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FBI

Wednesday, May 3, 2000 4:00 PM UTC

Our Nazi allies

A German amateur investigator finds information on the U.S. government's friendly dealings with war criminals. Meanwhile, the FBI and CIA guard their records.

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Dieter Maier, an amateur investigator working from his home on the outskirts of Frankfurt, Germany, has uncanny luck finding out about U.S. ties to the Nazis.

For the past 20 years, Maier has been filing a steady stream of requests for information to a variety of U.S. government agencies, largely for the existential pleasure of historical inquiry, and also out of a fear of a rebirth of Nazism, fascism and racism in Germany. The more he knows about the past, he says, the better prepared he is to deal with the future and present.

What is most startling about Maier’s success, however, is that he appears to have had an easier time finding information on U.S. collaboration with Nazis after World War II than a committee appointed by Congress to extract the same controversial data.

Maier, through Freedom of Information Act requests, has unearthed new information on characters like Karl Heinz-Priester, one of the most prominent postwar neo-Nazi leaders. According to “The Biographical Dictionary of the Extreme Right,” Priester, a former Waffen SS liaison officer, helped found the National Democratic Reich Party in 1949. After being expelled for his dictatorial tendencies, Priester set up the equally virulent German Social Movement and became a leading player in the international fascist movement.

Maier received files from U.S. Army Intelligence that show that Priester was on the U.S. payroll as an informant, a fact never before reported. Priester was terminated as a U.S. spy in 1959 when it was deemed that his usefulness was falling off, or as it was put on his file card: “Subject’s services no longer needed. Production and performance poor.” (The FOIA is, unfortunately, a hit-and-miss proposition. I also filed a request on Priester, and was sent, among other things, the identical file card — with the notations identifying Priester as a U.S. agent blacked out.)

That U.S. officials collaborated with Nazis after World War II is, of course, well known. Just one day after Germany’s surrender, on May 10, 1945, the Joint Chiefs of Staff ordered Gen. Dwight Eisenhower to arrest all suspected war criminals, though advising him “to make such exceptions as you deem advisable for intelligence and other military reasons.” In other words, cut deals with war criminals who could be usefully employed by U.S. intelligence. Over the years, the United States found a spot on the payroll for thousands of former Nazis, especially as part of intelligence gathering operations aimed at the Soviet Union, our wartime ally but soon-to-be mortal foe.

Not much has been learned about these programs since, with successes such as Maier’s rare. But that was supposed to change in the fall of 1998, when Congress passed the little-noticed Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act. It requires government agencies to turn over to the National Archives all files relating to Nazi looting and war crimes, including documents that detail American ties to Nazi war criminals.

“The former Soviet Union has opened its archives. Eastern European countries have done so; even Argentina has begun to open its files on Nazis. Why are ours still closed?” asked former Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman, D-N.Y., at the time. Holtzman is now a member of the Interagency Working Group, which Congress established to oversee implementation of the NWCDA. Federal agencies are to comply with the law by January 2002, but it’s unlikely this timetable will be met. Up to 10 million pages are expected to be
released, but only 1 million pages, many of them innocuous, have thus far been declassified.

There are some logical reasons for the delay. The job
is enormous, and of course involves the review of tons of paper held by
numerous government agencies. Meanwhile, Congress failed to
appropriate enough funding to implement the NWCDA and then cut
declassification budgets sharply last year. (In the case of the Defense Department, they were cut by about half, to $100 million.)

Still, there are no encouraging precedents for this degree of disclosure. “From the end of World War II to Vietnam to Iran-Contra — you name it and [the CIA] lied about it,” says Christopher Simpson, author of “Blowback,” the definitive book so far on U.S. collaboration with the Nazis.

Holtzman is optimistic the files will ultimately be released. But, “There’s a long history of concealing these files,” she says. “The impulse to open them up is not in the genes.”

The FBI finally turned over seven boxes of largely insignificant material to the National Archives in January, one day before it met with the IWG to discuss the bureau’s general lack of progress. Army Intelligence, a prime repository of Nazi material, also has been slow to turn over its holdings. The Army has individual files on some 20,000 Nazi-related figures, but thus far has released only about 450.

