Book review: FBI’s role as secret police force revealed - Entertainment, Books - Navy Times

Book review: FBI’s role as secret police force revealed

Planting microphones. Warrantless wiretapping. Breaking and entering. To generations of G-Men, these were known as “black bag jobs” — illegal acts ordered in the name of national security by officials at the highest rungs of the FBI. Spying remains the bureau’s foremost mission today as it confronts terrorists and other enemies of the state.

In his compelling and deeply reported book, New York Times reporter Tim Weiner weaves oral histories with declassified reports to trace the bureau’s history as a secret police force, relied on by presidents over the past century to spy on communists, foreign spies, the Ku Klux Klan — even their political opponents.

“We think of the FBI as cops,” Weiner said in a phone interview. “Very few Americans understand that the FBI is, and always has been, a secret intelligence service.”

This book takes you inside the FBI’s intelligence world, made up of black bag specialists, hard-nosed agents and demanding directors, from J. Edgar Hoover on. It also explores the tug-of-war between intelligence gathering and civil rights, a tension at the heart of the FBI’s mission that it has struggled with from its inception. Often, the agents most adept at treading this fine line, who rose to the top ranks of the FBI, were veterans, especially Marines, Weiner found. That includes current FBI director Robert Mueller.

“The moral code that the Marines instill makes for FBI agents who can bust down doors without breaking the law,” Weiner said. “They respect the law.”