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Summary
Summary
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
The Washington Post * New York Daily News * Slate
"Fast-paced, fair-minded, and fascinating, Tim Weiner's Enemies turns the long history of the FBI into a story that is as compelling, and important, as today's headlines."--Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Oath
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Enemies is the first definitive history of the FBI's secret intelligence operations, from an author whose work on the Pentagon and the CIA won him the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
We think of the FBI as America's police force. But secret intelligence is the Bureau's first and foremost mission. Enemies is the story of how presidents have used the FBI as the most formidable intelligence force in American history.
Here is the hidden history of America's hundred-year war on terror. The FBI has fought against terrorists, spies, anyone it deemed subversive--and sometimes American presidents. The FBI's secret intelligence and surveillance techniques have created a tug-of-war between protecting national security and infringing upon civil liberties. It is a tension that strains the very fabric of a free republic.
Praise for Enemies
"Outstanding."-- The New York Times
"Absorbing . . . a sweeping narrative that is all the more entertaining because it is so redolent with screw-ups and scandals."-- Los Angeles Times
Author Notes
Tim Weiner was born on June 20, 1956. He was educated at Columbia University. As a correspondent for The New York Times, he covered war and terrorism in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Sudan, and other nations. His articles on secret government programs received the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. He has written several books including Blank Check: The Pentagon's Black Budget, Enemies: A History of the FBI, and One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon. Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA won the National Book Award.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The dilemma of the tug-of-war among the needs of personal safety, national security, and personal liberty has long been acknowledged, even by our Founding Fathers. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Weiner dealt effectively with this issue in Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA (2007). Here he tracks the efforts of the FBI to protect us from anarchists, communists, fascists, jihadists, and a laundry list of other subversives during the past century. A skilled and fair writer, Weiner resists the temptation to portray FBI officials as thugs with badges. Still, many of these revelations are chilling, as agency operatives consistently circumvented both the Constitution and statutes as they snooped, wiretapped, and interrogated. Sometimes these methods were, indeed, effective in protecting us from a variety of plots. At other times, the methods, with hindsight, seem malicious and sometimes comically ineffective. At the center of the narrative is, of course, J. Edgar Hoover, portrayed by Weiner as dedicated, often honorably motivated, but almost fanatically committed to building and then preserving the power and independence of the FBI. This is a superb examination of a national institution and forces us to consider the price we pay to feel safer. High-Demand Backstory: The critical and popular support of this author's aforementioned book on the CIA will automatically create buzz for this acount of the FBI, of course intensified by the recent release of Clint Eastwood's biopic.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ON Dec. 31, President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act, which allows for the indefinite military detention, without trial, of any American citizen "who was a part of or substantially supported Al Qaeda, the Taliban or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners." This act effectively abrogates the Bill of Rights and removes one of the cornerstones of Western liberty. But not to worry. In a signing statement, Obama pledged that he would not authorize any such detentions. What a curious position for a former constitutional scholar to take: the promise of one man substituted for the rule of law. It is just such presidential hubris, Tim Weiner makes clear in his important and disturbing new book, "Enemies: A History of the FBI," that bears much of the blame for the worst violations of our freedoms in this century. Contrary to conventional wisdom and Clint Eastwood movies, J. Edgar Hoover did not accumulate his power by barging into the Oval Office with a thick dossier of dirt on each new president and his family. Hoover was indeed a vicious gossipmonger, yet the most damning information he possessed could not be disseminated easily. No newspaper of his time would print it, no radio or television station would broadcast it. The harder truth is that most presidents since Woodrow Wilson have been less intimidated by the F.B.I. than seduced by it. Under the rubric of protecting the nation, they secretly authorized the F.B.I. to open mail, infiltrate political parties, tap phones, perform "black bag" break-ins of homes and institutions, and draw up vast lists of Americans eligible for "custodial detention" during a crisis. Or at least Hoover said they did. Often, his "authorization" came from an unrecorded, private conversation with the chief executive. When presidents or attorneys general or the Congress tried to rescind these dubious mandates - or when they were explicitly struck down by the highest courts in the land - he usually ignored these authorities. Any power ever granted to the F.B.I. he considered to be his in perpetuity. A classic paranoid, he fostered paranoia everywhere. When the F.B.I. tapped the home phone of a Supreme Court clerk in 1936, Weiner writes, "Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes suspected that Hoover had wired the conference room where the justices met to decide cases." Yet Weiner also makes clear that the problem went beyond Hoover. The F.B.I., as Robert Penn Warren wrote about the rest of humanity, was "conceived in sin and born in corruption." When Theodore Roosevelt first proposed a national police force in 1908, Congress said no, fearing "a central police or spy system in the federal government." Roosevelt simply used a "special expense fund" at the Justice Department to quietly hire 34 agents for his new "Bureau of Investigation." To