I. C. Smith

I.C. Smith is a former Navy man and police officer who went to work for the FBI during the height of the Watergate investigations and ended his career more than twenty-five years later during the Whitewater investigation. Both an expert in counterintelligence and government corruption investigations, Smith was involved in numerous high profile cases including the Larry Wu Tai Chin espionage and Katrina Leung cases and has unique insights into such cases as the Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen investigations. He served overseas as a legal attaché for the South Pacific, based in Canberra, Australia, and spent a year at the Department of State where he traveled to the Soviet Union, Nicaragua, and China while conducting counterintelligence threat surveys. As special agent in charge in Arkansas, Smith became intimately involved in the campaign finance investigations during the Clinton administration and initiated a top-down investigation of corruption in the political machine that produced a president of the United States. Those investigations became national news, and the Wall Street Journal called Smith a ‘storied figure’ in the FBI. Smith, since his retirement in July 1998, has been a frequent commentator on national security issues in the national media and has lectured at the Smithsonian Institution. From a street agent in St. Louis, Missouri, to a member of the FBI’s elite Senior Executive Service, Smith’s career encompassed some of the FBI’s greatest accomplishments and most visible failures, and he tells those stories with unusual candor as only one on the inside can.