drugs without a proper search warrant. White agents did the “black bag job,” but the tainted search caused internal FBI problems.

The expression black-bag job alludes to the black bag in which the equipment required for this type of operations was typically carried—cf., below, quotation 3.

These are, in chronological order, the earliest occurrences that I have found of the expression black-bag job, of its abbreviated form bag job, and of its variants:

1-: From a transcript of the testimony of Frank Brooks Bielaski (1889-1961), then a former U.S.-Government secret agent, which was heard on Tuesday 4th May 1950—transcript published in State Department Employee Loyalty Investigation: Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, Eighty-first Congress, Second Session [&c.] (Washington, District of Columbia: Government Printing Office, 1950) [page 939]:

Mr. Bielaski. I met a man named Daniel O’Connor, who is a former agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and […] he said, “I entered Larsen’s apartment here in the District of Columbia and when I entered his apartment I found plenty of FBI documents in Larsen’s possession.”
Senator Tydings. Let me ask you there, for the record: Was the raid in New York and the raid on Larsen and these people in the District made simultaneously, or made with a lapse of a few days between?
Mr. Bielaski. I don’t know. I think they were simultaneously [sic].
Senator Tydings. I would imagine so.
Mr. Bielaski. They should have been, and I imagine they were; but I think that O’Connor did what is known as a black bag job on his own. He is not supposed to do that, under the instructions from the FBI. I assume he slipped in and took a look, and that is what he saw.

2-: From Intelligence Unit Needs To Shed Its Stereotype, by Joseph Kraft, published in The Parsons Sun (Parsons, Kansas, USA) of Monday 22nd August 1966 [page 6, column 6]—Richard Helms (1913-2002) was the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from 1966 to 1973:

In the selection of a deputy director to Helms, an effort should be made to go against the grain of the stereotype. While the job requires someone not altogether ignorant of foreign policy and intelligency practices, the new man probably also ought to be an outsider (with no interest in covering up past mistakes or prolonging old quarrels) given to study and evaluation (rather than black-bag tricks).

3-: From Invisible Witness: The Use and Abuse of the New Technology of Crime Investigation (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc., 1968), by the U.S. author and journalist William Weyand Turner (1927-2015), then a former FBI agent [chapter 10: The Black Bag Job: pages 218 to 231]—ONI stands for Office of Naval Intelligence:

[pages 223 & 224]: The ONI’s intrusion had been what is known in law enforcement circles as a “black bag job,” named for the bag used to carry the necessary paraphernalia. A black bag job is dirty business, perpetrated in the holy name of law, order and the national security. It is wanton trespass, breaking and entering, burglary and larceny under the criminal statutes of the several states, and a violation of the Fourth Amendment guarantee against unreasonable search and seizure. Since it is illegal, its fruits are invalid as evidence in court. As in the above related ONI case, government security agencies use the black bag job for intelligence purposes—in these cases the main objective ordinarily is not to convict but to know what the other side knows. But the bag job is also widely used by police departments and government agencies in criminal cases for lead purposes. Some particularly unscrupulous officers go so far as to attribute specific information gained from a black bag job to a confidential informant—and then legally obtain a search warrant on the basis of the “informant’s” disclosures.

4-: From Miami Confidential, by Herb Rau, published in The Miami News (Miami, Florida, USA) of Thursday 12th September 1968 [page 4-B, column 1]:

Some spook terminology (“spook” being an espionage agent): “C” is Sir Dick White, chief of British intelligence Service (known as “Broadway”). His American counterpart is Thomas Karamessines, deputy director for planning in the CIA, boss of the U.S. spy stable. “Black Bag Job”—illegal entry and the planting of a “bug” in an enemy’s quarters. “CAT”—concealed auto transmitter. “Fisur”—a phonetic contraction for physical surveillance; FBI jargon.

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