this day, the F.B.I. lacks a formal charter, and its financing has often been shrouded in secrecy. This opaqueness, unsurprisingly, has not improved performance. Wisely concentrating on the F.B.I.'s secret intelligence operations, Weiner lays bare a record of embarrassing, even stunning failure, in which the bureau's lawlessness was matched only by its incompetence. The F.B.I. conducted huge raids against pacifists, labor leaders and other dissidents during World War I, directing the arrest of tens of thousands of individuals. Yet it failed to uncover a single enemy spy, even as a nest of them blew up the enormous Black Tom munitions dump in Jersey City, riddling the Statue of Liberty with shrapnel. Combating Nazi agents before and during World War II, the F.B.I. was, by its own assessment, "a laughing-stock." During the cold war, a Soviet spy said its agents were "like children lost in the woods." The bureau often seemed as alarmed by its new rival, the C.I.A., as it was by foreign intelligence networks. It failed repeatedly to break up spy rings like the Rosenbergs', even forgetting it already had damning evidence in its files against the atomic spies Harry Gold and Klaus Fuchs. Hoover himself derided the "gross incompetency" of his agency in failing to keep better tabs on Lee Harvey Oswald after his return from the Soviet Union. There were successes, of course. By the 1950s, the F.B.I. had placed a spy "inside the highest councils of the Soviet Union," something that neither the C.I.A. nor American military intelligence had accomplished. The political wizardry of Lyndon Johnson finally persuaded Hoover, an inveterate racist, to run a counterintelligence program that largely destroyed the Ku Klux Klan of the civil rights era. Yet by the 1960s, the F.B.I. seemed just as lost combating domestic revolutionaries as it was battling foreign spies. The bureau failed utterly to stop the lunatic amateurs of the Weather Underground, even as they planted a bomb in the Capitol. "Four or five" of the agents charged with infiltrating the antiwar movement "liked their new lives so much that they never came back." The Puerto Rican terrorist group F.A.L.N. carried out a hundred bombing attacks and "pulled off the most lucrative armed robbery in the history of the United States" without a single member being apprehended. In 1971, the bureau got black-bagged itself, as a group calling itself the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the F.B.I. broke into a field office and made off with documents exposing some of its most notorious activities. Untold resources were wasted over decades surveilling the tiny Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, without turning up a trace of sedition. By 1976, 53 F.B.I. agents were under criminal investigation for such activities, and the bureau was forced to raid its own headquarters. From the very start of his career, Hoover spoke of fighting "terrorism," even imagining a "dirty bomb" delivered in an attaché case. Yet the F.B.I. proved singularly ill-equipped to deal with the modern reality. An Iraqi plot to kill Golda Meir on a 1973 trip to New York was thwarted only when two cars with bombs in them were towed away for occupying no-standing zones. (Makes one think differently about those traffic enforcement agents, doesn't it?) Botched confrontations with cults and right-wing radicals left a trail of blood from Whidbey Island to Ruby Ridge to the Branch Davidian compound in Waco. The bureau was penetrated again and again by double agents from Russia, China, Cuba, even Al Qaeda. (The Chinese spy Katrina Leung, truly a double agent, seduced both the special agent in charge of her case and "a leading F.B.I. counterintelligence expert on China.") F.B.I. turncoats like Robert Hanssen and Earl Pitts went undetected for years, costing "hundreds of millions of dollars" and the lives of a "dozen or more foreign agents who worked for the bureau and the C.I.A." THE best terror informant the bureau actually had was dropped for fear that he might be a double agent, while as late as 2002, only eight agents could speak Arabic. The F.B.I. remained a "pyramid of paper," mysteriously unable to create a decent computer system; by 2000, "the average American teenager had more computer power than most F.B.I. agents," according to Weiner, and agents "could not perform a Google search or send e-mails outside their offices." Hoover's successors were mostly clueless bunglers; save for the current director, Robert S. Mueller III, none completed their terms of office. It's infinitely depressing to read once again the epic of that ultimate loose cannon, Louis Freeh, who decided that his main enemy was the Clinton White House. He did not speak to President Clinton for nearly four years, and ultimately resigned without notice, three months shy of 9/11. It's infuriating to read of how F.B.I. agents investigating Al Qaeda were stymied from stopping the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, thanks to a bureau misinterpretation of a Justice Department directive about sharing evidence. One agent, trying desperately to get a search warrant for the apartment of the captured terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui through the afternoon of Sept. 10, 2001, received a final denial from the F.B.I.'s International Terrorism Operations Section telling him that the "F.B.I. does not have a dog in this fight." Small wonder that Thomas Kean, the Republican chairman of the 9/11 Commission, concluded: "We can't continue in this country with an intelligence agency with the record the F.B.I. has. You have a record of an agency that's failed, and it's failed again and again and again." Weiner, a Pulitzer Prize winner and former New York Times reporter who has spent years writing about America's security apparatus and who won the National Book Award for his history of the C.I.A., "Legacy of Ashes," has done prodigious research, yet tells this depressing story with all the verve and coherence of a good spy thriller. He holds out hope for the considerable ethical and operational reforms instituted by Mueller, finding both a reborn bureau and a federal government "trying, in good faith, to balance liberty and security." This is encouraging, though as Obama's willingness to sign the National Defense Authorization Act shows, all such efforts remain at the mercy of presidents and their insatiable appetite for information. J. Edgar Hoover was a classic paranoid, who fostered paranoid everywhere. Kevin Baker is a novelist and historian who lives in New York City.
