Since the day in July, 1789, when George Washington submitted to the Senate the first list of Customs collectors, the nation’s overseas trade has grown from a mere trickle to a multi-billion-dollar flood. The administration of the Bureau has become more complicated and its operations more diverse as the commercial intercourse between nations has grown. In size, the Customs Bureau is one of the smaller Federal agencies, having approximately 8,500 employees. But being the senior service in the Federal government, its past is a mirror of the nation’s history. It is a history tinged with violence and intrigue, because there has never been a time when its agents were not engaged in a running war with smugglers--from Jean Laffite and his band of cutthroats in the bayous of Louisiana to the criminals who direct today’s multi-million-dollar traffic in contraband. Because it deals with commerce and travel, the operations of Customs touch every man, woman and child and every item of merchandise entering this country--from the tourist returning from Zamboanga to the aardvark headed for a zoo. Customs has been damned as a nuisance and a bumble-headed bureaucracy. It has been praised as one of the most efficient and necessary units in the Federal government. Despite its long history, few Americans know anything about Customs beyond the fact that they must submit to an irritating baggage examination by an inspector upon arriving home from abroad. What is Customs? Why was it organized? What are its duties? And why is it necessary? Customs is a slender, dark-haired expert sitting in a small room in New York appraising the value of a treasure in diamonds. It is a chemist in a laboratory checking the quality of a foreign import--and its dutiable value--and arriving at a decision which may mean life or death for an American business in a highly competitive market. It is an inspector at an airport or on a pier examining the luggage of passengers to be sure they have complied with the law. Customs is a tall man with a wind-burned face lying in the mesquite above the Rio Grande, watching patiently for the smuggler of heroin or marijuana he knows is coming his way. It is a burly man lowering himself into the dark hold of a ship to check the cargo and to search for contraband. It is a man giving an expert appraisal of the antiquity of a tapestry or the authenticity of a painting to be certain an importer is not being defrauded. It is a man checking the contents of a mountain of parcels arriving from overseas. Customs is a man explaining to a tourist what he can do to save time and avoid trouble in his travels. It is volumes of complex rulings by the courts and laws passed by Congress governing the huge import-export trade. It is a lawyer standing in a courtroom arguing that an import is subject to much higher duties than its importer claims.