The CIA, whose records are most eagerly anticipated by researchers and historians, has long promised to turn over its files. In 1992, the agency said it would review and voluntarily provide Nazi-related files, no matter how embarrassing. No disclosures followed. Between 1996 and 1999, Under Secretary of State Stuart Eisenstadt pressed the CIA to release material regarding looted Jewish assets. This was when the topic gained international attention with the disclosures about gold stolen by the Nazis that eventually wound up in Swiss banks. “All we could pry loose were a few files and that was with the State Department leaning on them,” recalls one person familiar with the process.

Thus far, the CIA has not turned over a single piece of paper to the National Archives, a record of noncompliance matched only by the National Security Agency.

Ken Levit, special counsel to the CIA and the agency’s representative on the disclosure act, says 1 million OSS (the agency that preceded the CIA) files remain classified and are currently under review to determine if they are “relevant” enough to disclose. He predicts the CIA will turn over 6,000 pages of OSS files this week and several thousand more in the weeks to come. “The act is a big priority for us,” Levit says.

However, Levit could not guarantee that the CIA will turn over a single page of its own files. “There will likely be other [declassification of material], but there it’s hard to predict,” he says.

In the past, some disclosures have been extremely humiliating, such as the news that America’s most notorious Nazi “asset” was Klaus Barbie, an SS man and Gestapo officer recruited by the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) in 1947. The French, who wanted to try Barbie for such war crimes as sending Jewish children to Auschwitz and ordering the murder of resistance leader Jean Moulin, learned that he was being sheltered by the CIC. When Paris demanded that he be turned over, the U.S. Army helped Barbie flee to South America on a clandestine “ratline.” (In 1983, the Bolivian government extradited Barbie to France, where he was convicted of crimes against humanity and died in prison.)

There was also Reinhard Gehlen, the Gestapo general who oversaw military intelligence programs throughout Eastern Europe for Hitler. Gehlen, who got his start by extracting information from Russian POWs who were systematically starved to death following Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, surrendered to U.S. troops in 1945. He offered to provide intelligence on Russia in return for light treatment at the hands of the Allies, and was flown to Washington (disguised as an American general) for interrogation and training. In the summer of 1946 — when the policy of de-Nazification was already being supplanted by one of anti-communism — he was sent back to Germany to set up the country’s new intelligence agency. In “Blowback,” Simpson estimates that the United States spent some $200 million and employed at least 4,000 people to construct the Gehlen Org over the next decade.

Simpson says that among the most important CIA files still classified are ones concerning Otto von Bolschwing, who as an SS officer served on Adolf Eichmann’s staff and was one of the chief masterminds behind the plan to exterminate the Jews. In 1941, he was the top SS officer in Bucharest, Romania, and instigated a pogrom in the city during which hundreds of people were murdered. Some of those killed were hung on meat hooks at a meat-packing plant, had their throats cut, and then were branded “kosher meat” with red-hot irons.

Von Bolschwing was recruited by U.S. intelligence at the end of the war and assigned to the Gehlen Org. In 1954, the CIA brought him to the United States. Since as a Nazi criminal he was ineligible to reside here, the agency provided the INS with a letter saying it had conducted a full investigation of him and had found no derogatory information. Von Bolschwing was discovered to be living in California in the 1970s, prompting Justice Department proceedings to deport him. In the end, he was stripped of his citizenship but allowed to remain in the country due to his age and the fact that he was suffering from a degenerative brain disease. He died in a California nursing home.

The CIA has always claimed, quite implausibly, that it didn’t know von Bolschwing was a war criminal. But so far it has given no sign that it will turn over his file.

Maier’s research offers other hints at information still hidden in agencies’ files. Consider what he discovered about SS officer Otto “Scarface” Skorzeny, one of Hitler’s most rabid followers and a man whose files should certainly be released under the NWCDA. In 1943, Skorzeny led a commando raid that rescued Benito Mussolini from an Allied prison. The following year, he kidnapped Hungarian Regent Miklss Horthy, who was planning to sign a peace agreement with the Russians. Such exploits led the Allied press to dub Skorzeny “the most dangerous man in Europe.”

In 1948, Skorzeny escaped from an American POW camp. He moved to Spain and became intimately involved in postwar neo-Nazi movements, and is suspected of involvement in the disposition of looted assets. According to several published accounts, including one by former U.S. intelligence agent Miles Copeland, Skorzeny, who died in 1975, helped the CIA train the Egyptian security services in the 1950s.