Guardian Review
Despite recently declassified materials, historians of the FBI remain painfully hostage to the fragmentary records that survived "the routine destruction of FBI files" typifying J Edgar Hoover's 48-year, secrecy-obsessed directorship and especially "the bonfire of his personal files after his death" in 1972. Because deliberate cover-ups naturally excite scurrilous conjectures, suspicious students of the bureau have reacted to Hoover's well-oiled system for the undetectable destruction of government archives by mimicking his tendency to assume the worst, often on the basis of hearsay evidence, about the target of an investigation. Author of a celebrated account of serial blundering and incompetence at the CIA, Tim Weiner is commendably impervious to this familiar temptation, refusing to replicate Hoover's paranoid style. Although Hoover unscrupulously exploited stories of homosexuality to discredit or silence political adversaries, Weiner begins his latest book, based in part on the freshly declassified documents, by dismissing the racy gossip that Hoover himself was "a tyrant in a tutu". And although one of Hoover's chief deputies testified to his boss's smouldering bigotry ("He hated liberalism, he hated blacks, he hated Jews - he had this great long list of hates"), Weiner is more lenient in his own assessment, assuring us that Hoover "was not a monster" and concluding, in an effort at balance, that the man's "knowledge was enormous, though his mind was narrow". Leaving Hoover's alleged personality disorders to Hollywood scriptwriters, Weiner focuses his efforts instead on refuting a series of misperceptions about the FBI that a lasting cult of secrecy has allowed to crystallise in the public mind. The first of these misunderstandings is that the FBI, after 9/11, had to be dragged reluctantly from its traditional law-enforcement approach towards an unprecedented preventive mission, aimed at stopping in advance those who might possibly harm the country. There is nothing especially novel, it turns out, about the preventive mission assigned to the bureau in the war on terror. From its very origins, the FBI devoted the lion's share of its resources towards averting future harms, not towards solving past crimes, which remains a largely state and local function. As one-time FBI associate director Mark Felt (aka "Deep Throat") explained in the mid-1970s, the mission of the bureau has consistently been "to stop violence before it happens" by targeting individuals deemed dangerous by unaccountable bureaucrats on the basis of undisclosed evidence. Contrary to the comic-strip image of the G-man gunning down gangsters in the 30s, Hoover's fixation was the communist menace, a "malignant and evil way of life" with which red professors and preachers, union activists, movie-makers, civil rights leaders and student protesters threatened to infect the American population. While warning, after the second world war, that the Soviets might be secretly plotting nuclear terrorism inside the US, his real concern was to prevent secret armies of disloyal citizens from luring their countrymen into a noxiously anti-American way of life. Rather than fighting crime, Hoover, even after he severed his cloakroom ties to the malodorous politics of McCarthyism, kept busy "creating the political culture of the cold war". Refreshingly, Weiner also dismantles the myth of an imperial presidency, its powers supposedly swollen by real and imaginary threats. Permanent national-security bureaucracies, such as the FBI, make ephemerally sitting presidents seem not imperial but astonishingly easy to dominate, manipulate and deceive. After Truman announced that he wanted "no Gestapo or secret police" and objected to the FBI's "dabbling in sex-life scandals and plain blackmail", for instance, Hoover "all but declared war on the White House". The shocking "insubordination" of intelligence agencies towards the presidents they nominally serve is facilitated by the former's closely held possession of embarrassing information. Illegally obtained evidence of reputation-ruining antics permitted Hoover to defy the Kennedys without risking his job, just as it allowed him to charm (rather than merely threaten) presidents from FDR to LBJ with voyeuristic morsels about political rivals culled from his confidential trove. The way disgruntled FBI agents toppled Nixon's would-be imperial presidency by leaking secrets to the press illustrates again how a formal hierarchy of authority can be informally capsized. But perhaps the deepest reason why presidents have a hard time controlling their national security bureaucracies involves the preventive mission itself. The performance of routine law enforcement bodies can be evaluated by the percentage of committed crimes they have successfully solved. Moreover, their ability to indict and convict depends on their compliance with rules and procedures set by elected officials. By contrast, intelligence agencies cannot be disciplined in this way; nor is any clear method available for evaluating their performance or measuring, in retrospect, the number and gravity of attacks that they have successfully foiled. Hoover's "alliance" with President Truman's "strongest political enemies in Congress" also illustrates the inadequacy of schoolbook accounts of the American separation of powers. Rather than the legislative and executive branches checking and balancing each other for the sake of the public, what we find is an agency officially located within the executive but that repeatedly colluded with one of the parties inside the legislature