ATF Traces Its Lore to Days of Eliot Ness : Enforcement: Once known as ‘revenuers’ who chased bootleggers, agents these days focus on illegal weapons and explosives.

Once known as “revenuers” who tracked down the backwoods operators of whiskey stills and those who trafficked in illegal brews, agents of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms have been around since 1919.

An organization rich in history, its most famous member, Eliot Ness, headed an anti-bootlegger strike force during Prohibition that went after the likes of Al Capone and other mob chieftains. Ness and his colleagues earned the nickname “The Untouchables” as a tribute to their moral integrity.

But with the end of Prohibition in 1933, this unit of the Treasury Department gradually faded from public view, even though it took on more professional tasks over the years, like cracking down on the use of illegal firearms and explosives in the commission of violent crimes.

A relatively low-key but essential partner in major investigative efforts, ATF nonetheless has remained--in the eyes of many federal law enforcement officers--something of a second-level crime-fighting unit whose members lack the breadth, training and sophistication of larger agencies like the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service.

Its weekend raid on a heavily armed religious cult in Texas that resulted in the death of four agents and two cultists has raised further questions about ATF’s tactical competence in law enforcement. “As a general rule, when the bad guys win, somebody made a mistake,” said Howard Safir, former deputy director for operations of the U.S. Marshals Service.

Safir, who now heads a Fairfax, Va., corporate intelligence and security firm, said “it seemed like there was an awful lot of frontal assault” on the cultists’ compound as well as “an awful lot of media around.”

Safir said he had a high regard generally for ATF but added: “I don’t know what their tactical capability is.”

A former Justice Department official who has worked with ATF praised their technical expertise on explosives but noted: “As a general investigative agency, they’re not in same ballpark as the (FBI). They’re much more a seat-of-the-pants operation.”

Unlike the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration, both divisions of the Justice Department, ATF and the Internal Revenue Service have traditionally operated without strict day-to-day supervision by their own parent, the Treasury Department, according to law enforcement sources.

Although Sunday’s raid had been planned for weeks, it was not until last Friday that ATF officials apprised their Treasury Department superiors about it, a knowledgeable source said, adding that “ATF was allowed to make the operational decision itself.” Rehearsals were believed to have been held at the agency’s training site at Ft. McClellan, Ala.

Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, asked Monday by reporters if ATF had handled the raid properly, replied: “I can’t really evaluate this until we get through and see what happened.”

In recent years ATF’s principal mission has been the enforcement of federal laws relating to firearms, explosives and arson, spending less than 5% of its agent hours on untaxed alcohol and tobacco. Gone is the agent of old, smashing barrels of moonshine with an ax. Today’s agent is more likely to be involved with machine guns or a truckload of stolen explosives.

Sen. Dennis DeConcini (D-Ariz.), the Senate’s leading authority on ATF, said the agency’s Waco raid “makes sense to me because of its role in enforcing the laws governing firearms and explosives. The operation was aimed at serving a valid search warrant based on very reliable information that automatic weapons were being kept there illegally.”

DeConcini, in an interview, said the raid “obviously did not succeed and indeed it was a tragedy.” But he said ATF agents are adequately trained to enforce laws aimed at “armed career criminals,” adding that “they have been doing a good job even though they are a small agency.”

DeConcini, who has scrutinized ATF as chairman of an appropriations subcommittee with oversight responsibilities, said the agency recently helped locate the FBI’s prime suspect in January’s shootings outside CIA headquarters by tracing the automatic weapon used in the crime.

“FBI agents have broader training, of course, because they have the luxury of their own academy,” he said. “But I will stack ATF’s 2,200 agents up against any other agency when it comes to fighting violent crime.”

About 120 agents of ATF have been killed in the line of duty since Prohibition, but Sunday’s four deaths represented its bloodiest single day, authorities said.

The agency has had brushes with religious cults before. Three years ago agents arrested a cult leader in National City, Calif., near the Mexican border, who was wanted in the slaying of a family of five.