Roy Mosteller was just a lad in high school when he decided he wanted to join the Navy. Being born and raised in Long Beach, California, he felt the Navy was the only choice for him.
It was the early years of World War II. He remembers flipping through his high school yearbook and seeing that nearly a quarter of the boys he went to school with were already in the military.
Determined to serve, he met with recruiters, only to be turned away because he wore glasses. He didn’t let the rejection deter him, however. With the country at war, he was confident the Selective Service would soon be calling.
Meanwhile, he went to work on his uncle’s cattle ranch in Texas. While he waited, he figured he would learn how to be a cowboy. It wasn’t long though before he got that call from the Selective Service. They told him to report to Lubbock, and on Sept. 13, 1943, Roy was drafted into the Navy.
“They handed me a file covered in two- or three-inch letters that read ‘USN,’” Roy said. “I remember asking the man, ‘Does that mean I’m in the Navy?’
“He replied, ‘Yeah, sure. You’re in the Navy. Don’t you want to be in the Navy?’
“I said, ‘Absolutely!’”
Following bootcamp at the Farragut Naval Training Station in Farragut, Idaho, he was sent to his first duty station in Washington, D.C., where he worked as a yeoman for the Chief Cable Censor in the Office of Censorship. The office was chiefly responsible for monitoring telecommunications going in and out of the country.
It was here that he began his long career with the Office of Naval Intelligence.
Roy was in Washington when the end of the war was announced. He was working the night shift, so his afternoon was free. He decided to join the crowd gathered in Lafayette Park across from the White House to hear President Truman’s proclamation.
“The most memorable part of that day was walking to work down Pennsylvania Ave. and seeing the light on in the tower of the Capitol Building. I knew at that point that the war was definitely over,” Roy said.
During the war, while the Navy was in charge of telecommunications, the Army was in charge of postal censorship. After the war, the Army was standing up occupational forces in Japan, and with no experience in telecommunications censorship, the Army reached out to the Navy seeking volunteers to go to Osaka, Japan. Roy and two other Sailors raised their hands.
He said he remembers with amusement that the Navy personnel had to wear Army uniforms. However, wanting to be identified as Navy men, they wore their Navy insignia creating confusion for other military personnel.
“Although I was wearing Yeoman First Class insignia, I was often saluted by Army personnel who felt it best to do so because they had no idea who I was,” Roy said.
During his deployment in Japan, Roy made frequent trips to Kyoto, home to the historic Imperial Summer Palace. On one such visit, while exploring the palace grounds, he removed a pin from one of the gates, taking it as a keepsake from the iconic site.
Although that pin was one of his prized possessions, many years later he returned it to the Palace.
“Being a federal law enforcement officer, the thought of possessing stolen property from the Japanese Imperial Palace bothered me, so I decided the pin needed to be returned,” Roy said. “The opportunity came in 2019 when my daughter visited Kyoto and returned the pin for me. Now, my conscience is clear.”
‘Regular’ Navy All Along
Roy was discharged from active-duty in 1946 following his tour in Japan — but not without some initial confusion. A mistake on his dog tags led him to believe he had been serving as a Navy Reservist. The tags he received upon being drafted were stamped 'USNR,' signifying Navy Reserves, but according to his paperwork, his actual designation was 'USNI,' indicating he was a Navy inductee.
This error only came to light after his service, catching him by surprise when he discovered his official status had been 'regular Navy' all along.
After he was discharged, Roy went back to school to earn his accounting degree, and then upon finishing school, he went to work as a public accountant. Working as a public accountant seemed like a natural step for him since his father was an accountant and Roy had been helping him since he was in the seventh grade. He worked as an accountant for a while but found he really didn’t enjoy it.
“It was taxes that drove me out of the business,” he said.
While in school, he needed to earn a little extra money, and looking back fondly on his time in the Navy, he joined the Navy Reserves, but he didn’t serve in the Reserves for long, because it was only a short time later that the Korean War broke out.