to undermine sitting presidents and plot their electoral defeat. "Hoover knew how to use intelligence" not only to root out potential traitors, but "as an instrument of political warfare" to help red-hunting Republicans give grief to allegedly weak-on-communism Democrats such as Truman. Hoover's back-channelling of sensitive information to Richard Nixon, serving at the time on the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), is only the most famous example of the partisan-political game played by an unaccountable executive-branch bureaucracy that had no constitutional right to spend taxpayers' money to help one party depose the other. Another of Weiner's arresting themes is the way the bureau frequently overemphasised lesser threats and underemphasised greater ones. In the immediate postwar period, the diversion of scarce resources to red-hunting meant the neglect of organised crime. In the late 60s and early 70s, similarly, the "bureau's increasingly relentless focus on American political protests" and "political warfare against the American left" drained "time and energy away from foreign counterintelligence" and counterespionage. A similarly one-sided fixation has emerged in the decade after 9/11. In response to political pressure, the FBI now routinely resorts to what seems like solicitation and entrapment to compensate for an awkward deficit of homegrown Islamic terrorists: "More than half of the major cases the FBI brought against accused terrorists from 2007 and 2009 were stings." The implication, once again, is that the bureau's irrational focus on relatively marginal threats has significant costs, diverting investigative attention from much more serious perils to the country's and the world's wellbeing. For instance: "The FBI's relentless focus on fighting terrorism had an unforeseen consequence. The investigation and prosecution of white-collar crime plummeted, a boon to the Wall Street plunderings that helped create the greatest economic crisis in America since the 1930s." Weiner's passing reference to a "tug-of-war between security and liberty" brings us to the most pungent question raised by the history he recounts, namely: can the FBI's serial failures (for example, to prevent the Soviet theft of nuclear secrets or the 9/11 attack) really be attributed to the way the bureau's hands have been irresponsibly tied by civil liberties, Congressional oversight, freedom of the press, and the rule of law? In a few casual asides, Weiner suggests that the answer is "yes", that legality and individual rights have imposed a debilitating burden on America's intelligence agencies. He also seems to defend the same thesis from the opposite perspective: "Over the decades, the bureau has best served the cause of national security by bending and breaking the law." Fortunately or unfortunately, this conclusion is contradicted by almost every page of Weiner's detailed narrative, where the principal obstacles to the bureau's effective use of scarce resources in the defence of national security are meticulously rehearsed. They include a lack of professionalism, cultural insularity, monolingualism, bureaucratic routine, political partisanship, ideological fixation, and a failure of agents to follow up on promising leads. Legality and liberty are barely if ever mentioned in this regard. Not surprisingly, given his last book, Weiner also emphasises the dismayingly dysfunctional consequences of the "fight between the FBI and the CIA", which he describes as "a theatre of the absurd". The subsection that Weiner devotes to former FBI interrogator Ali Soufan also upends the facile supposition that security is invariably compromised when intelligence agents follow procedures. While Soufan quickly extracted actionable intelligence from captured al-Qaida suspect Abu Zubaydah using well-tested methods of studying the subject's background and building a personal rapport, inexperienced CIA interrogators, who excruciatingly water-boarded Zubaydah 83 times over an extended period, only motivated their helpless captive to fabricate tactically useless lies to stop the pain. Readers of a comprehensive history such as Weiner's come away with an indelible impression that the FBI chronically misjudges and capriciously ranks the dangers facing the country. For instance, even when "the Communist Party was no longer a significant force in American political life . . . Hoover had to continue to represent the party as a mortal threat". Such misuse of scarce resources cannot be explained by too much liberty but only by the tunnel vision of a specialised bureaucracy that needs to justify its existence to the Appropriations Committee. Hoover was convinced that the American civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements were orchestrated from Moscow, but he consistently overestimated the danger posed to America by "the American communist underground" because only a fifth column under the control of "the international communist conspiracy" would fall squarely under the domestic jurisdiction of the FBI. Operating without reality checks, or even sanity checks, secretive intelligence agencies are unlikely to provide a rational assessment and prioritisation of the many real but not equally urgent threats to national security. In 1943, Attorney General Francis Biddle ordered Hoover to destroy the bureau's list of American citizens who, although they had committed no crime, were deemed dangerous and worthy of military detention. (Hoover defied the order, quietly renaming and better concealing the list.) What disturbed Biddle was the impossibility