Enemies: A History Of The FBI (2012) - Plot & Excerpts
You will not read a scarier book this year. I finished this book as we were hearing the Congressional report on the use of torture in the war on terror. Pretty good timing and in this area the FBI comes out much better than Weiner's subject in his last book, the CIA . With Enemies and the previous Legacy of Ashes we learn that the best description of the relationship between America and her intelligence services is bumpy. And that is being most generous. As he did with the CIA in Legacy of Ashes the author plots the history of the FBI from it's beginnings in the administration of Teddy Roosevelt. The first thing one thinks of in the history of the FBI is J Edgar Hoover. Hoover was a complex man. As with most tyrants he started out, most likely, with good intent. Soon enough, however, the ability to maintain and grow his power base superseded everything else. Books can be and have been written on the psychology of Hoover but as relates to this book we are presented with a just the facts rendition of Hoover's FBI. This ranges from his overriding fear of communism, his constant use of bugs and black bag jobs, his ever present files on the powerful, his battles with the Kennedys and King, to the machinations made by his lieutenants to oust him before he died in his sleep. Perhaps more interesting is the books second half which features the history of the bureau post Hoover. The Church hearings of the mid seventies brought about the first call to end the FBI as we know it. The constant battles between the CIA and FBI which have led to disasters of epic proportion. Interestingly, for all the pledging that the two services had found Jesus in understanding they must work together after 9/11, change is proven false over and over as details of the enhanced interrogations are written about. In regards to the various FBI directors post Hoover the results are mixed. What becomes clear is that if any individual is responsible for the failures of 9/11 it is Louis Freeh. The Director of the FBI under President Clinton became, on purpose or unknowingly, the cat's paw for the Republicans in the myriad investigations of the Clinton Presidency. Obsessed with Clinton, communication broke down not only with the White House, but within the organization itself. It is hard to read the details of the agents who knew something was going to happen and tried to get cooperation from the leaders of the Bureau. Reading a memo written by an agent days before 9/11 in which he resigned himself that he had done all he could to get his superiors attention. When he notes that " God forbid an attack comes of that method" you want to shake someone. The method: flying planes into buildings. If the pre 9/11 days are shown to be filled with incompetence and ineptitude there is no feeling that the behaviors are anything more than a bureau overmatched for the job at hand. There was nothing criminal in the bureau's behavior. Post 9/11 however the Bush administration put everything on the table. The details in the book correlate a great deal with the news of this week from the Senate. For the FBI in this time period, however, a hero emerges. Director Robert Mueller becomes an unlikely hero when he consistently badgered Bush and Cheney over the legality of the torture methods used. Just as importantly many of the successes of the intelligence community post 9/11 came from the FBI who refused to practice those methods. As we now know the CIA did. Reading about FBI agents keeping files at Guantanamo labeled " potential war crimes" about their CIA and Army brethren is more than a little disconcerting.The ugliest section of the book in a book filled with ugly has to be the well told tale of President Bush and Vice President Cheney choosing to send White House counsel Alberto Gonzales to the hospital room of incapacitated Attorney General John Ashcroft to gain his signature extending the use of the enhanced techniques. At the time both the acting AG and the FBI Director Mueller were no longer willing to consent to these measures. All in all Weiner has in these two books produced two devastating documents that do nothing to make Americans feel safer. That these two agencies stated purpose is to do just that makes one question both their mission and it's success. There's not much to see here: a one-damn-thing-after-another journalistic history, which makes no effort whatsoever to explain the events that it's relating. No doubt if you can simply accept and embrace that, you could find it vaguely interesting. Weiner has a major advantage here, compared to his CIA history, which was so sprawling and unfocused that I sometimes wondered if he'd bothered to edit it at all: the FBI, for a long time, can be told as the story of J. Edgar. Of course, that story has been told over and again, but at least the first half of this book has some unity. On the downside, like the CIA book, in Weiner's eyes, the FBI can't win: either it's doing unconstitutional or flat out illegal things, or it's not doing enough to prevent terrorism. More importantly, it too often turns into a history of things that happened in the world with which the FBI was, in however slight a way, connected. As with the CIA book, there's very little to suggest that this is a history of the institution, rather than a history of some stuff that happened this one time. This is made even worse by his (again, journalistic) tendency to see history through one very specific understanding of the present, to wit, battles over the strength of the executive. You're better off reading actual histories of Al Qaeda and the Bush administration than reading this; I hope there are better books out there on the FBI.
What do You think about Enemies: A History Of The FBI (2012)?
What insight. So much to learn about the FBI. The writing is objective, clear and well done.
—jmnov
