Enemies: A History of the FBI
Tim Weiner. Random, $30 (560p) ISBN 978-1-4000-6748-0
”A secret police is anathema in a democracy. But the FBI’s powers make it America’s closest counterpart,” writes Weiner, noting that not crime-fighting but pursuing terrorists and spies has been the agency’s main mission for a century. In this revealing history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Weiner, a Pulitzer-winning journalist, depicts a secret, and highly politicized, intelligence outfit to rival the CIA that he chronicled in his National Book Award–winning Legacy of Ashes. Drawing on newly released documents, Weiner follows the Bureau’s century-long war against foreign spies, terrorists domestic and foreign, and alleged domestic “subversives” from communists to civil rights activists.The war was carried on with warrantless wiretapping, bugs, burglaries, illegal arrests, and armies of informants. His most eye-opening revelations concern how the Bureau has engaged in wide-ranging overseas espionage and covert operations: it helped choreograph the 1965 American invasion that installed Joaquin Balaguer—an FBI informant—as president of the Dominican Republic, and placed a spy in the highest councils of the Soviet and Chinese governments during the Cold War. FBI despot J. Edgar Hoover dominates the story vividly in a revisionist portrait of the spymaster: “not a monster,” Weiner says, but rather “an American Machiavelli," and Weiner shows how avidly his tramplings of constitutional rights were supported by presidents, who feasted on the secrets he fed them. If sometimes disorganized Weiner’s narrative is an important, judicious account of the tension between national security and civil liberties. Photos. B&w photos. Agent: Kathy Robbins. (Feb. 14)
