Customer Reviews

Wedge: From Pearl Harbor to 9/11--How the Secret War between the FBI and CIA Has Endangered National Security

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is one of those books you know people in high places should read, but of course they never will. If they actually do, they of course will be thwarted in their efforts to implement any corrections that are pointed out by the book, because the institutional forces that are involved are way too powerful, and way to attached to their perks and spheres of power to shift any, even for reasons of National Security.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation was essentially the creature, or creation anyway, of J. Edgar Hoover, who was the director of the Bureau for a record 46 years (a record not likely to ever be broken). Hoover built up the organization from an obscure office in the Department of Justice into a behemoth that ran down the "moto-bandits" of the 20's and early 30's (Dillinger, Bonnie & Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, Machinegun Kelly) and then helped put the East Coast mob into retreat, at least temporarily, in the mid-30's. By then he'd become powerful enough that he felt his power and authority should be expanded.

One of the directions in which he wished to extend his power was toward political dissent and disloyalty in the U.S. Hoover himself was apparently pretty apolitical, at least as far as partisan Republican vs. Democrat issues were concerned, but he was very disturbed by Communist influence, and possible Nazi influence, in the U.S., and he apparently felt that he should be in charge of rooting out the elements of these philosophies that were in the U.S.

Tied up with this was the issue of espionage. For a while, Hoover had a clear field, but when the U.S. entered World War II, his FBI, clearly a law enforcement agency trained to catch criminals, wasn't very good at catching spies. Worse, their focus was on *catching* them, as opposed to feeding them bad information, for instance, or following them to see who they led authorities to. Hoover's own mindset, stubbornly provincial and conservative, ruled out the Bureau learning how to do these things: instead, he doggedly persisted in attempts to control how enemy agents were dealt with, who actually dealt with them, and most importantly, who got the credit.

By the time the Office of Strategic Services was formed in 1942, the lines were already pretty clearly drawn. Hoover would oppose any expansion of intelligence capability outside of the Bureau itself, and doggedly continue to try and expand his power vis a vis intelligence matters. When he died 30 years later, he was still trying.

The first half of this book lays out the problems this created when the U.S. first tried to deal with the threat of the Nazis, and later with the Communists. Hoover's death didn't end the bureaucratic rivalry that had sprung up: by then the institutional memory of the CIA and FBI was too strong to be killed off by the absence of one individual. The rest of the book deals with the post-Hoover era, with the last chapter and an epilogue added on later, which outline the current difficulties in the War on Terror.

The author lays all of this out in considerable detail, and frankly at times it makes for pretty horrifying reading. All the way back in the beginning, Hoover absent-mindedly filed away the message the Nazis sent double-agent Dusko Popov asking him for ship dispositions and locations, torpedo net positions, and other very suggestive things regarding Pearl Harbor. When the attack actually occurred, Popov was in South America. The first report of the attack that he heard only gave note of it, and he was elated, figuring that with the information he had given the U.S. we must have won a terrific victory. He was later outraged to discover we didn't use the information. Hoover, apparently, didn't trust or like traitors, even those who betrayed our enemies.

There is one proviso with a book like this. *All* intelligence books written about recent history are somewhat problematic, in that the author tends to discover information about the *failures* of intelligence. Successes, if properly conducted, remain out of sight of the public. This book is probably especially prone to that, given that the subject is implicitly a failure, or series of failures, in intelligence. That being said, the author certainly had a lot of material to report, and regardless of any successes, there's enough here to make your hair stand on end. The book is somewhat dated, too: the main narrative finishes just as the first President Bush leaves office to be replaced by Bill Clinton, and the epilogue/afterward are frankly inadequate to deal with the issues facing us today. I would have much preferred it if the author had added another hundred pages, instead of the 20 or so that are tacked onto the end of this edition. He does mention constraints of space, so perhaps the publisher is to blame.

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in current affairs or the current intelligence failures in the U.S.

