My Family’s Long and Painful Relationship With the FBI

I never knew my uncle.

Marvin Risen, my father’s brother, died long before I was born. He was an FBI agent in Nashville and was killed in a plane crash in 1943.

But decades later, when I was growing up, something about Marvin’s death still troubled my family.

My parents often talked about how they had never been given any answers about Marvin’s death, and that led them to speculate wildly, trying to connect the dots. They openly questioned whether he had been the victim of wartime sabotage. His plane crashed in the middle of World War II, and his Nashville FBI office was not far from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, then home to a critical part of the Manhattan Project: America’s top-secret program to build an atomic bomb before Nazi Germany. They sometimes wondered whether spies had blown up Marvin’s plane because he had uncovered an atomic espionage ring.

It wasn’t until this year — more than 80 years after my uncle’s death — that the full story of Marvin Risen and the Federal Bureau of Investigation would finally be resolved. But even then, the FBI’s painful treatment of our family would leave an open, unhealed wound.

In hindsight, I see that my parents long, failed struggle to grasp the truth about Marvin’s death wasn’t their fault. It was the result of the FBI’s callous handling of Marvin’s case — and many others like it. When my uncle was killed, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was at the height of his power, and he ran the FBI like a dictatorship. The bureau was a cult of personality built around Hoover; he served a total of 48 years in his post, first as director of the FBI’s predecessor, the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigations, and then as director of the FBI from its renaming in 1935 until his death in 1972.

Hoover accumulated power in part through his legendary ability to manipulate the press to propagandize and glorify the FBI. He created a mythic origin story for the FBI built around its manhunts and gun battles with Depression-era gangsters like John Dillinger; FBI agents killed in shootouts with gangsters became Hoover’s martyrs. But that meant that FBI agents like Marvin, who died in accidents or from illnesses, were largely ignored by Hoover’s FBI — even if their deaths were work-related.

On October 15, 1943, American Airlines Flight 63 crashed in rural Tennessee, killing all 11 people on board, including Marvin. The aircraft crashed soon after taking off from Nashville for a short flight to Memphis. Records show that, not long after leaving Nashville, the pilot radioed to air traffic control asking for permission to climb to 8,000 feet, possibly in an effort to find a band of warmer air to get rid of ice clinging to the wings and propellers, according to a later federal investigation by the Civil Aeronautics Board, which then regulated commercial aviation. But as the plane gained altitude, ice continued to build, making it impossible to control.

The plane rapidly lost altitude and crashed into a wooded hill near Centerville, about 60 miles from Nashville. The area was so remote that the crash site wasn’t discovered until the next morning by a farmer, who then drove 3 miles to the town of Wrigley, where he could get a phone to call officials in Nashville. In its 1945 final report on the crash, the Civil Aeronautics Board was critical of American Airlines for allowing the plane to fly without deicing equipment; American had removed the equipment in the summer and had not yet reinstalled the gear for the fall and winter. The crash was caused by the “inability of the aircraft to gain or maintain altitude due to carburetor ice or propeller ice or wing ice or some combination of those icing conditions while over terrain and in weather unsuitable for an emergency landing,” the report stated. The agency’s report said that if the weather conditions on the route were known by the airline, that “should have precluded the dispatch of the flight in an aircraft not equipped with wing or propeller deicing equipment.” 

The plane nosedived into the ground, leaving a crash scene so horrific that none of the bodies could be easily identified. It was so terrible that Ernest Gann, an American Airlines pilot and author, wrote about the crash in his acclaimed 1961 memoir on the dangerous early days of aviation, “Fate is the Hunter,” which was turned into a movie in 1964.

Marvin Risen could only be identified by his official FBI briefcase. He was just 27 when he died. He had been with the FBI since 1939.

After I grew up and became a reporter, my family’s questions about what had happened to my uncle remained unanswered. As a journalist covering intelligence and national security issues, I frequently reported on stories involving the FBI, and that experience taught me that it was not surprising that the bureau had failed my family. The FBI was insular and slow to change, and many aspects of the FBI’s culture still bore the imprint of J. Edgar Hoover long after his death. 

So in the 1990s, I decided to take the initiative and find out what I could about Marvin Risen and the FBI. I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI for Marvin’s personnel file. After a three-year wait, a huge package from the FBI arrived at my home, filled with hundreds of pages of ancient letters and memos documenting my uncle’s life and death. The files taught me things I didn’t know about my family; they revealed that my father was interviewed by the FBI when the bureau was considering hiring his brother. The files also showed that before he was promoted to special agent, Marvin started out working in the FBI’s fingerprinting unit, and later served as a tour guide at FBI headquarters in Washington.

But the most significant discovery in the files came from internal FBI memos that described the way in which the FBI handled Marvin’s death. 

The files showed that immediately after the plane crash, Hoover took a personal interest in Marvin’s case. Phone calls, telegrams, and internal FBI communications flew back and forth between Hoover and the FBI agents in Nashville and on the scene of the crash; it was clear Hoover had some of the same suspicions about the cause of the crash that later bedeviled my parents. Hoover wanted to know whether the crash was an act of sabotage, designed to kill an FBI agent. Adding to the intrigue was the fact that Blan Maxwell, the speaker of the Tennessee state Senate, was one of the other passengers who died. At the time, Maxwell was widely considered the leading candidate to become the next governor of Tennessee. Prentice Cooper, the governor at the time, was one of the first officials on the crash scene, mingling with the FBI agents who were scouring the site.  

