Wedge: The Secret War between the FBI and CIA

Wedge - The Secret War between the FBI and CIA

Cover for the paperback edition
Author Mark Riebling
Cover artist Chip Kidd, hardcover
Country United States of America
Language English; Japanese; Polish; Czech,
Genre Nonfiction > Political Science > United States > Espionage
Publisher Alfred A. Knopf, Simon & Schuster,
Publication date
1994; 2002
Media type Print (hardback & paperback)
Pages 592 pp (recent paperback edition)
ISBN 978-0-7432-4599-9 (recent paperback edition)
OCLC 50899798
327.1273/009/045 20
LC Class JK468.I6 R56 2002

Wedge - The Secret War Between the FBI and CIA, a nonfiction book by American historian and policy analyst Mark Riebling, explores the conflict between U.S. domestic law enforcement and foreign intelligence. The book presents FBI-CIA rivalry through the prism of national traumas—including the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, and 9/11—and argues that the agencies' failure to cooperate has seriously endangered U.S. national security.

Theme: conflicting personalities, missions, cultures

Riebling argues that relations have always been tense, dating back to the relationship between the two giants of American intelligence - J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI and William Donovan of World War II's Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of the CIA). Wedge traces many of the problems to differing personalities, missions, and corporate cultures. Donovan had been in combat in World War I, while Hoover was building the FBI Indexes at the GID. Donovan argued against the constitutionality of Hoover's GID activities in the 1920s. In World War II, President Roosevelt (at the demand of the British, including Ian Fleming), allowed the creation of a new intelligence agency, against the wishes of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. He put Donovan in charge. The intelligence failure of the FBI (i.e. regarding Dusko Popov) leading to Pearl Harbor helped convince government leaders of the necessity of a 'centralized' intelligence group.

Donovan's new group accepted communist agents and the alliance with the Soviets, while Hoover (informed by his experiences in the First Red Scare period) was abhorred at the thought and believed the Soviet empire would become the 'next enemy' after World War II was over. The CIA evolved from freewheeling World War II foreign operations, hiring known criminals and foreign agents of questionable moral character. Donovan operated with a flat, non-existent hieararchy. The FBI in contrast focused on the building of legal cases to be presented in the US court system, and the punishment of criminals, and demanded 'clean living' agents who would act in strict obedience to Hoover's dictates.[1]

Personalities profiled

CIA Counterintelligence Chief James Jesus Angleton

Scott Ladd wrote in Newsday, "If a heroic figure emerges from Wedge it is the late James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's controversial director of counterintelligence for more than 20 years. Riebling partially rehabilitates Angleton from the drubbing he's taken in recent books such as David Wise's Molehunt, in which he is depicted as disrupting his own agency in a futile, paranoid search for a nonexistent mole."[2] A Namebase reviewer finds that "Riebling explains the Angleton view so competently that it finally makes sense on its own terms."[3]

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover

Ladd asserts that Riebling "avoided tarring the late FBI boss with the kind of sensationalist touches common to recent biographies. ... [Riebling] is respectful of those he believes played the game both wisely and well."[2]

KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn

In his 1984 book New Lies For Old, Soviet KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet empire, and the rise of a democratic regime in Russia.[4] Riebling calculated that of Golitysn's 194 original predictions, 139 were fulfilled by 1994, while 9 seemed 'clearly wrong', and the other 46 were "not soon falsifiable"—an accuracy rate of 94%.[5] Riebling suggested that this predictive record (and the rise of KGB officer Vladimir Putin) justified re-evaluation of Golitysn's background theory, which posited a KGB role in "top-down" liberalization and reform. Golitysn quoted Riebling's assessment in a January 1995 memo to the Director of the CIA.[6]

Operations and controversies spotlighted

Probe of the John F. Kennedy assassination

Riebling devotes considerable attention to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. His take is that "liaison problems" between the FBI and the CIA "contributed" to the Dallas tragedy, impeded the investigation and led to a "fight that precluded the truth from being inarguably known." When the Warren Commission issued its conclusions on the murder in 1964, it concealed "indications of a Communist role" because of an interagency conflict over the bona fides of the Soviet defector Yuri Nosenko, who insisted that Moscow had nothing to do with the crime. The FBI thought Nosenko was telling the truth; the CIA was sure he was lying to protect Moscow. Riebling writes that the Warren Commission's "obvious delinquencies and cover-ups would later lead conspiracy theorists to suspect Government complicity in the assassination."[7]

Dispute over KGB defector Yuri Nosenko

Wedge describes the divisiveness caused by the FBI's championship of Nosenko, versus the C.I.A.'s support for the Soviet defector Golitsyn, who accused Mr. Nosenko of being a Kremlin plant. In 1970 the Nosenko-Golitsyn conflict "reached a point of crisis." Calling on Richard Nixon in Florida, J. Edgar Hoover asked the President how he liked the reports obtained by the FBI from Oleg Lyalin, a KGB man in London. Nixon said he had never received them. Furious, Hoover learned that Angleton acting on advice from Golitsyn, had withheld them from the President as disinformation. "If Lyalin had been the first such source to be knocked down by Golitsin," Riebling writes, "Hoover might have been able to tolerate Angleton's skepticism. But coming at the end of a decade which had seen CIA disparage a whole series of FBI sources, the Lyalin affair turned Hoover irrevocably against Angleton and Golitsyn."[7]

