American Notes

Are you intelligent, curious, persistent, tough and straight as a laser beam? If you are all of the above -- and also black, Hispanic, Asian Native American or a woman -- you may qualify for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and get your college tuition paid by the government.

This month FBI director William Sessions will ask Congress for legislation creating an FBI version of the time-honored ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Corps) program to recruit minority students who need financial aid to finish college. Sessions' aim is to bring ethnic and gender diversity to the bureau, whose 10,094 special agents include just 485 blacks, 557 Hispanics, 135 Asians, 39 Native Americans and 1,078 women.

One reason for recruiting more ethnic agents: they are needed to penetrate organized crime, which is increasingly populated by black, Hispanic and Asian gangsters. There is another motive: two major discrimination suits have been brought against the FBI by minority agents in the past four years, and the bureau is seeking to clean up its reputation for in-house bigotry.