Other than a few bland pages from the Treasury Department, government agencies have turned over nothing on Skorzeny under the NWCDA. Meanwhile, Maier has uncovered a 1951 Air Force memo that details a meeting in Spain that year between Skorzeny and an unnamed American intelligence agent. The meeting occurred while Skorzeny was a fugitive on a U.S. arrest warrant, and hunted by German authorities for possible prosecution on war crimes charges.

The U.S. agent was clearly on good terms with Skorzeny — “Customary greeting is not unlike being welcomed by a huge bear or engulfed by a Saint Bernard dog,” reads his account. The agent seems to have been no fan, though, of Scarface’s wife, Countess Ilsa von Finkelstein. During the conversation, Skorzeny complained that the U.S. Treasury had frozen the profits from the sale of his war memoirs. Reads the memo: “Commenting on this particular point, his wife displayed her rare appearing sense of humor: ‘Good God, do you realize that by our money going to the U.S. Treasury, Rolf [Skorzeny's alias] is actually paying for re-arming the French!’”

The memo contains repeated references to Skorzeny’s desire to aid America in the fight against communism (though he feared “a loss of face in his [Nazi] followers” should he openly collaborate with the U.S.). “His primary interest appears to be to find some kind of position for himself relative to the only trade he knows — soldiering,” the agent reported. “He champions the cause of those nationals of other countries who fought with the German allies against the Russians and who are now held in prison, and plunks for the creation of the nucleus of a German Commando Cadre in Spain about which could be formed a new German army to combat the Russians.”

Skorzeny apparently had knowledge of a number of wanted war criminals, including Hans-Ulrich Rudel, Hitler’s most decorated airman. Skorzeny indicated to the American agent that he had met with Rudel — who at the time had found refuge in dictator Juan Peron’s Argentina — on a recent trip to Lisbon, Portugal. Rudel, Skorzeny said, was bitter toward his former enemies “inasmuch as he was tried as a war criminal and convicted, [and] he cannot legally return to Germany.” However, Skorzeny reported that Rudel had returned several times to Germany “in the black” and was “anxious to be on the side of the United States if given the opportunity.”

The memo closed by saying that the reporting officer “sees Skorzeny frequently and has succeeded in winning his confidence completely, but it is felt that this source has scarcely been scratched when one considers the wealth of information he possesses. Skorzeny will continue to be watched and pertinent information forwarded when available.”

The primary disclosures under the NWCDA so far are found in thousands of pages released by the Army concerning the little known Field Intelligence Agency Technical. That agency’s goal was to ensure that the Allies received ample payment from Germany for war damages. Since Germany was devastated by war’s end, it was clear that such reparations would need to take the form of “ideas, formulae, processes, and know-how concerning German scientific and industrial technology,” as one Army memo put it.

Hence, FIAT investigators scoured Germany looking for anything that might be suitable war compensation.

German scientists themselves were primary targets of FIAT investigators, whose job included finding suitable candidates for a top-secret program called “Overcast.” As Simpson reported in “Blowback,” the Joint Chiefs of Staff initiated that program in July 1945 to, according to a military memo, “exploit chosen rare minds whose continuing intellectual productivity we wish to use.” Overcast evolved into Operation Paperclip, through which the U.S. secretly brought over hundreds of Nazi scientists to work in American military and industrial labs.

All of this was done in the strictest secrecy. A March 1947 military memo I discovered in the documents reads: “Every effort will be made to prevent this operation from being publicized. All communications concerning the movement will refer to the [scientists] as ‘German civilians.’ No interrogation or interviews by the press or other persons not directly concerned with the movement will be permitted.”

Nor did the Army want word of such programs to leak out in Germany. A 1946 memo written by U.S. Brig. Gen. G.K. Gailey said his office “appreciates fully the technical value of Overcast and similar projects. It also appreciates that these scientists can execute the maximum of creative and recreative work when they know that their dependents are comfortable, and their property safeguarded.” Nonetheless, Gailey felt it prudent to keep such programs unknown to the general German populace, who might resent perks offered to scientists, such as extra rations and fuel. “The moral effect on the other citizens and the lessening of respect for Military Government and the local German government, as organizations of special privileges, will do much to lessen the value of the instruction of true democracy which we are endeavoring to fost[er],” he wrote.

