I never knew my uncle.

Marvin Risen, my father’s brother, died long before I was born. He was an FBI agent in Nashville and was killed in a plane crash in 1943.

But decades later, when I was growing up, something about Marvin’s death still troubled my family.

My parents often talked about how they had never been given any answers about Marvin’s death, and that led them to speculate wildly, trying to connect the dots. They openly questioned whether he had been the victim of wartime sabotage. His plane crashed in the middle of World War II, and his Nashville FBI office was not far from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, then home to a critical part of the Manhattan Project: America’s top-secret program to build an atomic bomb before Nazi Germany. They sometimes wondered whether spies had blown up Marvin’s plane because he had uncovered an atomic espionage ring.

It wasn’t until this year — more than 80 years after my uncle’s death — that the full story of Marvin Risen and the Federal Bureau of Investigation would finally be resolved. But even then, the FBI’s painful treatment of our family would leave an open, unhealed wound.

In hindsight, I see that my parents long, failed struggle to grasp the truth about Marvin’s death wasn’t their fault. It was the result of the FBI’s callous handling of Marvin’s case — and many others like it. When my uncle was killed, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was at the height of his power, and he ran the FBI like a dictatorship. The bureau was a cult of personality built around Hoover; he served a total of 48 years in his post, first as director of the FBI’s predecessor, the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigations, and then as director of the FBI from its renaming in 1935 until his death in 1972.

Hoover accumulated power in part through his legendary ability to manipulate the press to propagandize and glorify the FBI. He created a mythic origin story for the FBI built around its manhunts and gun battles with Depression-era gangsters like John Dillinger; FBI agents killed in shootouts with gangsters became Hoover’s martyrs. But that meant that FBI agents like Marvin, who died in accidents or from illnesses, were largely ignored by Hoover’s FBI — even if their deaths were work-related.

On October 15, 1943, American Airlines Flight 63 crashed in rural Tennessee, killing all 11 people on board, including Marvin. The aircraft crashed soon after taking off from Nashville for a short flight to Memphis. Records show that, not long after leaving Nashville, the pilot radioed to air traffic control asking for permission to climb to 8,000 feet, possibly in an effort to find a band of warmer air to get rid of ice clinging to the wings and propellers, according to a later federal investigation by the Civil Aeronautics Board, which then regulated commercial aviation. But as the plane gained altitude, ice continued to build, making it impossible to control.

The plane rapidly lost altitude and crashed into a wooded hill near Centerville, about 60 miles from Nashville. The area was so remote that the crash site wasn’t discovered until the next morning by a farmer, who then drove 3 miles to the town of Wrigley, where he could get a phone to call officials in Nashville. In its 1945 final report on the crash, the Civil Aeronautics Board was critical of American Airlines for allowing the plane to fly without deicing equipment; American had removed the equipment in the summer and had not yet........

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