But the FBI quickly determined that the crash was just an accident. Once the FBI concluded that the plane was not downed by sabotage, Hoover lost interest. There was no drama in Marvin Risen’s death that Hoover could use to glorify the FBI. The files show that the FBI’s interest quickly shifted to finding Marvin’s FBI badge and gun amid the wreckage. When his gun was found, it was badly damaged from the crash.  

The files also revealed that Hoover and Clyde Tolson, his right-hand man and possibly his lover, personally decided not to include Marvin Risen on the FBI Wall of Honor, which listed the FBI’s valiant dead, the agents killed in the line of duty.   

The files reveal that Tolson was named by Hoover to be the chair of the committee set up to decide who was — and who wasn’t — included on the Wall of Honor. Hoover and Tolson wanted to reserve the Wall of Honor for agents killed in gun battles with gangsters and spies. The files included memos and messages between Hoover and Tolson showing that the pair decided that an accidental plane crash didn’t qualify as dying in the line of duty. They rejected Marvin Risen from consideration for the Wall of Honor, even though he was traveling in the line of duty when he died. He had been on his way to Memphis to meet with federal prosecutors about a bank robbery case. He wasn’t hot on the trail of an atomic spy ring or some other glamorous case. Yet he was involved in the kind of criminal investigation that made up much of the FBI’s day-to-day work.

At the time of his death in October 1943, Marvin Risen had one son, Daniel, and his wife, Mary Emily, was pregnant with their second son. In April 1944, she gave birth to Marvin Patrick Risen, who became known as Pat. 

Marvin’s wife, suddenly a widow in her mid-20s with two small children, was left to pick up the pieces after the shattering death of her husband. Yet the most that Hoover did to help was to offer her a secretarial job at the FBI’s headquarters, which would have required her to move from Nashville to Washington. She rejected the offer.

Later, two of Marvin’s sisters went to FBI headquarters in Washington to try to talk to Hoover about Marvin’s case. Hoover refused to come out of his office to meet with them, leaving them waiting — and insulted.

Marvin’s wife later remarried another agent in the FBI’s Nashville office, but both her sons kept Risen as their last name.

Daniel died by suicide when he was a young man. Pat Risen lived until 2022 and had two sons, Clay Risen and Michael Risen. Clay and I both worked at the New York Times together for many years; he continues to write for the Times and is the author of several books. His brother Michael is the associate head of school at the Norwood School, a private school in the Washington area.  

Out of the blue this spring, the FBI contacted Michael Risen: The bureau wanted to talk about his grandfather.

Decades after Marvin Risen’s death, the FBI had finally changed the Hoover-era standards for determining who should be included on the Wall of Honor. A review of old files on agents who had died in the line of duty but had been rejected by Hoover and Tolson had turned up Marvin’s case.

More than 80 years after his death, Marvin Risen was finally going up on the FBI’s Wall of Honor. 

Thomas Cottone, a retired FBI agent, said in an interview that he discovered Marvin’s case while going through old issues of an internal FBI newsletter, which contained an article about the plane crash. Cottone was already pushing the bureau to include the names of several other agents who had died in accidents while on duty, and so he began to advocate for Marvin as well.

One reason the FBI may have finally changed the qualifications for the Wall of Honor is that a number of FBI employees have died in recent years from cancer and other health complications resulting from exposure to toxins while serving at Ground Zero in New York and at the Pentagon after 9/11. Several employees who died after working at Ground Zero and the Pentagon in what were clearly work-related deaths have now been added to the wall; they would almost certainly not have been included under the old Hoover-era standards. 

In May, the FBI held a ceremony at its headquarters — which is named for J. Edgar Hoover — honoring Marvin Risen and seven others whose names have just been added to the wall. 

FBI Director Christopher Wray spoke at the event, and several members of my family attended. I was not one of them.

I couldn’t bring myself to attend the ceremony. I have my own personal history with the FBI, and that experience has been painful and complicated.

During my time as a national security journalist, the FBI has over the years spied on me, sought to discredit me and my reporting, and even tried to help the Justice Department put me in prison as part of a long government campaign to silence me through the use of draconian leak investigations into my stories. At one time, there were FBI agents assigned to two separate federal grand jury investigations into my work. They pulled my life apart, sifting through my private data while subpoenaing and forcing testimony from many of my sources. They even spied on my children; they thought they had uncovered a big secret about me when they discovered that I had sent a wire transfer to Europe. It was actually money for my son, who was then on a study abroad program. 

Even as the FBI was investigating me, I had to continue to deal with the bureau as a reporter. I frequently went to FBI headquarters for interviews for new stories while I was still the subject of leak investigations related to earlier coverage. But I was always suspicious that the FBI was using the interviews at the Hoover building to try to get me to say something incriminating in connection with one of their leak investigations — or simply to intimidate me. 

For one story about the government’s counterterrorism operations, I went to FBI headquarters for an interview and was ushered into a windowless conference room where seven FBI agents were waiting for me. None of them would give me their names or talk to me at all. After I explained to them what I knew about the story I was working on, they all just sat and stared at me, not saying a word, refusing to comment or answer any questions. 

The FBI’s campaign of intimidation against me reached its peak when the bureau sent a team of agents to Europe to try to ambush a meeting I had scheduled with a source. The FBI found out about the meeting in advance from an informant who the FBI used to gather information about me. At the last minute, the ambush was averted when the FBI’s informant had a change of heart and tipped me off.

I haven’t forgotten.

I am prepared to go to FBI headquarters when it is required for my work as a journalist. But I didn’t want to go for a celebration, no matter how long overdue.

I believe that Marvin Risen would understand.