Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
Dennis Baker, a career FBI agent, was named special agent in charge of the bureau’s St. Louis Division in November. Baker, 54, has been with the FBI for 22 years, starting in its Greensboro, N.C., office. Most recently, he was special assistant to the deputy director of the FBI, at its D.C. headquarters. He sat down in his office on Market Street to talk about bank robbers, terrorists, and Ernest Hemingway.
You’re probably more used to asking the questions than answering them.
I am, actually. However, in my last position, I had to do a lot of briefings, so I was on the other side of that, where they were asking me the questions and I had to provide the answers, and those questions were pretty difficult… When I first got to Greensboro, I was assigned as the bank-robbery coordinator, because I had a law-enforcement background. And we had a lot of bank robberies then in the Greensboro area. I was doing interviews with bank robbery suspects at least once a week. Because I had all those interviews with suspects, I did develop some expertise in obtaining confessions… That is one of those skills you have to use; it’s just like firearms training. You can get it back, but it has a shelf life, and if you don’t use it, you kind of lose it a little bit.
So where are you with your firearms training?
Actually, I may be an SAC, but I still have to qualify like everyone else. That’s four times a year.
When you were a little kid, what did you think you were going to be—when you were like 8 years old, watching TV in Oklahoma?
I was in Okmulgee, Okla.—it’s pretty small; I think it’s probably 15,000 residents—and I wanted to be a policeman. Yeah, that was my dream. [Laughs.] It was funny, because I didn’t have any hesitation. Maybe it was the TV shows or maybe it was the sense of adventure, but it seemed like it would be a great job. I remember watching Adam-12. That was back in the days when the police were absolutely the good guys. There were no ambiguities like there are today—in some of today’s shows.
Then you went to the University of Tulsa and majored in English. How was studying English going to get you into law enforcement?
I wanted to go to law school at some point, and English seemed like a good route to be a lawyer… I don’t think he’s in vogue now, but Ernest Hemingway was one of my favorite authors. I loved his short stories. I like the Lost Generation—Fitzgerald, Hemingway… But after I graduated, I wanted to pursue my dream, so I joined the [Tulsa] police department.
You went to law school while you were with the Tulsa PD, and then you joined the FBI, went to Greensboro, and right away you got involved with investigating bank robberies, which historically have been a big part of FBI work. That’s sort of the origin of the FBI, chasing bank-robbing gangs across the Midwest, right?
It is, although it’s not as big as it once was, because of the other threats that we’ve had. We’ve kind of had to transition away from responding to every bank robbery like we did, because we don’t have the resources. We have other priorities, like terrorism, for example. So we rely on the state and locals, because they have jurisdiction. And one of the things that we’re going to do here is, we have joint task forces with the police officers, and they assist us in our response; so it may not be an FBI agent responding to a typical bank robbery, where the robber just shows a note. It may be a task-force member responding to that. Really, the primary mission of the FBI hasn’t changed, which is to protect lives and property, but the threats and the suspects and the criminals we face, that’s changed. It’s a much broader focus than what we’ve had before.
During your time in Greensboro, you were on SWAT teams, chasing bank robbers, doing these crazy things. Was your wife, Wanda, worried?
Yes. It’s funny; you do those things, it’s a sacrifice that families make in law enforcement, and you don’t realize that. I’m thinking, “Hey, I’m having a great time, it’s fun, this is what I want to do, I’ve trained to do this,” but the person that really has the rough time is the spouse—because they’re not in control. You’re always thinking, to a certain extent, “I may be going into harm’s way, but I have a certain amount of control.” The spouse, you have no control; you don’t know what’s going on; you’re in the dark. It’s not until later that you begin to realize that.
When did you come to that realization?
I began to realize that when—my son is in the Marine Corps. So now I’m worried about him. This is payback, because I worry about that mainly because I’m not there. I have no control over that.
You’ve been with the agency 22 years now. Almost exactly halfway through your time with the FBI, 9/11 happened.
For me, it’s a big dividing line, because prior to 9/11, I’d spent my time in bank robberies, drug investigations, violent crime, and after 9/11, I said, “I want to be in the fight against the terrorists.” That’s a big change for FBI agents, because we have an intelligence function, a national-security function, and a law-enforcement function. I was primarily doing the law-enforcement function, and I decided, “You know what? I want to change.” And that’s when I went to D.C.
You’re like the kid who goes down to the recruiting office the day after Pearl Harbor.
[Laughs.] It’s kind of like that, yeah. Because I saw, that’s the new danger, that’s where they need people, that’s where I want to go.