I found the World War II and the Cold War parts of this book pretty fascinating, and maybe the most enjoyable to read. The portrayal of Hoover is very nuanced and fair. The Epilogue about 9/11 is sobering and hits on some themes that I haven't read anywhere else. America was left virtually defensless, Riebling argues, because of the Clinton administration's fateful decision to elevate the FBI over the CIA -- to pursue a law enforcement approach to what had traditionally been intelligence problems. He shows how the Aldrich Ames spy case left CIA bureaucratically paralyzed, and how the FBI, under Louis Freeh, exploited the chance to become America's premier national security power. He traces the numerous interagency foul-ups which led inexorably to our national unpreparedneness for 9/11. He shows how the FBI's suspicion of a mole in CIA -- who turned out to be the FBI's own Hanssen -- sowed distrust which discouarged the sharing of information. This linking of 9/11 failures to the damage wrought by Hanssen and Ames is one of the most important labyrinths explored by Riebling, and I have the feeling that a whole book could be written about this aspect alone.

I read WEDGE when it was first published in 1994 and I just re-read it with the new Epilogue. I am stunned by how prophetic Riebling was and by how he shows so indisputably that 9/11 was caused by the same interagency conflict that has caused so many other tragic intelligence failures over 60 years.

In places Riebling goes into a lot of detail, which can be a bit eye-glazing if you are not a spy buff; but if you are one, this is a gold mine of unearthed facts and totally original, highly persusaive, indeed compellingly logical interpretation.

The writing is generaly good but uneven; sometimes flat, but sometimes nearly as good as anything in the Engish language. Would be very interested to see what Riebling produces next as I marked him a talent, perhaps a major talent, and it has been eight years between books for him. From what he has been writing at National Review Online about 9/11 and intelligence I take it he is still working these issues and clearly he is working them as well as anyone.

Although I know the CIA better than I do the FBI, I have spent time in the past ten years with law enforcement officers from over 40 countries including the US, and the bottom line is that the FBI bureaucracy (Supervisory Special Agents and the politically-motivated upper tiers of FBI management) are a worse threat to US security than individual terrorist groups, for the simple reason that as long as the FBI leadership remains in denial, in secret, and ineffective, the entirety of our homeland defense is incapacitated.

The earlier version of this book focused on the decades of historical enmity between CIA and FBI--in the early years, Edgar J. Hoover was clearly to blame for a culture of hostility between the two agencies and between the FBI and military intelligence--in one instance he actually suppressed early knowledge of Japanese intentions on Pearl Harbor obtained from a German agent tasked to fulfill their targeting requirements.

In later years the CIA took on more responsibility for shutting out the FBI, consistently refusing to brief them in to either internal counterintelligence failures, or foreign operations with a strong domestic counterintelligence matter.

What the author has done in the aftermath of 9-11 is update the book and make it even more relevant to every citizen and every elected official and every bureaucrat. The earlier edition made me very angry about how the senior FBI bureaucracy can sacrifice the national interest at the altar of its own selfish agenda of self-preservation and aggrandizement--from Special Agent Rowley to Special Agent Robert Wright, the FBI leadership consistently spends more time censoring and punishing its own people for honesty, than it does chasing terrorists. This new improved edition should make every citizen, every voter angry, and they should instruct their elected representatives that the time has come for a National Security Act that finally reforms national foreign intelligence, military intelligence, and law enforcement intelligence, and in passing, creates the homeland security intelligence act to create a federated system of state and local intelligence and counterintelligence cadres that operate under the jurisdiction of governors and mayors rather than the federal government.

Pogo had it right: we have met the enemy and he is us.

This is an audacious, exhaustive, highly original book. I think it's fair to say that Riebling is somewhat biased toward the CIA and against the FBI, although perhaps not without some very good reasons (for instance, FBI diretcor J. Edgar Hoover clearly didn't understand counterintelligence; also, the FBI refused to do intelligence analysis).

Riebling also takes a somewhat revisionist approach to the Cold War, implying in many places that the secret measures taken againt communist sympathizers by our government weren't that extreme, and noting that they were in fact more modest than those taken by Jefferson, Madison, et. al. against suspected British sympathizers in the early decades of the Republic.

There's a besetting contrarian current or draft in this work, which sometimes Riebling rides to great heights of interpretation (e.g., on KGB deception ops), but which sometimes blows him into dead-ends where the key data is still classified.