of effectively challenging a conclusion reached within a secretive bureaucracy. The attempt to pick out those who were likely at a later date to break the law naturally led to a search for proxy indicators, which boiled down in practice to speech critical of government policy. As a result, during the Vietnam war, "The FBI found it hard to distinguish between the kid with a Molotov cocktail and the kid with a picket sign." The institutional shortcomings of the FBI, Weiner is surely right, cannot be traced exclusively to Hoover's personal eccentricities and foibles. That the bureau's troubles have more enduring sources was made clear, for example, by the way Dick Cheney, after 9/11, "renewed the spirit of the red raids" and "revived the techniques of surveillance that the FBI had used in the war on communism". The root cause of the bureau's frequent ineffectiveness also lies deeper than the aversion to self-criticism characterising specialised bureaucracies or the vulnerability of secretive agencies to partisan-political capture. It is trite but true that public officials, like all of us, tend to behave irresponsibly when unwatched. This common failing is exacerbated when national security is at stake, for the simple reason that insecurity is highly emotional, subjective, variable and easy to manipulate for strategic ends. Elected and unelected officials understand that when fear levels are raised - justifiably or not - an insecure public will tend to support national security policies uncritically and will not, until many years have passed, hold its leaders responsible for misconceived actions, including mendaciously justified wars and the arbitrary snaring of confused young men in undercover stings. That such seemingly incurable ills persist well beyond Hoover's long personal shadow is perhaps the most important lesson of this carefully researched study of occult powers inside the most externally powerful modern democratic state. Stephen Holmes's The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror is published by Cambridge University Press. To order Enemies for pounds 20.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop - Stephen Holmes Caption: Captions: J Edgar Hoover pointing out regional FBI offices on a map of the United States Author of a celebrated account of serial blundering and incompetence at the CIA, Tim Weiner is commendably impervious to this familiar temptation, refusing to replicate [J Edgar Hoover]'s paranoid style. Although Hoover unscrupulously exploited stories of homosexuality to discredit or silence political adversaries, Weiner begins his latest book, based in part on the freshly declassified documents, by dismissing the racy gossip that Hoover himself was "a tyrant in a tutu". And although one of Hoover's chief deputies testified to his boss's smouldering bigotry ("He hated liberalism, he hated blacks, he hated Jews - he had this great long list of hates"), Weiner is more lenient in his own assessment, assuring us that Hoover "was not a monster" and concluding, in an effort at balance, that the man's "knowledge was enormous, though his mind was narrow". Hoover's "alliance" with President [Truman]'s "strongest political enemies in Congress" also illustrates the inadequacy of schoolbook accounts of the American separation of powers. Rather than the legislative and executive branches checking and balancing each other for the sake of the public, what we find is an agency officially located within the executive but that repeatedly colluded with one of the parties inside the legislature to undermine sitting presidents and plot their electoral defeat. "Hoover knew how to use intelligence" not only to root out potential traitors, but "as an instrument of political warfare" to help red-hunting Republicans give grief to allegedly weak-on-communism Democrats such as Truman. Hoover's back-channelling of sensitive information to Richard Nixon, serving at the time on the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), is only the most famous example of the partisan-political game played by an unaccountable executive-branch bureaucracy that had no constitutional right to spend taxpayers' money to help one party depose the other. Another of Weiner's arresting themes is the way the bureau frequently overemphasised lesser threats and underemphasised greater ones. In the immediate postwar period, the diversion of scarce resources to red-hunting meant the neglect of organised crime. In the late 60s and early 70s, similarly, the "bureau's increasingly relentless focus on American political protests" and "political warfare against the American left" drained "time and energy away from foreign counterintelligence" and counterespionage. A similarly one-sided fixation has emerged in the decade after 9/11. In response to political pressure, the FBI now routinely resorts to what seems like solicitation and entrapment to compensate for an awkward deficit of homegrown Islamic terrorists: "More than half of the major cases the FBI brought against accused terrorists from 2007 and 2009 were stings." The implication, once again, is that the bureau's irrational focus on relatively marginal threats has significant costs, diverting investigative attention from much more serious perils to the country's and the world's wellbeing. For instance: "The FBI's relentless focus on fighting terrorism had an unforeseen consequence. The investigation and prosecution of white-collar crime plummeted, a boon to the Wall Street plunderings that helped create the greatest economic crisis in America since the 1930s." - Stephen Holmes.