FIAT investigators screened German scientists, supposedly to ensure that no war criminals were brought to the United States. Instead, Nazi Party members and collaborators had their records cleaned up in order to justify their immigration to America. Paperclip’s most famous beneficiary was Wernher von Braun, an SS officer who helped develop the V-2 rockets for Hitler and later went to work for NASA, ultimately rising to the post of deputy assistant director of planning. (Harvard mathematics professor and musician Tom Lehrer satirized von Braun in a song named after him: “Don’t say that he’s hypocritical,” Lehrer sang, “say rather that he’s apolitical. ‘Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.”)

The case of Paperclip recruit Wilhelm Eitel is discussed in great detail in the FIAT files. Eitel joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and during the war worked at the strategically important Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. FIAT had a wealth of negative material on Eitel, including numerous sworn statements from people who said he had “embraced the cause of Nazism even before the [Nazis] assumed governmental power in Germany.”

One person said Eitel was a member of the dreaded “Brown Shirts” and tried to foster Nazi ideas at the institute. Eitel was also said to have worked with Nazi Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick — who was hanged at Nuremberg — to fire Jewish scientists at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in 1933. This was at a time, according to one government memo, when Nazi policies “had not as yet been formulated by law in Germany and when other colleges and universities still attempted to protect their scholars who were persona non grata with the regime.” The FIAT records reveal damning personal information on Eitel as well: He sought to flee Berlin at the end of the war with his wife’s sister, with whom he was having an affair, prompting his wife to hang herself.

U.S. Army Intelligence initially deemed Eitel to be a “security threat,” but it was soon determined that his past should be overlooked due to his “preeminence in his field … and potential value to possible enemies of the United States.” Just as importantly, one FIAT examiner wrote in another memo, Eitel was “most collaborative and anxious to help.”

Hence, FIAT orchestrated a whitewash. The agency determined that Eitel was an “ardent Nazi, but by no means a vicious one,” and therefore worthy of U.S. sponsorship. “Since Dr. Eitel and his people are without means of support we might have to arrange some way to assist in paying him something or getting food to him,” one memo reads. “He is in a very bad way now and if we do not act at once it may be too late.” Soon the Army intervened with German occupation authorities to get Eitel off the rock pile where he was required to work one day a week, then set him up translating scientific material, work for which he was generously compensated.

In 1946, FIAT brought Eitel to Tennessee, where he worked in a Navy lab. The government even paid to have a grand piano shipped in for his daughter.

But the FIAT papers have been the highlight of generally uninteresting documents released so far. And the slow pace of compliance has clearly produced some frustration. The IWG has held a series of meetings with the CIA, the FBI and the Army during the last two months, to try to get officials at those agencies to speed up their efforts.

Simpson, for one, says that the ultimate question of compliance with the NWCDA may be settled in the courts or in a political showdown with Congress. And while members of the IWG with whom I spoke are not openly critical of the performance of intelligence agencies (though they also must surely fear alienating them by saying so), one senses they are not entirely satisfied with the record to date.

When asked, Michael Kurtz, chair of the IWG and assistant archivist of the United States, is careful with his words. “A healthy degree of skepticism is warranted,” he says. “How much material gets declassified remains to be seen.”

Ken Silverstein is a contributing editor at Harper’s magazine and an Open Society fellow. Research support for this article was provided by The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute. More Ken Silverstein.

Tuesday, May 1, 2012 6:49 PM UTC

FBI heroically locks up ridiculous anarchists on May Day

Feds stop inept radicals from carrying out a plot feds helped them conceive and carry out

By U.S. Attorney Steven Dettelbach, left, and FBI special agent in charge Stephen Anthony walk past a map showing the location of a bridge on Ohio Rt. 82. Five men, pictured on the wall behind the map, have been arrested for conspiring to blow up the bridge. (Credit: AP/Mark Duncan)

Happy May Day, fellow travelers! If you’re not currently disrupting capitalism and/or having your wrists zip-tied for exercising your right to freely assemble, you probably read about the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s latest, not-at-all suspiciously timed terror sting. The Bureau, in an inspired bit of early-20th century nostalgia, has railroaded a bunch of dangerous anarchists. (Or “dangerous” “anarchists.”) America will not waver in the face of the Galleanist threat!

