Distinctly Montana Magazine

74 D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA N A M A G A Z I N E • FA L L 2 0 2 3 BUTTE, MONTANA I N 1970, SPECIAL AGENT JOHN SHAW WAS ATTENDING A GRADUATE-LEVEL CLASS IN NEW YORK CITY AND HIS PRO- FESSOR, VERY CRITICAL OF THE FBI, MADE SOME REMARKS THAT AGENT SHAW THOUGHT WERE UNFAIR. He replied by writing a 16-page letter defending the FBI, while also admitting that it may have some faults. And that some of those faults might be attributable to the "cult of personality" sur- rounding J. Edgar Hoover, the secretive and imperious founder of the Bureau. He sent the letter to the typists' pool, where a "routine inspection" of the secretarial garbage cans revealed incomplete drafts of the document. The letter, which Hoover bi- ographer Curt Centry called "sincere, albeit naive," rankled the top brass at the FBI. Shaw was ordered to hand over the complete letter. He refused. Before the day was over, Shaw got a message from Hoover himself. Hoover told him he'd committed a grave error and that it was "atrocious judgment" to answer the profes- sor's criticism at all—better to report it, and let the notoriously capricious Hoover deal with it himself. In the end, Shaw had his gun and badge taken away. But the worst insult was yet to come: Hoover transferred Shaw to Butte, Montana—as close to Siberia as he could muster. Or, as Shaw put it in an interview quoted by the Washington Post, Hoover wield- ed Butte like "a sinkhole office of disciplinary assignment, the Devil's Island of the bureau... They couldn't establish the basis for firing me, so they did the next best thing—send me into exile." Shaw, whose wife was gravely ill, refused the post and resigned. He would go on to a long career at the Immigration and Naturalization Service, after publicly criticizing the FBI and the reason for his re- assignment to the boonies. Sometimes, even a promotion was still a pun- ishment. Guy Bannister, familiar to devotees of JFK assassination conspiracies (and played by Ed Asner in the furiously spurious JFK), received what was os- tensibly a promotion to his first SAC (Special Agent in Charge) post in Butte. There, from 1938 to 1941, and

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