Kirkus Review
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, 2008, etc.) delivers an authoritative and often frightening history of what has been, in effect, America's secret police. The history of the FBI is easily divided into two periods: the J. Edgar Hoover period and after. In 1924, before he was 30, Hoover took over a tiny, tawdry Bureau and built it into a fearsome empire he ruled as a personal fiefdom until his death in 1972. The Bureau under Hoover did as it pleased and answered to no one. Illegal wiretapping, bugging, black-bag jobs--the organization did it all in the service of Hoover's relentless pursuit of communist subversives real and imaginary. In the process he assembled files of devastating information on thousands of Americans from the presidents on down. Much of this scurrilous information was obtained on the direct orders of presidents and attorneys general, and was supplied to them for their own uses. After Hoover's death, these abuses were reined in, but the Bureau has since endured a series of flawed directors who have proven unable to bring order to its sprawling and insular chaos or overcome a culture of rigidity and bureaucratic ineptitude. Weiner focuses on the FBI's activities investigating and attempting to prevent subversion and terrorism and writes little about the Bureau's pursuit of gangsters and white-collar criminals, which has taken up far fewer resources than the public supposes. A major theme is the difference between investigations intended to support criminal prosecutions and those intended to disrupt potential subversive activity. The former require strict adherence to constitutional safeguards; the latter, however necessary they seemed at the time, have all too often trampled on civil liberties. Striking an appropriate balance between liberty and security remains an ongoing challenge for the FBI. Weiner contributes much new, troubling and thoroughly substantiated information to any serious consideration of that issue. A sober, monumental and unflinchingly critical account of a problematic institution.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The FBI during the 20th century was synonymous with J. Edgar Hoover, whose secret intelligence operations were top priority. This title examines the vital role that gathering and using intelligence played in defining the FBI and its place in American society. Weiner does an excellent job of creating a definitive history and paints a clear picture for the listener of how from the 1920s until his death, Hoover was obsessed with intelligence, obtained despite illegalities and violations of civil liberties, and how it fueled his vast power through several Presidents. There are many revelations here: Hoover's real obsession was anti-communism, and he wove this into everything from the civil rights movement to his distrust of the CIA. Another eye-opener is the lack of evidence relating to rumors of Hoover's sexuality. VERDICT Stefan Rudnicki does an outstanding job of conveying the mood, gravity, and emotion of the text via his energetic reading. ["Weiner's book is so engrossing that even the footnotes make for worthwhile reading," read the also starred review of the Random hc, LJ 4/15/12.-Ed.]-Scott R. DiMarco, -Mansfield Univ. of Pennsylvania Lib. (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Chapter 1 Anarchy J . Edgar Hoover went to war at the age of -twenty--two, on Thursday morning, July 26, 1917. He walked out of his boyhood home in Washington, D.C., and set off for his new life at the Justice Department, to serve as a foot soldier in the army of lawmen fighting spies, saboteurs, Communists, and anarchists in the United States. America had entered World War I in April. The first waves of her troops were landing in France, unprepared for the horrors that faced them. On the home front, Americans were gripped by the fear of sabotage by German secret agents. The country had been on high alert for a year, ever since an enemy attack on a huge warehouse of American munitions bound for the battlefront. The blast at Black Tom Island, on the western edge of New York Harbor, had set off two thousand tons of explosives in the dark of a midsummer night. Seven people died at the site. In Manhattan, thousands of windows were shattered by the shock waves. The Statue of Liberty was scarred by shrapnel. Hoover worked for the War Emergency Division at the Justice Department, charged with preventing the next surprise attack. He displayed a martial spirit and a knack for shaping the thinking of his superiors. He won praise from the division's chief, John Lord O'Brian. "He worked Sundays and nights, as I did," O'Brian recounted. "I promoted him several times, simply on merits." Hoover rose quickly to the top of the division's Alien Enemy Bureau, which was responsible for identifying and imprisoning politically suspect foreigners living