Five young men from Cleveland are now in jail, accused of plotting to “blow up a bridge in the Cleveland area,” according to the FBI’s triumphant press release/criminal complaint. As is always the case with FBI terror stings, the “sting” part involved the bureau’s informant/agent provocateur mostly inventing the plot the accused have now been arrested for. In this case, the five planned to detonate smoke bombs as a distraction as they “topple[d] financial institution signs atop high rise buildings in downtown Cleveland.” But the informant (as usual, a sketchy unnamed character with a checkered past) strongly pushed the group to seriously consider different, more extreme plots. At the end, some or all of them were going to plant C-4 on the Route 82 Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge over the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.

So what was initially a political action aimed at financial institutions somehow morphed into a supposed attempt to destroy or damage a piece of publicly owned infrastructure in a national park. Anarchists sure do hate bridges, and parks, I guess. (No parliament of men has the authority to designate which spaces are “national parks”! The whole world is the worker’s national park!)

The FBI’s affadavit suggests that there was never actually a serious “plot.” The gang tossed around the idea of “taking out” a bridge in order to stop people from getting to work, but they also thought maybe they could use their (pretend) C4 on a Klan rally, or a neo-Nazi organization, or an oil well, or the Federal Reserve Bank. They eventually decided to maybe sink a ship. All of their many plans were super serious and well-thought out. (“To prevent capture, he suggested getting tacks that they could throw out of the back of a car if they get in a chase.”) Eventually they settled on the bridge thing, sort of, and bought fake IEDs from the guy they already suspected was a cop.

In other words, these are a bunch of dumbasses even by the standards of amateur “black bloc” dumbasses. Do you know how I know these morons weren’t serious? They planned to download the Anarchist Cookbook and follow its notoriously awful instructions. Every experienced anarchist knows that the Feds have a mole in your group house, but these guys were mainly concerned with having someone’s “hacker friend” explain to them how bitcoins work. Without the FBI’s intervention the most damage these idiots would’ve ever caused is a broken Starbucks window. So thank god they’re off the streets, and congrats to the FBI for getting this tale of dangerous, bomb-planting anarchists onto the news broadcasts on the day of Occupy’s big May Day action.

(At least the Feds are branching out from only targeting Muslims in these ridiculous “stings.” Some day all Americans, regardless of creed or color, will have their circle of friends secretly infiltrated by a paid informant.)

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Alex Pareene

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.

Monday, Mar 26, 2012 12:00 PM UTC

U.S. intelligence unmasked

The author of a new FBI book talks about what being a spy is really like and ways to balance liberty and security

By , The Browser
This interview first appeared in The Browser, as part of the FiveBooks series. Previous contributors include Paul Krugman, Woody Allen and Ian McEwan. For a daily selection of new article suggestions and FiveBooks interviews, check out The Browser or follow @TheBrowser on Twitter

The job of the intelligence services is to understand others and help leaders act more wisely, says Tim Weiner, the author of a new history of the FBI. There’s also, he tells us, a balance to be struck between liberty and security.

The BrowserYou have spent decades studying the inner workings of America’s intelligence system, and the past few years looking at newly released files from the FBI. What will we learn by reading your new history of the FBI, “Enemies”?

You will learn that the Bureau has served first and foremost as a secret intelligence service reporting to the president of the United States. In its first incarnation under J. Edgar Hoover, who ruled the Bureau for 48 years, the FBI was the president’s secret intelligence service. Today, 40 years after Hoover’s death, we still live in the shadow of his legacy. How do you run a secret intelligence agency in an open and democratic society? How do you balance national security and civil liberty? How can we be both safe and free? These are questions that Hoover struggled with, and that we struggle with still.

Your prize-winning book about the CIA, “Legacy of Ashes,” was called “a credible and damning indictment of U.S. intelligence policy” by Publishers Weekly. What are the counts in your indictment, if you agree with that assessment?

