Customer Reviews

The FBI: A History

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The FBI is a meticulously researched book about an American institution. Unlike most other FBI books, the focus is not on J. Edgar Hoover, but on what might be called the rest of the FBI story. The book covers the origins of the FBI beginning with the creation of the Secret Service during the Civil War and the growth of federal law enforcement leading to the creation of the FBI in 1908.

This book makes some surprising findings such as the fact that as of September 10, 2001, there were only 6 Muslim FBI agents and only 21 FBI agents who could speak Arabic. This was a major factor in the success of the terrorists on 9/11. Another factor was the lack of communications and cooperation with the CIA.

This is a great book about the FBI. Its only weakness is a lack of detailed info about J. Edgar Hoover the man and whatever illegal activities that he was up to.

The book had many good points about the beginning of the FBI and progress of growth of the FBI

This audiobook is a serious and rather dry history of how the FBI evolved. It focuses much more on the political, strategic and legal frameworks which created and formed the bureau through its history. Issues are considered at very high level, only rarely illustrated with anecdotes at the street/law enforcement level.

There's some interesting stuff in the book and you leave it better informed and with a different perspective on the FBI - but it is hard work at times and not a pacy true crime book like Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. Having said this I found the more recent history fairly engaging, so perhaps my lack of engagement with other sections of the book was due more to a lack of familiarity with the cast of characters than the content.

The audio book reader is adequate but prone to repeated basic errors (i.e. reading 'character' for 'charter') which tends to distract.

I ordered a used copy of "The FBI:A history" and it was rated by the seller as being in excellent condition.

What was received was an underlined copy, with notations beneath,and above paragraphs as well as in the margins of the book.

When I contacted the seller and told them of the condition of the book received, they immediately sent a replacement that was in the condition stated. I would certainly buy again from this seller

It says something about the bankruptcy of the American Left that this book, the best critical history of an American institution, was written by an Englishman.

Dr. Jeffreys-Jones is largely free of two intellectual flaws of U.S. leftists. First, he is free of the Fuhrer Prinzip which poisons American liberals. American Leftists make their heroes into demi-gods and when those heroes have flaws, they need scapegoats. J. Edgar Hoover is the perfect candidate for scapegoat and if his record needs to be twisted to fit the role, so be it. Jeffreys-Jones has too much integrity for that. He presents Hoover in all his strengths and weaknesses. He shows just how much of the political spying was ordered by such liberal icons as FDR. In this he complements Richard Gid Powers' fairminded biography.

Second, he avoids the Manichean tendency of his U.S. counterparts to demonize any entity they criticize. The author finds as much to praise as to criticize about the Bureau. This makes the criticisms more credible.

The author views the history of the Bureau through the prism of race, which initially seems odd. The FBI after all is not the affirmative action police; they are assigned all sorts of crimes. An agent I knew in 1968 told me that his office spent the bulk of its time tracking stolen cars that had been dumped across state lines. And while minority agents should make up more than 16% of the total special agents, most elite government jobs are even lower. Only the military has anything approaching the proper numbers.

Yet there are a lot of rewards by looking at the Bureau from this angle. First, the author brings the history of the Bureau back almost 40 years earlier than the traditional birthday of the FBI to a time when the sole task of federal investigators was to support civil rights of African-Americans. He also points out that the Bureau has been hampered by a lack of diversity in dealing with the Mafia as well as in investigating Muslim terrorists.

The author says some annoying things.

Some of them are the result of his having to wade through a mountain of material written in large part by a lot of crackbrain simpletons. For instance:

1. The only reason John McNamara was not convicted of the bombing of the Los Angeles Times was because he pled guilty to avoid the death penalty.

2. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade was not a group of democrats with only a handful of Communists involved. There were a few dupes who joined up, but any honest history of the Spanish Civil War will admit the dominance of various Communist factions. There were no George Orwells among them.

3. Dr. Jeffreys-Jones falls for a conspiracy theory involving the attack on Pearl Harbor which is absurd on its face.

4. Louis Freeh did not leak a memo because of a "report" that President Clinton was receiving funds from the Chinese government. The FBI was able to track the fund transfers and the only reason no one was indicted was because the Clinton Justice Department refused to prosecute.

Some relevant but inconvenient points are omitted. The homophobia Dr. Jeffreys-Jones accuses the Bureau of was certainly encouraged by Bill Moyers' orders on behalf of LBJ for the FBI to provide a list of gay Republicans for blackmail purposes. And he accuses the FBI of not coordinating information with the CIA before 9/11, but he fails to disclose that the Clinton Administration made such sharing of information illegal.

And some of the annoying elements are purely Dr. Jeffreys-Jones own prejudices. There may be valid criticisms to make about the undermining of the Chilean and Nicaraguan governments, but that they were democratically elected is not one of them. The Allende government was duly elected in Chile but engaged in massive voter fraud thereafter and the Sandinista came to power peacefully (it is a bit of a stretch to say they came to power "democratically") they simply refused to hold elections. To argue that these governments were democratic is grossly misleading. The Nazis came to power by Constitutional means and I, for one, believe that the world would have been saved a lot of hell if some 1930s version of the CIA has toppled the "democratically" elected Nazi government.

But these failures should not deter even a conservative from reading this valuable book. It is rare to read a leftist who discusses the FBI with the respect it deserves and many of the author's criticisms of the Bureau are strengthened by his giving the Bureau credit where credit is due.

This book is the product of something called The FBI Project, a European effort to create a European FBI. Given the demographic trends in Europe, which will see Muslim majorities in much of Europe well before the end of the century, it is encouraging to see a European considering the need for a racially sensitive federal police force. That the project is basing its efforts on the FBI is a tribute to the Bureau.

Anyone contemplating this book purchase should first consult the author's account of the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh's infant son on March 1, 1932, truly one of the most infamous crimes in American history. Professor Jeffreys-Jones relates on page 88 that the culprit, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, was apprehended in June 1932, based on handwriting analysis done by one Charles Appel of the FBI. According to the author, Appel's analysis held up at the trial and the kidnapper went to the chair.

The Professor's version of these events is detached from reality. Bruno Hauptmann was actually arrested on September 19, 1934, based on information obtained by the investigators the previous day. No handwriting analysis was involved. Hauptmann had purchased some gas, given one of the ransom notes in payment, and assured the gas station employee that the bill, a gold certificate, was valid and one of a hundred he still had. The suspicious employee wrote Hauptmann's license plate number on the bill. This bill was detected by a bank employee on September 18, 1934 as part of the ransom and the authorities were called.

Hauptmann's trial for kidnapping and murder began in New Jersey in January 1935. The New York Times gave the trial extensive coverage, and identified the eight handwriting experts called by the prosecutors. Charles Appel was not one of the eight. How Appel's analysis supposedly held up at a trial in which he did not testify is truly a mystery Jeffreys-Jones needs to explain.