In the Authorâ??s Note prefacing his book on the FBI, Tim Weiner describes Enemies as the â??history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a secret intelligence service,â? its major mission, according to Weiner, for most of the past hundred years. The book chronicles the â??tug-of-war between national security and civil libertiesâ?â??except that as Weiner portrays the FBI, with rare exceptions, there is no tug-of-war. â??Securityâ? far outweighs civil liberties and the Constitution.[1]
This book is not an objective study of FBI history. Instead it selects examples that bolster the contention that the FBI put its wars against anarchists, Communists, the New Left, and foreign and domestic terrorists ahead of any consideration for the Bill of Rights. Weiner concedes that proponents from all these groups actually committed acts of espionage or violence. But for the most part, he features perpetrators who were never punished.
Weiner also oversells the role that surveillance played in J. Edgar Hooverâ??s FBI and beyond. As former foreign counterintelligence (FCI) agent Robert Lamphere noted in The FBI-KGB War, â??only a small fraction of the New York field office [in the 1940s]â??fifty or sixty men out of a thousandâ??was concerned with Soviet espionage and few agents outside the squad really knew or cared much about Soviet spies.â? Add to that, foreign counterintelligence work was secret and could go on for years without resulting in any arrests or glory for its agents. That discouraged them from pursuing careers in FCI. By the post-Hoover era, foreign counterintelligence had become a backwater where one could place agents with the least ability such as Richard Miller, the first FBI agent to be accused and convicted of espionage.[2]
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