I certainly agree that “Legacy of Ashes” is credible, because every assertion is documented. There are about 200 pages of endnotes, and about 80 pages of endnotes in “Enemies.” When I say something, I back it up. But “Legacy of Ashes” is not an indictment of the CIA. The CIA and FBI are reflections of who we are as Americans. We are the most powerful nation on earth. We project our power across the globe, and in order to do that we need good intelligence. When intelligence fails, war happens and people die. When intelligence succeeds, war can be prevented and lives can be saved.

America is not very good at gathering intelligence, but we’re getting better. It’s understandable, because Americans have only been at it in a serious and concerted way since World War II. The British have been at it since Queen Elizabeth I, over five centuries. The Russians have been at it since Peter the Great. And the Chinese have been at it ever since Sun Tzu wrote “The Art of War,” so 26 centuries.

I want my books to serve not as an indictment but as a warning. If the U.S. doesn’t strike the balance correctly between security and countervailing concerns, we may lose our rights and our liberties, and we may not survive as a free republic. We have made many mistakes, the consequences of which can be measured in blood and treasure, but we are improving – particularly over the last three years.

Let’s turn to the books you’ve chosen, beginning with Sun Tzu. Tell us about “The Art of War,” and what an ancient Chinese military treatise has to do with contemporary U.S. intelligence.

Sun Tzu, a Chinese general 26 centuries ago, tells us: “If you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss.” That is the mission of intelligence. We can build all the billion dollar spy satellites we want – and we do – but to know your enemy is to talk to him in his own language. That is the job of spies, and that is what “The Art of War” teaches.

Chapter seven focuses on the dangers of direct conflict. How do U.S. intelligence agencies, as Sun Tzu says, “subdue the enemy without fighting”?

Through intelligence. Intelligence is the art of war without weapons.

How about black ops?

Well, you need to define what that is. Is it disinformation, lying, cheating or stealing? Black ops can mean all of those things. It can mean propaganda. It can mean putting a spy in the enemy’s camp. It can mean putting a bomb under the hood of the car of an Iranian nuclear scientist. The phrase “black operations” encompasses a multitude of sins.

All of them committed by U.S. intelligence?

The last one I listed was the work of the Israelis.

Let’s turn to a 1964 book that brought to light the role that intelligence services played in U.S. foreign policy.

“The Invisible Government” was the first reported book that actually described what the CIA did. It was written almost 50 years ago, and was a landmark. It explained that the CIA was not James Bond, which was just then becoming popular – that intelligence was not a matter of flying into a foreign capital in a trench coat, overthrowing a government, having a martini, making love and then catching the next plane. It showed that intelligence was a difficult, dirty, dangerous and at times tedious business which was about information, and how information meant power.

So it’s a very good book that is still vital today. And David Wise is still writing great books about intelligence.

In the introduction, the author defines the invisible government as the “interlocking, hidden machinery that carries out the policies of the United States… a loose, amorphous grouping of individuals and agencies drawn from many parts of the visible government”, with the CIA “at its heart”. Is that 50-year-old description of America’s intelligence apparatus still accurate? How did 9/11 change the structure of U.S. intelligence?

Things got much more complex. There are now 17 different American intelligence services, with a bureaucracy of interlocking directorates above them overseen by the Director of National Intelligence. All of them are required to report to the secretary of defense, who in turn reports to the president. In the last three years things have gotten better, largely due to the author of our next book.

That author is former CIA director and U.S. secretary of defense, Robert Michael Gates.

Robert Gates was the head of the CIA under the first President Bush. Under the second President Bush, at the end of 2006, he succeeded the irascible Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense. He stayed on under Obama until just a few months ago.

Gates, as you can see in “From the Shadows,” really understands how intelligence can serve and do disservice to the president of the United States. He probably had more experience in intelligence than anyone who has ever been secretary of defense. The secretary of defense basically runs the show when it comes to intelligence. We spend somewhere just south of $100 billion a year – the precise amount is classified – on intelligence, and the secretary of defense controls 85 to 90 percent of that.

Tell us more about this book.

Bob Gates basically got off the bus from Wichita, Kan. in 1966 and went to work for the U.S. government. He went from the air force to the CIA. After learning Russian, he became an expert – as we defined it – on Russia during the Cold War. He himself never went to Russia until the Cold War was ending, even though he was considered to be among the leading experts on the USSR. He got off the plane and Gorbachev said to him: “How does it look from the ground?” Because the U.S. had been staring down at the Soviet Union from spy satellites and planes, but we didn’t understand what was going on on the ground. We could count the missiles, but we didn’t see the potatoes rotting in the field because there wasn’t enough fuel to take them to market.