in the United States. At the age of -twenty--three, Hoover oversaw 6,200 Germans who were interned in camps and 450,000 more who were under government surveillance. At -twenty--four, he was placed in charge of the newly created Radical Division of the Justice Department, and he ran the biggest counterterrorism operations in the history of the United States, rounding up thousands of radical suspects across the country. He had no guns or ammunition. Secret intelligence was his weapon. Hoover lived all his life in Washington, D.C., where he was born on New Year's Day 1895, the youngest of four children. He was the son and the grandson of government servants. His father, Dickerson, was afflicted with depression; deep melancholy cost him his job as a government cartographer and likely hastened his death. His mother, Annie, was doting but dour. Hoover lived at home with her for the first -forty--three years of his life, until the day she died. He told several of his closest aides that he remained a single man because he feared the wrong woman would be his downfall; a bad marriage would destroy him. Hoover's niece, Margaret Fennell, grew up alongside him; she stayed in touch with him for six decades. She knew him as well as anyone could. "I sometimes have thought that he -really---I don't know how to put -it---had a fear of becoming too personally involved with people," she reflected. If he ever expressed love beyond his devotion to God and country, there were no witnesses. He was sentimental about dogs, but unemotional about people. His inner life was a mystery, even to his immediate family and his few close friends. Hoover learned how to march in military formation and how to make a formal argument. The drill team and the debate team at Central High School were the highlights of his youth. Central High's debate squad was the best in the city, and Hoover became one of its stars; his school newspaper praised his competitive spirit and his "cool relentless logic." He told the paper, after a stirring victory over a college team, that debating had given him "a practical and beneficial example of life, which is nothing more or less than the matching of one man's wit against another." Hoover went to work for the government of the United States as soon as he had his high school diploma. Its monuments were all around him. His -two--story home sat six blocks southeast of Capitol Hill. At the crest of the hill stood the chandeliered chambers of the Senate and the House, the colossal temple of the Supreme Court, and the Library of Congress, with its vaulted ceilings and stained glass. Hoover dutifully recited the devotions of the Presbyterian Church on Sundays, but the Library of Congress was the secular cathedral of his youth. The library possessed every book published in the United States. The reverent hush of its central reading room imparted a sense that all knowledge was at hand, if you knew where to look. The library had its own system of classification, and Hoover learned its complexities as a cataloguer, earning money for school by filing and retrieving information. He worked days at the library while he studied in the early evenings and on summer mornings at George Washington University, where he earned his master's degree in law in June 1917. He registered for military service but joined the Justice Department to fight the war at home. "The gravest threats" On April 6, 1917, the day America entered World War I, President Woodrow W. Wilson signed executive orders giving the Justice Department the power to command the arrest and imprisonment, without trial, of any foreigner deemed disloyal. He told the American people that Germany had "filled our unsuspecting communities and even our offices of government with spies, and set criminal intrigues everywhere afoot." The president's words stoked fear across the country, and the fear placed a great weight on the Justice Department. "When we declared war," O'Brian said, "there were persons who expected to see a veritable reign of terror in America." O'Brian watched over Hoover and his colleagues as they labored day and night in cramped and smoky rooms at the War Emergency Division and the Alien Enemy Bureau, poring over fragmentary reports of plots against America. They were like firemen hearing the ceaseless ringing of false alarms. "Immense pressure" fell upon them, O'Brian recalled; they faced demands from politicians and the public for the "indiscriminate prosecution" and "wholesale repression" of suspect Americans and aliens alike, often "based on nothing more than irresponsible rumor." Before Black Tom, "the people of this nation had no experience with subversive activities," he said. "The government was likewise unprepared." After Black Tom, thousands of potential threats were reported to the government. American leaders feared the enemy could strike anywhere, at any time. The