FBI Trivia
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48 free FBI trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This FBI trivia quiz covers the Federal Bureau of Investigation from its 1908 creation by a grandnephew of Napoleon to the modern Bureau of 56 field offices and Legal Attachés in embassies around the world. There are questions on J. Edgar Hoover's 48-year reign and the ten-year term limit it inspired, the 1930s war on Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd, wartime spy cases, COINTELPRO and the burglary that exposed it, Deep Throat, the Hostage Rescue Team, Ruby Ridge and Waco, the Unabomber, Robert Hanssen's dead drop, Whitey Bulger's capture and the Ten Most Wanted list. You will also meet the Bureau's institutions: the Academy at Quantico, the crime lab, the CJIS complex in West Virginia, the Behavioral Analysis Unit that inspired Criminal Minds, and the standard-issue Glock. Difficulty runs from questions any true-crime fan can answer to details for people who know which Supreme Court case first blessed FBI wiretaps. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the Bureau, its people and its cases, and each question quotes the sentence that supports it.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01A 1908 ban on borrowing which agency's agents led to the Bureau's creation?
Secret Service
The Secret Service had been renting out its investigators until Congress banned the loans in May 1908. The ban backfired: the attorney general hired 34 agents of his own, several of them Secret Service veterans.
Q 02The Bureau's founder in 1908 was a great-nephew of which French ruler?
Napoleon Bonaparte
Napoleon Bonaparte had his youngest brother's marriage to a Baltimore merchant's daughter annulled so the brother could wed a princess. The American grandson of that marriage, Charles, grew up to found the Bureau.
Q 03The Bureau of Investigation was created in 1908 with the backing of which president?
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt reached the White House because an anarchist shot McKinley in 1901. Fear of more such attacks, and a Justice Department with no detectives of its own, made his case for a federal force.
Q 04Which motto was coined for the FBI in 1935?
Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity
Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity dates from 1935, the year the Bureau took its present name, and was chosen because the words spell out the new initials. Bureau histories disagree over which official thought of it.
Q 05In 1910 the young Bureau took the lead on enforcing which new law against interstate prostitution?
The Mann Act
The Mann Act banned taking women across state lines for 'immoral purposes', loose wording soon aimed at the famous. Boxing champion Jack Johnson, convicted under it in 1913, spent seven years abroad and was pardoned only in 2018.
Q 06In 1933 J. Edgar Hoover was also given charge of which federal bureau?
Prohibition
The Bureau of Prohibition came under Hoover in 1933, just as the country was voting to end Prohibition itself. He never folded its agents into his own force, and the unit was soon gone from his Bureau.
Q 07J. Edgar Hoover died in 1972 while serving which president?
Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon was taped in 1971 explaining why he would not force Hoover out: the director, he feared, might pull the temple down with him, president included. Hoover died in office the following May.
Q 08After Hoover's death, Congress limited FBI directors to a single term of how long?
Ten years
Ten years, and one term only, has been the rule since 1976, set so that no director could again build Hoover's kind of tenure. Congress has bent it once, passing a 2011 law to keep a director for two more years.
Q 09Which president's attorney general put J. Edgar Hoover in charge of the Bureau in 1924, after the Teapot Dome scandal?
Calvin Coolidge
Calvin Coolidge's attorney general, Harlan Fiske Stone, was cleaning house after the scandal touched the previous director. His 29-year-old choice promptly fired agents he judged to be political hires.
Q 10Which first job, taken at 18, is credited with giving J. Edgar Hoover his lifelong devotion to indexed files?
Library of Congress messenger
Library of Congress messenger, from 1913, put him beside the staff building its card catalogue. Both the Library and the FBI trace his zeal for making masses of information findable back to that job.
Q 11At 24, J. Edgar Hoover organized which crackdown on suspected radicals, named for his boss, the attorney general?
The Palmer Raids
The Palmer Raids, named for Attorney General Mitchell Palmer, swept up thousands of people in dozens of cities in 1919 and 1920. They were soon condemned for trampling civil liberties.
Q 12The FBI lab's first major case tied Hauptmann to the Lindbergh ransom notes by matching what?
Handwriting
Handwriting: after Hauptmann's arrest in 1934, samples were flown to Washington, where the young lab matched them to the misspelled ransom notes. The work helped convict him and made the lab's name.
Q 13Outside which Chicago movie house was John Dillinger shot dead by Bureau agents in July 1934?
Q 21What did the name COINTELPRO stand for?
Counter-Intelligence Program
Counter-Intelligence Program was a bland label for covert efforts to discredit domestic political groups. The FBI anonymously mailed Martin Luther King a letter that his aides read as urging him to kill himself.
Q 22Burglars exposed COINTELPRO by raiding an FBI office during which 1971 fight?