The book is rich in detail. There is tradecraft detail here one finds nowhere else -- e.g., Nazi spies' use of butterfly trays to smuggle microdots; the story of Project WALNUT, CIA's first foray into the computerization of its records; a fistfight between FBI agents and CIA officers over custody of a Soviet defector in a Washington, DC restaurant.

There are long stretches where one feels riveted as in the best spy novels. The material on Ian Fleming and the influence of the "James Bond" ethos is especially well done.

Expertly handled too is the vast amount of original mateiral on the colorful and controversial CIA spycatcher James Jesus Angleton, whose approach is explained with patience and precision. Riebling clearly had access to many who worked closely with Angleton, including FBI liaison officer Sam Papich, and as a result there is a sureness of touch where other writers have played false notes.

Overall, despite some disagreements with Riebling's interpretations, I found this book educating and entertaining. It's the only history of our intelligence community I know of which traces our current problems to our past ones. And unlike most other books in the field, it does NOT devolve into nonsenical claims that the U.S. is in imminent danger of becoming a police state simply because it must sometimes use secret weapons against ruthless foes.

Within the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) it is scarcely a secret that there has always been a strong undercurrent of rivalry between the FBI and CIA (and its predecessor the Office of Strategic Services, OSS). This book throws a good deal of light on that rivalry and the institutional cultures that foster it. Mark Riebling appears to provide a fair and accurate assessment of origins and history of this rivalry.

As the book makes clear, the FBI is a premier law enforcement agency whose culture emphasizes development of legal evidence through systematic investigations to be used in obtaining court convections of malefactors. The Bureau has never considered research and analysis as essential to this mission. Because of this, the FBI has always been very much square peg in the round hole of the IC.

CIA by contrast has a culture based on the collection of information (which not at all the same as legal evidence) and its transformation by research and analysis into knowledge which can guide and inform decision makers. This is indeed the principal function of all members of the IC, saving the FBI. In the absence of a strong national intelligence authority, which has been vainly sought after since the Pearl Harbor, these cultural differences have been allowed to fester and as the book claims weaken the U.S. national security establishment. (The Director of National Intelligence (DNI) is only the latest in a long history of fruitlessly trying to build a functioning national intelligence authority).

The book concentrates on the CIA-FBI rivalries that come to the fore in the complex areas of counter-intelligence (CI) and counter-terrorism (CT) where foreign and domestic boundaries tend to converge and law enforcement and intelligence priorities cross repeatedly. It is discouraging to read over and over how efforts to create central and coordinated CI and CT programs have been thwarted by this institutional rivalry between CIA and the FBI. The book also makes clear that the FBI is NOT the villain of this rivalry and that the cultures of the principal members of the IC predisposes them not only to withhold cooperation from that odd man out ,the FBI, but from each other as well.

Mark Riebling's The Wedge is a very comprehensive review of the historic animosity between what we now call the CIA and the FBI, though the split precedes even the creation of the current CIA. As could have been predicted in this book, an intelligence "czar" - the Director of National Intelligence - has finally been appointed to try to make these two organizations put aside their organizational cultures and work together for the national good. In a nutshell, the "wedge" between the CIA and FBI has always been the "law"; the FBI's need to enforce it (often in a partisan fashion), and the CIA's charter to break it (usually in other countries, but often in our own.) And when an irresistable force meets an immovable object ...

Riebling throws light (new or old light, I'm not sure) on subjects as diverse as the disaster at Pearl Harbor, the Kennedy assassination, and Iran/Contra, even though his somewhat pro-FBI spin detracts from some of the impact of his claims. Worse, though, is the poor updating of the book, first published in 1994, with an afterword added in 2002. The index is atrocious; for example, mentioning NSA traitor Pelton in the book's text, but not including his name in the index. Likewise, Riebling's claims that the Glomar Explorer totally failed in its effort to pull up a Russian submarine from the depths of the Pacific Ocean are undone by the CIA itself admiting that it not only pulled up part of the submarine but filmed the burial at sea of the bodies of Russian sailors who died in that sub's sinking. (They even turned film of the event over to the Russians and you can watch the film on Goodge video.)

What this book is, then, is a pretty slap-dash updating of a volume that was excellent for its time, but is now just a rehashing old news for new profit.