German masterminds of Black Tom had been at work from the moment World War I began in Europe, in the summer of 1914. They had planned to infiltrate Washington and undermine Wall Street; they had enlisted Irish and Hindu nationalists to strike American targets; they had used Mexico and Canada as safe havens for covert operations against the United States. While Hoover was still studying law at night school, at the start of 1915, Germany's military attaché in the United States, Captain Franz von Papen, had received secret orders from Berlin: undermine America's will to fight. Von Papen began to build a propaganda machine in the United States; the Germans secretly gained control of a major New York newspaper, the Evening Mail; their front men negotiated to buy The Washington Post and the New York Sun. Political fixers, corrupt journalists, and crooked detectives served the German cause. But after a German -U--boat torpedoed the British passenger ship Lusitania on May 7, 1915, killing 1,119 people, including 274 Americans, the German ambassador glumly cabled Berlin: "We might as well admit openly that our propaganda here has collapsed completely." Americans were enraged at the attack on civilians; Germany's political and diplomatic status in the United States was grievously damaged. President Wilson ordered that all German embassy personnel in the United States be placed under surveillance. Secretary of State Robert Lansing sent secret agents to wiretap German diplomats. By year's end, von Papen and his fellow attachés were expelled from the United States. When Hoover arrived at the Justice Department, O'Brian had just tried and convicted a German spy, Captain Franz von Rintelen. The case was -front--page news. Von Rintelen had arrived in New York a few weeks before the sinking of the Lusitania, carrying a forged Swiss passport. On orders from the German high command, he had recruited idle sailors on New York's docks, radical Irish nationalists, a Wall Street con artist, and a drunken Chicago congressman in plans to sabotage American war industries with a combination of business frauds and firebombs. But Captain von Rintelen had fled the United States, rightly fearing the exposure of his secret plans. British intelligence officers, who had been reading German cables, arrested him as he landed in -En-gland, roughly interrogated him in the Tower of London, and handed him over to the Justice Department for indictment and trial. "America never witnessed anything like this before," President Wilson told Congress after the captain's arrest. "A little while ago, such a thing would have seemed incredible. Because it was incredible we made no preparation for it." Terrorists and anarchists represented "the gravest threats against our national peace and safety," the president said. "Such creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy must be crushed out. . . . The hand of our power should close over them at once." J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI would become the instruments of that power. Excerpted from Enemies: A History of the FBI by Tim Weiner All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
| Author's Note | p. xv |
| Part I Spies and Saboteurs | |
| 1 Anarchy | p. 3 |
| 2 Revolution | p. 7 |
| 3 Traitors | p. 13 |
| 4 Communists | p. 26 |
| 5 "Who is Mr. Hoover?" | p. 33 |
| 6 Underworlds | p. 47 |
| 7 "They never stopped watching us" | p. 60 |
| 8 Red Flags | p. 65 |
| Part II World War | |
| 9 The Business of Spying | p. 73 |
| 10 The Juggler | p. 81 |
| 11 Secret Intelligence | p. 92 |
| 12 "To strangle the United States" | p. 96 |
| 13 Law of War | p. 109 |
| 14 The Machine of Detection | p. 119 |
| 15 Organizing the World | p. 125 |
| Part III Cold War | |
| 16 No Gestapo | p. 131 |
| 17 Showdown | p. 140 |
| 18 "Red fascism" | p. 147 |
| 19 Surprise Attack | p. 151 |
| 20 Paranoia | p. 163 |
| 21 "It looks like World War III is here" | p. 171 |
| 22 No Sense of Decency | p. 179 |
| 23 Game Without Rules | p. 188 |
| 24 The Long Shadow | p. 191 |
| 25 "Don't trust anybody" | p. 202 |
| 26 Immoral Conduct | p. 211 |
| 27 "Murder was in style" | p. 216 |
| 28 Dangerous Man | p. 223 |
| 29 Rule by Fear | p. 230 |
| 30 "You got this phone tapped?" | p. 239 |
| 31 "The man I'm depending on" | p. 253 |
| 32 Clearly Illegal | p. 264 |
| 33 The Ultimate Weapon | p. 277 |
| 34 "Pull down the temple" | p. 288 |
| Part IV War on Terror | |
| 35 Conspirators | p. 307 |
| 36 "The Bureau cannot survive" | p. 320 |
| 37 House of Cards | p. 329 |
| 38 "A state of continual danger" | p. 337 |
| 39 The Price of Silence | p. 351 |
| 40 Mosaic | p. 367 |
| 41 The Blind Sheikh | p. 374 |
| 42 Flaws in the Armor | p. 382 |
| 43 An Easy Target | p. 396 |
| 44 All Our Weapons | p. 413 |
| 45 "If we don't do this, people will die" | p. 432 |
| Afterword | p. 449 |
| Notes | p. 451 |
| Index | p. 513 |
