The Unsleeping Eye: Secret Police and Their Victims

In his analysis of five eras in which""secret policing has been of vital importance to government,"" Australian writer Stove (Prince of Music) sheds new light on the intrigues of the major""spymasters"" for Queen Elizabeth I; explicates the""genius for anticipating 20th-century dictatorships' methods"" of the obscure Joseph Fouche, influential police minister to Napoleon; explores the roots of the former Soviet Union's 20th-century spy apparatus in the 16th-century cutthroat Oprichina; and reviews the""relentlessly conspiratorial habits of mind"" in Hitler's""Reich Security Main Office."" His argument for undertaking such a project: that governments don't want us to think about domestic surveillance and historians have failed to write about it. A long and sympathetic chapter on the career of controversial FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover is undercut by cheap shots at Franklin D. Roosevelt (""Fifty year's glutinous hagiography has failed to detect in FDR any principle whatsoever""), though, and other low blows (Martin Luther King Jr.""has become the opiate of post-Christian America's masses"") mar its pages. Stove spends pages condemning rumors about Hoover's homosexuality--at the same time that he off-handedly repeats slanders against liberal hero Adlai Stevenson--while dismissing in a paragraph the harm of Hoover-instigated spy operations directed at American citizens. Stove's subject is worthy, but his objectivity is questionable.