Women FBI Agents Get a Hearing in L.A. Office

A sprinkling of Playboy center folds and Tom Selleck posters have been removed from the walls of the FBI’s Los Angeles office after an unprecedented meeting on the problems and concerns of the FBI’s growing minority of women agents.

The ban on nudity and hairy chests as part of the FBI’s office decor was ordered by Richard T. Bretzing, the head of the Los Angeles office, after one female agent complained about sexist posters during the two-hour meeting.

Only a few FBI agents and some secretaries had pinups over their desks, so the impact of Bretzing’s order was barely noticeable in the FBI’s 425-agent regional headquarters in Westwood.

Nonetheless, the official ban symbolically marked a historic moment of sorts for the FBI--the belated first public stirrings of the women’s movement in what historically has been a male-dominated institution.

Until 1972 there were no women at all in the FBI. Today, there are 651 women among 8,946 special agents, roughly 7% of the FBI’s total force.

Career-Related Concerns

While the ban on pinups was the only immediate change resulting from Bretzing’s March 19 meeting with most of the 36 female agents under his command, FBI sources said the meeting also touched on more complex career-related concerns that affect FBI women throughout the nation. Among the general complaints of women throughout the FBI are difficulties in getting promotions, discrimination in some work assignments and verbal harassment of a sexual nature from male agents.

Among the complaints of some women agents in Los Angeles, for example, is that some of their male colleagues refer to them as “cupcakes” and “broad agents.”

The first disclosure of the meeting in Los Angeles came from an FBI source who said the Los Angeles office had been singled out by a high-ranking FBI official in Washington as a trouble spot for women agents.

FBI officials in Los Angeles and Washington refused at first to even confirm that the meeting had taken place. Half a dozen women who attended the session were contacted by The Times, but they also declined comment on the meeting.

Bretzing, however, agreed to discuss the meeting last week, denying that the session signaled a serious problem in his office. He also authorized his highest-ranking woman agent, Kathleen McChesney, to offer her own assessment of the situation.

“I am vexed by this whole issue,” Bretzing said. “No more than a third of the women said anything at all during the meeting. Of the third who spoke, probably only a third had critical observations.

“More said, ‘Don’t single us out. We don’t want to be treated differently from the men.’ That doesn’t show much dissatisfaction to me.”

Bretzing said the meeting followed a series of events that began two years ago when the FBI surveyed four of its largest offices, including Los Angeles, to find out why more women agents were not moving up “the promotional ladder” within the FBI.

Other Cities Studied

The other cities visited by the FBI study group included San Francisco, Philadelphia and New York. One conclusion reportedly was that many women found the frequent geographical transfers connected to career advancement in the FBI disruptive to family life, especially those with husbands pursuing separate careers.

Bretzing agreed that the constant moves connected with the FBI’s management career track are difficult for both men and women.

“You can reach the rank of supervisor with two or three moves in maybe eight to 10 years,” he said. “After supervisor, that’s when the moves begin. I’ve been in three offices as special agent in charge. I sit here with 12 moves in my career. With seven children, you can imagine how disruptive that has been.”

According to Bretzing, the 1984 survey was followed by another nationwide FBI survey this January into the problems of women agents and some married FBI couples. He said that survey, conducted partly in Los Angeles, showed that some women in several FBI offices believed female agents faced difficulties in being accepted for certain squad assignments.

Bretzing said the issue of career opportunities for women became “one of about 25 subjects” discussed at an FBI Career Board retreat in March at Quantico, Va. The semiannual meeting of about 15 top officials was chaired by John Otto, the FBI’s executive assistant director. One Los Angeles representative was Patrick Mullany, Bretzing’s chief administrative aide.

Angry Confrontation

While Bretzing refused to discuss the Quantico meeting, another FBI source said the women’s issue triggered an angry confrontation between Otto and Mullany, which led to the charge that Los Angeles was a trouble spot.

“You have got some problems with the treatment of female agents, and we are aware of it. You better do something about it,” the source quoted Otto as telling Mullany.

FBI officials in Washington later minimized the incident as a “blowup of personalities” and denied that Los Angeles is viewed as a trouble spot for women agents. One official said the fact that Bretzing called the meeting of his female agents was commendable.

Bretzing said he began the meeting by tracing the history of the FBI’s efforts to deal with the special concerns of women and then asked if anyone was dissatisfied with their present assignment.

“Not a single person raised her hand,” he said. “I asked if anyone would prefer being on a different squad. One person raised her hand. I don’t call that much of a problem. I suspect if I asked the male agents, more would have raised their hands.”

Defending the record of the Los Angeles office, Bretzing said women agents are assigned “across the board” to organized crime, white-collar fraud, narcotics, terrorism, and foreign counterintelligence details, regarded as the FBI’s top-priority assignments.

He conceded that there are no women pilots or female members of the FBI SWAT teams in Los Angeles and also admitted that there are no women currently on the local bank robbery squads, but he said there was no policy of keeping them off such details.

“There is no tendency to keep women out of violent action,” Bretzing said. “We have women working terrorism, which is a very violent area. Another is narcotics. The women in Los Angeles are no different than the men. There are some outstanding ones, a majority who are good and a few who are probably ill-suited for the career they are in. They are regarded as equals in every area.”

Survey Ordered

Besides responding to the complaint about the pinups on the walls, Bretzing said he has ordered a survey of all women in the Los Angeles office to solicit their concerns. The project has not been completed, he said.

Bretzing said one woman raised the possibility of establishing a grievance committee to explore the problems of women, but he rejected the idea.

“There already are established procedures for voicing complaints, and there is no need to add any extra layers to what we already have,” he said.

“I think it was a productive meeting. It showed there was management concern. I think it also illustrated to some of the women that they were not as unhappy as they may have thought.”

Besides his own comments on the women’s meeting, Bretzing also authorized McChesney, the only woman supervisor in the Los Angeles office, to discuss the meeting and the general concerns of women agents.

McChesney arrived in the Los Angeles office in January as head of the government fraud squad, responsible for some of the FBI’s most sensitive investigations, including defense industry kickbacks.

Her assessment was a cautious one.

“I can’t speak for how the women feel generally,” she said. “You have 36 women agents, so you have 36 different opinions on the subject.”

Times staff writer Ronald J. Ostrow in Washington contributed to this story.