Thinking the Navy could use his experience in censorship, Roy wrote a letter to the Director of Naval Intelligence saying he was ready to return to active-duty if they needed him. Within a few days, he was active again and spent two years in San Diego with a lieutenant commander drafting a plan that would reestablish the censorship office in the event of WWIII – “which, thankfully, didn’t happen.”
While he was working in San Diego, he got his first exposure to research analysts doing investigative work. What they were doing looked interesting, so when his tour of duty was over, Roy approached his commanding officer and offered to stay active and give him another year if he could be a research analyst.
“In those days, the office was doing primarily background investigations, and they were just getting older and older and going unworked,” he said. “He needed help, so he accepted my request and sent me to Long Beach.”
Roy’s introduction to the job was anything but conventional. He recalls being ushered into a room by a senior agent, who opened a file cabinet brimming with requests for background investigations and said, 'There they are. Go for it.' That marked the start of his hands-on, trial-by-fire training.
Throughout his assignment, Roy was taken along on surveillance operations and observed how criminal investigations were conducted. The work captivated him, and by the end of his yearlong stint, he was eager to continue. He approached his commanding officer again, expressing a desire to transition into a civilian research analyst role.
Roy’s self-taught skills and successful track record in conducting background investigations had not gone unnoticed. However, the commanding officer explained that the decision required approval from ONI in Washington and an available position. With no guarantees, Roy was told to return home and await the outcome.
From Active-Duty to Civilian Agent
His wait wasn’t long. He was again released from active-duty in May 1953 and at the end of November, he got a phone call from ONI offering him a job.
Training for agents was not the same as the modern day Naval Criminal Investigative Service Basic Agent Training. The majority of his training consisted of being paired with a senior agent and shadowing them for several months. It wasn’t until he had been on board as an agent for a while that formal basic agent training was established, and he was among the first class of agents to take part in the training which was held in Washington.
His first duty station as an ONI civilian agent was in San Diego.
“In those days, they called us research analysts, but we were actually agents,” Roy said.
Because of the huge backlog of delinquent background investigations, it was common practice to expect new agents to conduct background investigations for quite some time before they started working criminal investigations.
For Roy it was no different, but the occasional criminal case did cross Roy’s desk. He remembers the first criminal case he worked was in 1954.
It was around Christmastime, and the office was throwing a holiday party when they got a call from the captain of a destroyer docked at the San Diego Naval Station. He had discovered that there was money missing from the safe and was requesting immediate assistance.
Being a junior agent, Roy was pulled from the party and sent to investigate. Almost immediately his training kicked in and he recalled that one of the first things he should do is make sure the suspects could not leave the scene, so he requested that the captain close the quarterdeck. Upon talking to the captain, he learned that several hundred dollars was missing.
Roy recalled that the suspect, realizing the closed quarterdeck could cause crewmates to miss their flights home, turned himself in. The suspect also said that with the close-knit crew, someone was going to immediately realize he was the one who took the money.
“I quickly recovered the money and gave it to the captain,” Roy said. “He put it back in the safe. I went back to the party. It was the fastest criminal case I ever worked.”
Up to this point, the agency was known as ONI, but in 1962, it became the Naval Investigative Service before transitioning again in 1992 to what is known today as NCIS.
Other changes occurred as well. One major change occurred in the early 1970s when NIS was relieved of the responsibility of conducting background investigations and could begin focusing solely on investigating criminal activity.
Another common practice for agents was to stay at one office for the duration of their career. However, as agent responsibilities were changing, it was becoming necessary for them to work in different offices and gain experience in different locations if they wanted to grow in their careers.
So, after spending several years in San Diego, in 1962, Roy requested an assignment in Honolulu, Hawaii, where he would assume the position of assistant supervising agent for a busy office that worked primarily narcotics cases.
“I like to say that we were investigating dumb guys doing dumb things,” Roy said.
