TV REVIEW : An Outsider Goes ‘Inside the F.B.I.’

If you get through the first of the four-part WETA and British Channel 4 co-production, “Inside the F.B.I.,” and wonder--as with the FBI itself--what it’s up to, don’t worry. The muddied confusion becomes clearer. Painfully clearer.

English writer-producer-director Tony Stark may benefit from the outsider’s stance, peering into the largest American law-enforcement complex from the other side of the pond, but he’s obviously a better historian than reporter on present-day events.

Tonight’s opening hour, for instance, uncomfortably blends what is claimed as unprecedented new footage of an FBI SWAT team in preparation and action with a survey of J. Edgar Hoover’s methods for turning the FBI from a corrupt force into a crime-fighting machine.

The two elements are meant to be tied together as an example of how the bureau has changed its look, methods and approach. The actual results are, on one hand, constant interruptions of potentially exciting action scenes for the reality-TV crowd and, on the other, a jigsaw portrait of Hoover with many of the pieces missing.

Stark ironically emphasizes that many current FBI agents are fairly unaware of the details of Hoover’s tenure, while keeping his viewers almost as much in the dark.

In tonight’s second hour, though, Stark fluidly charts a fascinating course through some of the FBI’s worst history--the Hoover-driven campaigns to illegally spy on U.S. citizens involved in political activities Hoover personally disagreed with.

Beginning with a decades-long effort to dismantle the American Communist Party and ending with botched efforts to spy on groups opposed to U.S. military intervention in Central America, Hoover’s agency is shown here to be the worst kind of governmental rogue elephant charging against the political left while stomping on constitutional rights.

The list of lives ruined either directly or indirectly by the agency’s counter-intelligence program is much longer than even Stark suggests, and it’s up to California State senator and co-founder of Students for a Democratic Society Tom Hayden to announce a verdict on Hoover’s war against the left.

Hoover, says Hayden, exercised “insane thinking” in his effort to undermine perceived enemies with his un-American tactics, “the greatest abuse of power in extremis in the most . . . democratic society in the world.”

The FBI’s victims in the third hour (airing Wednesday) are of the more classic variety--the American Mafia, which Stark reports is as strong as ever despite a flurry of arrests in the 1980s of Mob kingpins under federal racketeering statutes. Barely mentioned are previously well-documented allegations linking Hoover’s reluctance to crack down on organized crime to Mafia blackmail on his rumored homosexuality. (The best report on this Hoover scandal, Frontline’s “The Secret File on J. Edgar Hoover,” will air again at 9 p.m. Tuesday on KCET-TV.) By contrast, charges that labor unions are largely under Mob influence come through plainly.

The final hour largely revolves around the tensely dramatic case of young Michael Pardue, a Hitchcockian innocent trapped in an FBI sting operation that nearly sent him to prison. Stings, like the high-tech security features of the agency’s huge information data base, can misfire. And when it comes to the FBI, the victim can be you.

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“Inside the F.B.I.” airs 9-11 p.m. tonight and Wednesday on KCET-TV Channel 28; 8-10 p.m. tonight and Wednesday on KVCR-TV Channel 24; and 8-10 p.m. tonight and 9-11 p.m. Wednesday on KPBS-TV Channel 15.