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(More customer reviews)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.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Wedge: From Pearl Harbor to 9/11--How the Secret War between the FBI and CIA Has Endangered National Security
Prophetic when first published, even more relevant now, Wedge is the classic, definitive story of the secret war America has waged against itself. Based on scores of interviews with former spies and thousands of declassified documents, Wedge reveals and re-creates -- battle by battle, bungle by bungle -- the epic clash that has made America uniquely vulnerable to its enemies. For more than six decades, the opposed and overlapping missions of the FBI and CIA -- and the rival personalities of cops and spies -- have caused fistfights and turf tangles, breakdowns and cover-ups, public scandals and tragic deaths. A grand panorama of dramatic episodes, peopled by picaresque secret agents from Ian Fleming to Oliver North, Wedge is both a journey and a warning. From Pearl Harbor, McCarthyism, and the plots to kill Castro through the JFK assassination, Watergate, and Iran Contra down to the Aldrich Ames affair, Robert Hanssen's treachery, and the hunt for Al Qaeda -- Wedge shows the price America has paid for its failure to resolve the conflict between law enforcement and intelligence. Gripping and authoritative -- and updated with an important new epilogue, carrying the action through to September 11, 2001 -- Wedge is the only book about the schism that has informed nearly every major blunder in American espionage.
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