Watergate and the crisis in domestic surveillance under Richard Nixon

Emboldened by the knowledge that his personal relationship with Nixon was far warmer than that of Richard Helms, the Lyndon Johnson-appointed Director of Central Intelligence, Hoover proceeded to break off direct contact with the CIA Later, when the agency sent him requests for information, he would curse the CIA and say, "Let them do their own work!"[7]

Yet despite his ties to Hoover, Nixon privately felt, in the words of his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, that "the FBI was a failure; it hadn't found Communist backing for the antiwar organizations, which he was sure was there." As Riebling writes, the Nixon White House quietly encouraged the two agencies to encroach on each other's territory, and it established the notorious rump group known as the Plumbers, whose key operatives came from both the FBI and the CIA.[7]

Nixon's conspiratorial mind-set, combined with his wont to exploit the two agencies for his own political purposes, led naturally to the President's effort to enlist both in the Watergate cover-up, which was strenuously opposed by Helms. Hoover had died in 1972, but Riebling believes that had he been alive, the FBI Director would have responded the same way as Helms. Riebling writes that "no one ever doubted" that Hoover "would have refused to let CIA or the White House, tell the bureau how to conduct a criminal investigation. The Watergate cover-up, even his most severe detractors would admit, could not have happened on Hoover's watch."[7]

Analysis of 9/11 intelligence failures

In the epilogue to the paperback edition, Riebling argues that the Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen spy cases further soured relations, resulting in liaison problems that contributed to the intelligence failures of 9/11. Riebling's account of interagency counter-terrorism efforts before September 11, 2001 highlights ten instances in which he believes the national-security establishment failed along the faultline of law enforcement and intelligence.[8]

Quotes from the work

First paragraph

Last paragraph

Epilogue

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Reception and influence

Critical reception

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Influence on U.S. national security policy

Influence on public discourse and academic scholarship

Reviews and discussions

References

  1. 1 2 Michael R. Beschloss, "Such Bad Friends," The New York Times Book Review, November 6, 1994.
  2. 1 2 Scott Ladd, review of Wedge in Newsday, quoted on Amazon.com homepage for Wedge
  3. "Riebling, M. Wedge. 1994". NameBase. Archived from the original on 2012-01-16. Retrieved 2012-01-20.
  4. Anatoliy Golitsyn, New Lies For Old (Dodd, Mead, 1984)
  5. Riebling, Wedge (1994), 407-8
  6. Golitsyn, Anatoliy. "Destruction through KGB Penetration of the Central Intelligence Agency." Memorandum to Admiral William O. Studeman, Acting Director, Central Intelligence Agency, February 1, 1995, reprinted in Golitsyn, The Perestroika Deception, Pelican Books, 1998, pp. 221ff
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 Wedge (1994)
  8. Mark Riebling, "Epilogue," in Wedge: How the Secret War Between the CIA and FBI Has Damaged National Security from Pearl Harbor to 9/11(paperback edition, Simon and Schuster, 2002).
  9. Wedge (2002 edition), p. 3
  10. Wedge (2002 edition), p. 472
  11. Richard Gid Powers, "Undercover Rivalries," Washington Post Book World, November 7-13, 1994, quoted on Amazon.com home page for Wedge
  12. John Fialka, review of Wedge in the Wall Street Journal, quoted on Amazon.com homepage for Wedge
  13. Michael W. Lynch, “Secret Agent Scam: The FBI Leverages it Failures,” Reason, June 6, 2002
  14. "Failure and Crime Are Not The Same: 9-11's Limited Hangouts," 2003
  15. Vernon Loeb, "From the 'Hanssen Effect' to Sept. 11," The Washington Post, October 21, 2002.
  16. Andrew C. McCarthy, "The Intelligence Mess," The Wall Street Journal, September 20, 2006.
  17. President George W. Bush, Address on the State of the Nation, January 28, 2003.
  18. Richard A. Posner, Remaking Domestic Intelligence, Hoover Institution Press, 2005
  19. Glenn P. Hastedt, Espionage: A Reference Handbook.
  20. Dowd, Maureen (June 5, 2002). "Wedge On the Potomac". The New York Times.
  21. Amazon.com Home Page for Wedge, No. 4 Best-Seller in Category Political Science: United States: Federal System accessed 30 Aug. 2010
  22. http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Mark+Riebling%22&hl=en&tbo=1&tbs=bks:1&ei=8TVzTLy-GMH_lgfo362HAQ&start=30&sa=N

Bibliography

External links

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