From playing chess with the Russians to meeting with J. Edgar Hoover, these guys have done it all. Tulsa has around 50 active FBI agents and a large number of retired agents as well and the stories are fascinating.

With the agency being splashed around the news in conjunction with the General David Petraeus case, KRMG went to visit with some agents and asked them to tell us some of their stories.

When asked what is it about their jobs that might surprise the average Tulsan one said “probably the variety of cases we worked.”  He went on “everything from espionage to terrorism cases, from bank robberies to kidnappings.”

And yes, there were even meetings with Russians over a game of chess “I love to play chess, and the Russians are the best players in the world” one retired agent began. In an attempt to establish contacts he visited a park where people played chess. One there he struck up a game with a man and learned his lesson quickly. “He let me get him in check mate pretty quick” he began. “But I found he was toying with me, from that point on he beat me so quick it wasn’t funny” he chuckled as he recalled.

Click here to listen to the stories.

And that same former agent spent a little time with the legendary former director of the agency as well. “I was a great admirer of J. Edgar Hoover who I met with three times” he noted. “I really liked the guy, there was a lot of media that knocks him but he was a wonderful man and a great leader.”

And how’s this for a kicker, the same agent worked the case about a guy named Frank Morris. Sound familiar? Morris, along with brothers John and Clarence Anglin and Allen West were the men who planned and executed the only “successful” escape from the prison known as The Rock, Alcatraz.

“We think they all died that night” he told me. “The water was 54 degrees, you’d get hypothermia in about three minutes in that water” he went on.  West never made it out of his cell and cooperated with the FBI willingly. “He told us the plan was to make it to Presidents Island and hide until morning, then steal a car” he said. “No car was ever stolen and afterwards we had leads from here to Australia.”

So with so many leads why are they confident the escapees died in San Francisco Bay? “We kept the case open for ten years” he explained. “Phone surveillance, mail surveillance, neighborhood surveillance not one hit and that doesn’t happen in fugitive cases.”

For every story like that, there is also one that would make you shake your head. The agents laughed about one of those right here in Tulsa. “There was a guy, he had been a minor league ballplayer” one agent remembered. “He ride his bike to up to a drive through bank and robbed it, and they knew him” he said as they all broke out in laughter. Another chimed in “we went to talk to the teller and she said I think I knew who it was, and she told us.” It ended as you might think “We went to his apartment and there he was” they laughed again.

The men did get serious when they told KRMG that agencies like theirs along with CIA and others sometimes get a bad rap, especially when one of their own goes bad. “Yeah, it’s too bad, there are a certain percentage of people who have that perception and it’s wrong, they shouldn’t bunch everybody in together.”