Weekend Buff

This week -- a candid look at our nation's domestic intelligence agency

Enemies is, theoretically, a history of the FBI as an intelligence organization. But it’s really an expose that shows the agency as an institution fighting for more power and greater authority from its very inception.

The author, Tim Weiner, enjoyed great success with his award-winning 1988 book, Legacy of Ashes, a history of the CIA. In addition to having written that book, Weiner has decades covering national security stories and as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times and Philadelphia Inquirer, where he won a Pulitzer Prize.

To say he is knowledgeable is an understatement, and with Enemies, he turns his attentions to the FBI. This history, written in 2013, highlights how the FBI was at its core an intelligence agency from its inception, pushing for ever-more-invasive means to spy on targets. When the agency’s efforts failed to legally allow for wholesale domestic snooping, they did it anyway, mainly at the behest of J. Edgar Hoover.

Weiner portrays Hoover as a maniacal hater of communism, willing to do anything, including ignoring the law, to hunt down communists for decades. And while Hoover was onto something, he made up statistics, overstated threats, and coerced politicians to see things his way. Civil rights had little meaning to Hoover when communism was an ever-looming shadow threatening to destroy the country.

There are some fascinating stories in this book. For example, shortly after World War II, President Truman disbanded the OSS (the precursor to the CIA). Truman figured the war was over and there was no need for a spy agency. Ignoring the remarkably invasive Soviet incursion into our government, he felt spying was a dangerous game for civil liberties. Truman was right about the civil liberties, but not having any foreign counterintelligence capabilities was a non-starter. Hoover, who hated the OSS, saw his opening.

With the Cold War looming, Hoover forcefully argued that the FBI should run both domestic and foreign intelligence-gathering. He felt splitting the the two missions into separate agencies was a recipe for disaster. For once, Hoover didn’t get what he wanted; but he was proven right in many ways decades after his death, when the 9/11 attacks occurred. But this book suggests that an all-powerful FBI could have posed a national threat of a different sort.

Anecdotes aside, at its heart this book is a primer on an agency out-of-control, and some of its revelations are downright frightening. Secret lists of enemies, thousands of illegal wiretaps and bugs, destroying people who got in the way of the “mission” regardless of the truth, all these and more pepper the pages of this book. Decades of improper actions seem to define the FBI.

Enemies was published in 2013, so none of the current shenanigans of Comey, McCabe, and Strzok make it into the narrative. It would be a nice addendum to this book, but there is plenty here to digest. You will learn a lot, and be disturbed and even scared by much of it. The book has grown in importance with the current FBI, and the recent scandals will be top of your mind with every page.

Stylistically, Weiner knows how to write, and he keeps the book moving with a just-the- facts approach reminiscent of a news article. It’s informative, but there’s plenty of room for some excitement.

Enemies is a bit long at 560 pages, but you will breeze through it. You can pick it up on Amazon for as cheap as $6.

So take a trip into the dark recesses of J. Edgar Hoover’s baby, still looming over all our lives.

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