SPRINGVILLE — Retired FBI agent James Wright weaves his Mormon faith into his new book about the cases in which he worked to bring criminals to justice.
Both are important, he says.
"My religion is my way of life," said Wright, who has written the autobiography "FBI: Fidelity Bravery Integrity." "The cases were important because I was in a position to defend this country and enjoy what I was doing."
The FBI has a large number of agents who are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In one office of 20 agents where Wright worked, five were LDS.
"(J. Edgar) Hoover liked LDS people," he said of the agency's first director.
Many LDS FBI agents have language skills useful to the bureau from serving missions in foreign countries for the LDS Church, and "they aren't likely to drink and smash up our cars," Wright said.
Wright won many awards for his work, including the Quality Incentive Award, which he achieved for developing a long list of informants, particularly among people from the Middle East living in the San Francisco Bay Area.
"They would talk to me," he said, "and that developed sources for (various) cases."
Among the cases Wright worked were the Patty Hearst kidnapping and its ties to the Symbionese Liberation Army; the Chowchilla school bus kidnapping case; the Unabomber; Jim Jones and the People's Temple mass suicide; and the Montana Freemen case.
Now living in Springville, the former government agent and special investigator used his own FBI file to write the autobiography, a process that took 16 months.
Early on, Wright thought he was going to have a life as a schoolteacher. After graduating from BYU on a wrestling scholarship, he landed a teaching job in Centerville. But at the end of the school year, his father suffered a heart attack. Wright returned to Woodbury, N.J., to assist his family and was hired to teach at Woodbury Junior High School and coach at his alma mater, Woodbury High.
In all, he taught four years.
Meanwhile, a secretary at the junior high suggested to Wright that he would make a good FBI agent. Her husband was an agent and she said if he would apply, she would type up the application. Then-FBI director Hoover apparently agreed with her, and Wright was hired.
After graduation from FBI training, Wright was assigned to New Haven, Conn., where he worked several cases before being sent to San Francisco, where he spent 23 years. He was one of several agents to work the Patty Hearst kidnapping.
"I believe Patty Hearst was legitimately kidnapped," he said.
She was held in a closet for weeks in early 1974 and was terrorized and repeatedly raped. Then she joined her captors Bill and Emily Harris and the SLA, he said.
Inmates in San Quentin formed the SLA, using taxpayer dollars and their girlfriends to do their work on the outside, he said.
Wright said he believes Hearst was brainwashed into staying with the group.
The Chowchilla kidnapping case could have turned into a tragedy. Brothers Rick and Jim Schoenfeld and friend Fred Woods, all from wealthy families, commandeered a Chowchilla. Calif., school bus of 26 children in July 1976. They hid the bus, transported the children 100 miles away and forced them into a moving van that they had buried in a rock quarry about eight miles from Wright's home. Inside, they placed mattresses, which the school bus driver and junior high kids used to stack on top of each other to escape.
"They could have died in there (from the heat)," Wright said.
The perpetrators never could make their ransom demands because the police telephone was so busy handling the calls of concerned parents the kidnappers couldn't get through, Wright said.
The trio is still in prison, more than 30 years later. Wright said he believes they have been repeatedly turned down for parole because of the lack of concern they showed for the children, many of whom were traumatized by the experience.
"FBI: Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity" was self-published in November through iUniverse.
e-mail: rodger@desnews.com