Ali and Frazier
Ali and Frazier met on 8 March 1971, and the burglars picked that night hoping everyone near the office in Media, Pennsylvania, would be following the fight. The files they mailed to reporters exposed the program.
Q 23Which FBI second-in-command was Watergate's 'Deep Throat'?
The Biograph Theater
The Biograph Theater was showing a Clark Gable gangster film, Manhattan Melodrama. The 'Woman in Red' who led agents to him actually wore orange, and had bargained for help against her own deportation.
Q 14Which FBI Chicago office chief won fame for the Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd cases?
Melvin Purvis
Melvin Purvis lit a cigar outside a Chicago cinema as the signal to close in on Dillinger in July 1934. Three months later he led the agents who cornered Pretty Boy Floyd on an Ohio farm.
Q 15Which of these gangsters was brought down by Treasury Department investigators instead of Hoover's Bureau?
Al Capone
Al Capone fell to a Treasury tax-evasion case in 1931 because gang crime lay outside the Bureau's powers at the time. Its agents had only arrested him for contempt, after he faked illness to dodge a grand jury.
Q 16In 1928 the Supreme Court let agents tap a bootlegger's phones without a warrant, ruling it was no search under which amendment?
The Fourth Amendment
The Fourth Amendment: in the Olmstead case, taps placed without entering the bootlegger's property were ruled no search. The Katz ruling reversed that in 1967, saying the amendment protects people, not places.
Q 17Early Bureau homicide investigations included the murders of members of which Native American nation?
Osage
The Osage were being killed for their oil headrights in 1920s Oklahoma. Bureau agents worked undercover until rancher William Hale was convicted of ordering murders, the story later filmed as Killers of the Flower Moon.
Q 18How did the eight Nazi saboteurs rounded up by the FBI in June 1942 reach the United States?
By U-boat
By U-boat: two submarines put them ashore on Long Island and Florida with crates of explosives. The FBI caught all eight only after one of them, George Dasch, phoned the Bureau and gave up the rest; six were executed.
Q 19The Venona project, which helped the FBI unmask atomic spies such as the Rosenbergs, decoded the intercepted cables of which country?
The Soviet Union
The Soviet Union was still America's wartime ally when Army codebreakers began attacking its cables in 1943. The decrypts later led the FBI to Julius Rosenberg's spy ring.
Q 20Which wartime policy did Hoover oppose that Roosevelt then enacted under Executive Order 9066?
Mass removal of Japanese Americans
Mass removal of Japanese Americans struck Hoover as needless, because the FBI had already arrested the people it judged dangerous right after Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 anyway, in February 1942.
Mark Felt
Mark Felt, the Bureau's number two, began guiding Bob Woodward of the Washington Post after being passed over for director when Hoover died. He admitted being Deep Throat only in 2005, aged 91.
Q 24After a $7 million heist, Víctor Gerena spent a record 32 years on the Most Wanted list, reportedly hiding in which country?
Cuba
Cuba is where prosecutors believe Gerena went after the 1983 robbery of the Connecticut Wells Fargo depot where he worked as a guard. He stayed on the list from 1984 until 2016 and was never caught.
Q 25Leslie Isben Rogge, who surrendered in 1996, was the first Most Wanted fugitive caught thanks to what?
The FBI's new website
Rogge, a bank robber, surrendered at the US embassy in Guatemala City in May 1996 after a viewer of the FBI's new website recognized his photo, the list's first internet-assisted capture.
Q 26The FBI Academy, where new agents train, is located in which Virginia town?
Quantico
Quantico, on a Marine Corps base, is where trainees work staged cases in Hogan's Alley, a mock town built with help from Hollywood set designers. Its only bank is robbed at least twice a week.
Q 27In FBI legend, which nickname for its agents did a cornered Machine Gun Kelly coin by shouting 'Don't shoot'?
G-Men
G-Men, short for government men, entered Bureau lore with Kelly's arrest in Memphis in 1933. The FBI's own history now says he probably never shouted it.
Q 28What are the FBI's overseas offices in US embassies and consulates called?
Legal Attachés
Legal Attachés, or 'legats', are FBI agents posted to US embassies and consulates, more than 60 offices worldwide, mainly to coordinate with foreign police and security services.
Q 29The FBI's Hostage Rescue Team was created in the early 1980s with which upcoming event in mind?
The 1984 Los Angeles Olympics
The 1984 Los Angeles Olympics raised a question nobody could answer: who would handle another Munich, where Israeli athletes were taken hostage and killed. HRT operators have trained full-time ever since.
Q 30The FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services Division, home to the fingerprint database, is where?
West Virginia
The Clarksburg, West Virginia, complex opened in 1995 and houses the Bureau's fingerprint and criminal-record databases; its main building is about the length of three football fields.