Barbara Van Driel spent eight years as a Special Agent in the FBI. When she joined in 1983, fewer than 500 women had ever served as Special Agent. Her first supervisor at the FBI was Robert Hanssen, a soviet double agent currently serving 15 life sentences for espionage at a federal supermax prison in Colorado.

In Van Driel’s career she observed firsthand the culture of the FBI struggle and fail to integrate women into its ranks. She experienced harassment, humiliation, frustration, and moments of absurd levity among the ranks of friends and peers who wanted only to serve their country and thwart criminals.

Her book “It Never Happened: FBI Negligence and Duplicity Revealed from the Inside Out” chronicles numerous episodes of harassment and morale degrading incompetence that she personally observed. Van Driel will be one of the participating writers at Authors on the Move on March 2, 2019 in downtown Sacramento. You can read the introduction of the book here.