One case Roy worked on involved a Sailor who experienced an LSD flashback while operating a nuclear submarine.
“I got a call from a submarine transiting from the East Coast to Pearl Harbor,” Roy said. “They had come through the Panama Canal and were traversing the Pacific, heading toward the island, when the submarine took a serious dive and began descending very rapidly at a steep angle.”
During the investigation, he discovered that the Sailor operating the controls had experimented with LSD before leaving the East Coast and experienced a flashback. Believing the submarine was on a collision course with an imaginary object he saw on the radar screen, and knowing he needed to avoid the object, he shoved the controls forward, causing the submarine to go into a deep dive.
Fortunately, there was an officer nearby who was able to wrestle control of the submarine from the Sailor saving the vessel and the crew.
Roy said he and his family enjoyed Honolulu so much that what was supposed to be a two-year assignment turned into eight years.
The Agent and the Presidents
Some of Roy’s most rewarding experiences as an agent involved working with the Secret Service on several occasions, providing protection for five U.S. presidents, from Eisenhower to Ford. He explained that it was common for the Secret Service to request assistance from NIS, as the agency often had detailed information on potential threats.
Roy had more contact with President Nixon than any other president he was tasked with protecting. One detail in particular was during a meeting with South Vietnamese president, Nguyen Van Thieu, in 1969 during the Vietnam War. While the two presidents were enjoying lunch, Roy was one of six NIS agents standing guard outside the door. When Nixon and Van Thieu left, the agents were told they could eat whatever food remained.
“I can proudly say I ate the president’s food at the president’s table even though he wasn’t there,” he said.
After the Vietnam War ended and the First Marine Division was coming home, Roy was once again assisting the Secret Service with the protection of Nixon. The president was attending a large celebration to officially welcome the Marines home. When the event was over, Nixon hopped into the back of a convertible for a ride to an awaiting helicopter.
Roy joined several agents to walk beside the car. As the car started to drive away, Nixon noticed a young Marine in a wheelchair and ordered the driver to stop. By this time, the crowd from the stands was starting to fill the parade field. When they noticed the president’s car stopped, they started running toward it.
“Several hundred people were running, running, running. I put my arms out and started yelling, ‘STOP! STOP!’ and doing whatever I could to stop the crowd, but it was to no avail. I found myself pushed against the side of the president’s car with my hands pinned to my sides by a friendly, but curious crowd,” Roy said.
“I was locked there. I could feel my weapon being jostled, and my initial thought was ‘I think someone is trying to get my gun out of my holster,’ but I couldn’t move my hands because I was so tightly pressed up against the car by these people. Fortunately, the guy driving the car realized what was happening, gunned the engine in warning, and the people in front of the car got out of the way allowing the car to move. To this day, I’m glad nobody got hurt.”
Roy’s NCIS career began and ended in San Diego. He retired in 1975 after spending 26 years in the Navy and Navy Reserves, where he reached the rank of Commander, and 22 years as a civilian Special Agent. He’ll be celebrating his 100th birthday on May 25, and he says he would do it all again.
“I look back on my career and I’m very proud,” he said. “I feel that I was a service to my country when I was active-duty in the Navy, and, of course, during the 22 years I was a Special Agent. I served honestly, bravely and well.”
Roy wrote an unpublished memoir about his time at NCIS called “My Daddy is a Spy.” The title was inspired by his daughter, Jan, who was in third grade when her teacher asked during “Show and Tell” what type of work her father did. He said, without hesitation, she proclaimed “My daddy is a spy!”
If he had one piece of advice for young agents just getting started, he would tell them, “Approach it with an open mind, realizing you’re not going to enjoy every day. Do the best you can realizing that you’re serving your country.”
| Date Taken: | 03.24.2025 |
| Date Posted: | 04.15.2025 08:53 |
| Story ID: | 494394 |
| Location: | CALIFORNIA, US |
| Web Views: | 53 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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