Ted Goble, 84; spiritual man became career FBI agent

He worked on such high-profile cases as the JFK assassination, the deportation of gangster Meyer Lansky from Israel to the United States, and carried a gun and a shotgun. But the mild-mannered agent never fired those weapons in his 27 years with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

“My dad only drew his gun twice and never fired it,’’ said his son, the Rev. Tod Gobledale of Kirkland, Wash. Mr. Goble was more avuncular than intimidating, and had “an underlying joy of life and an optimistic view of humanity,’’ his son said.

Mr. Goble, who worked in New Hampshire as a private investigator after retiring from the FBI, died Sept. 4 at Brigham and Women’s Hospital following a heart attack. He was 84.

He and his wife, Shirley Mulford, a United Church of Christ minister, lived in Cambridge.

“Ted’s approach to getting information was not aggressive,’’ said William Frugoli of Marshfield, who worked with him when Mr. Goble supervised an investigative team in the office of the Massachusetts attorney general, one of his jobs after retiring from the FBI in 1979.

“Ted would not use aggression, but passive aggression, and would get what he wanted without alienating the witness,’’ Frugoli said. “He was a smoothie.’’

“Even the bad guys talked to Dad,’’ Gobledale said.

He had an illustrious career with the FBI. From 1966 to 1970, Gobledale said, his father headed one of the teams that investigated whether there was a conspiracy in the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963.

Years later, he would tell friend Craig Ball that he believed that Lee Harvey Oswald “acted alone.’’

“Ted was also involved in arresting some Ku Klux Klan people during the Civil Rights Movement and was an FBI counterintelligence liaison in Tel Aviv,’’ Ball said.

While he was assigned as a legal attaché at the US Embassy in Israel from 1970 to 1972, one of Mr. Goble’s jobs was to assist in the return of underworld boss Lansky to the United States. Lansky had fled to Israel to escape tax-evasion charges. Israel deported Lansky, and he faced trial in the United States.

While her husband’s law enforcement career was important to him, Mulford said, he also had a passion to be a minister.

In Cambridge, Mr. Goble was an active member of First Church in Cambridge, Congregational, serving on its board of senior deacons, cochairing its capital campaigns, and assuming other leadership roles. He tutored immigrants in English, Mulford said, and “supported human rights, civil rights, and gay rights.’’

Theodore Norris Goble Jr. was born in Newark to Theodore and Emma (Stephenson) Goble.

He and his younger sister grew up in the New Jersey towns of Arlington and Pompton Plains. After he graduated from high school, said his sister, Patricia Zanone of Hixson, Tenn., he enrolled in 1942 at Brothers College, the theological school of what is now Drew University in Madison, N.J., planning to be a Methodist minister.

Mr. Goble joined the Navy to fight in World War II, assigned to the USS Bainbridge in Guam. Returning after the war, he graduated from Drew in 1947 with a degree in history.

That year he also married his high school sweetheart, Cora Harris.

He also started Harvard Law School that year. “One of his Drew classmates had an extra application for Harvard and gave it to Ted,’’ Mulford said. “He filled it out and sent it in.’’

He graduated three years later, Gobledale said, passed the bar in New Jersey, and practiced law for a while, “but found it boring.’’ He started with the FBI in 1952 in Charlotte, N.C., and after two years was assigned to its New York office.

The FBI gave him a chance to learn a language, and he chose Russian because of the ongoing Cold War. Instead, Gobledale said, the bureau sent him to Georgetown University to study Hebrew, preparing him for Tel Aviv, and assigned him to the bureau’s Washington, D.C., field office.

In 1972, Ted and Cora Goble began to welcome a less tumultuous life for themselves and their seven children when the FBI transferred him to New England.

Mr. Goble retired from the bureau’s Concord, N.H., field office, but not from investigating. He became a private investigator with a partner, sleuthing for law firms and corporations.

“In 1985, with most of the children out of the house,’’ Gobledale said, “he and my mother moved to Maine so he could go to Bangor Theological Seminary. He was interested in becoming a pastor.’’

When his marriage ended in divorce in 1988, Mr. Goble left the seminary. He and Mulford married in 1989 and moved to the Boston area. Cora Goble died in 2001.

In Boston, Mr. Goble worked in the state attorney general’s office for 10 years.

One of his children followed him into the FBI. Jeffrey, of Hershey, Pa., said that growing up he had “always been impressed by the character and integrity’’ of the agents he met. During his 21 years in the bureau, he wore his father’s badge.

In addition to his wife, his two sons, and his sister, Mr. Goble leaves two other sons, Kevin of Barnstead, N.H., and Quentin of Concord, N.H.; four daughters, Nancy Shotland of Keene, N.H.; Amy Richards of Hillsborough, Calif.; Sarah Bradley of Sturgeon Bay, Wis., and Emma of Cambridge; and 15 grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. tomorrow at First Church in Cambridge, Congregational.