There was recently a guy in Maryland—Antonio Martinez, also known as Muhammad Hussain, a 21-year-old Nicaraguan-American. Following an FBI sting operation, he was charged with intending to set off a car bomb at a recruiting center. A few weeks before that, there was a guy in Portland, Ore.—Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a 19-year-old Somali-American who grew up in Oregon—who supposedly wanted to set off a car bomb at a Christmas tree–lighting ceremony, and he was caught after an FBI sting. How many more of these people are there?
That is a main concern of the bureau, those types of individuals that are self-radicalized. This is an individual that, for whatever reason, has radicalized; he’s gotten information primarily—we see a lot of it—from the Internet; and he’s decided that he’s going to attack America. But they usually do this by themselves. They’re not surrounding themselves with a group and plotting. And so they’re hard to detect. We don’t have any indication that any of that is happening in St. Louis, but we’re constantly looking for it.
Enumerate some of the threats here.
Terrorism activity is the No. 1 threat; that’s what we concentrate on. But for us, it’s not just a matter of, “OK, something’s happened, we’re going to respond to it.” We want to prevent anything from happening in the first place. To prevent something from happening takes a lot more resources—a lot more intelligence, a lot more information—than responding to something and investigating… We want to go after the chain of events before it reaches a bomb going off. If you’ll recall, we arrested three individuals that were providing material support to the terrorist organization al-Shabaab, and one was an individual that lived here in St. Louis. These individuals were collecting funds, raising funds, to send back to al-Shabaab in Somalia. So if you look at that case, what we concentrate on is, how can we stop this chain? Because terrorists have to have money, to buy explosives, to buy devices, to travel. If we can disrupt the flow of money to terrorists, we’re preventing terrorism.
When you were in D.C., how did they think of the St. Louis FBI office at headquarters?
St. Louis has a great reputation. From the headquarters perspective, you can look at the 56 field divisions, and St. Louis is known because they have a great reputation in this community for law enforcement working together, sharing information. For a combination of reasons—maybe it’s historic; I haven’t quite figured it out—it seems like all of the law-enforcement agencies here work well together.
They don’t worry about you coming in and big-footing them?
They don’t. But I’ve got to tell you, that image is hard to overcome. In law enforcement, a lot of good can be done away in an instant if you have that attitude. Police departments, they don’t forget. I’ve had people, agency heads, come up to me and tell me what an agent’s done 20 years ago; they still remember that. That’s happened here. They’re quick to say, “Hey, that hasn’t happened in 20 years, and we all work well together,” but they still want to remind me that 20 years ago, someone didn’t work that way. So I remind my agents often that memory is deep here in law enforcement, and you have to respect those agencies and work with them.
What’s your biggest challenge coming here?
Terrorism is always our No. 1 priority, but I don’t think it takes anyone long when they get to St. Louis to see that violent crime is a big, big issue. So I’m taking a look at that now. There’s gang violence there, so we’re going to commit some of our resources to work with the city police and the county police to see what we can do to address that. I think that is going to be one of my priorities… This problem is not new to cities. It’s not new to the FBI. It’s something we’ve been fighting for 20 years now. It’s something that perpetuates itself year after year. It’s just like preventing terrorism: You don’t want to be in a position—really, where we are now—of just picking up bodies, because by then it’s too late. You want to position yourself where you’re stopping this before it happens. Along with enforcement, which is important, along with getting guns off the streets, along with putting the most dangerous criminals in jail, you have to have something in place to prevent this early on. I realize that this is a community effort. And the FBI is part of this community, and our resources are going to help fight this.
When you moved here, were you concerned about finding a safe place to live?
I was not, no… But I’ve got to tell you a quick story about what happened to one of our agents last week: We were at the Bosnian Chamber of Commerce, and we had an agent that was en route, driving from the office to help give our presentation, and as he was driving there, his car was hit by gunfire.
That’s unusual.
I thought it was unusual. So he stops, and there are bullet holes in his car. And what happened was, he just happened to be driving by when a guy was robbing another guy and fired shots at him—totally random, but if that could happen to an FBI agent driving along, it could happen to another citizen. There’s an awful lot of gun violence in this city. And I just thought, that’s my introduction to St. Louis. There’s the high crime rate, and then we go out and try to conduct some kind of outreach efforts, and that happens.
If you weren’t doing this, what else would you like to do?
If I wasn’t in the FBI, and outside of law enforcement? I’d probably be an English professor. Yeah. I’d probably stay with the Lost Generation there.