Gates learned through bitter experience, over the course of half a century, how intelligence works. It’s an amazing book. And as secretary of defense he used that knowledge to improve our intelligence services.

What precisely is the relationship between the Department of Defense and the U.S. intelligence apparatus?

Ultimately, intelligence should serve the national security of the United States. When you get up in the morning and open the paper or turn on your computer, you want to know: Is the world safe? Is my country safe? Is my city safe? Is my family safe? That is what the president wants to know too, and that is the job of intelligence.

Can any flow chart explain the relationship between the 17 agencies that are part of the U.S. intelligence service and Department of Defense?

In theory, it’s a bunch of boxes that connect and send intelligence up through the director of national intelligence and the secretary of defense to the president. In the past, it has worked more like 17 different musicians with 17 different scores playing a cacophonous tune with the conductor flailing his arms madly. But we’re getting better at it.

Next you cite one of Barbara Tuchman’s lesser-known works of history, “The March of Folly.” Tell us about it.

In short, this is one of the greatest books ever written. Why did the Trojans take in the wooden horse? Why was America in Vietnam? Barbara Tuchman explores those questions, and the answer is folly – leaders acting against the interests of their constituents.

Folly explains so much of the history of world events. People believe that the world is run by conspiracies because that is what they read in novels and see on cheap TV series. But the course of world events is determined less by conspiracies than it is by stupidity. Why did the British lose the United States? How did the Renaissance popes bring on the Protestant reformation? Folly. Lack of intelligence.

Please connect the dots to our topic of intelligence.

Consider the three meanings of the word intelligence. It is the power of your mind; it is secret information; and it is secret action taken in the name of a nation. If we had more intelligence we would know our enemies, have fewer wars and there would be less folly throughout history.

If the Trojans knew the Greeks were in the horse, they wouldn’t have opened the gates.

Exactly. Why did they let the horse in? Folly.

“The March of Folly” is used to teach blind spot analysis in business schools, a method for uncovering faulty or obsolete assumptions. How do intelligence agencies perform blind spot analysis to prevent the sort of folly that Tuchman described?

“The March of Folly” explains how not to make decisions. Leaders must learn to act only out of enlightened self-interest. To use power wisely, they must make intelligent use of information. If they blunder on based on faulty assumptions, then the Greeks end up inside of Troy and Americans wind up mired in Vietnam for a decade.

Let’s end with George Orwell’s “1984.” Most of us know it, but please explain why you chose it.

None of us love Big Brother, but we all know he is part of the family. Big Brother is like the uncle we don’t like who has to be invited for Christmas. The question is: How do we live with Big Brother without him ruining our lives?

“1984″ described, in 1948, what the modern surveillance state was going to look like. At the time, J. Edgar Hoover was creating that surveillance state. He is the man who invented the fingerprint file. Every camera that stares down on us in Washington, New York and London, and every bit of biometric data collected on us, is a tribute to Hoover. The greatness of Orwell’s book is that he saw it coming and described it in terms we could understand. What Orwell foretold in “1984″ was already happening as the book was being published. And that is what my history of the FBI, “Enemies,” is about.

But you suggest that America’s Big Brother is a bit of a bumbling uncle.

Like I say, we’re relatively new at this. We’ve only been at this in a serious way since World War II. The lessons of Sun Tzu are 26 centuries old and we’re only just internalising them. So give us a chance.

Also, to know your enemy you must talk to him in his own language. Nowadays that might be Arabic or Pashto or Chinese or Urdu. We don’t speak those languages very well. We want everyone to speak English. We want everyone to look like us, think like us and be like us. That isn’t a very good cultural climate for producing successful intelligence, nor for the enduring projection of power.

During a visit to the FBI, as you point out, President Obama proclaimed “we must always reject as false the choice between our security and our ideals.” But you suggest that liberty and security are opposing forces. How has the pendulum swung between liberty and security? And which way is it swinging now?

In the introduction to “Enemies” I point out that Alexander Hamilton, writing in 1787, said almost exactly the same thing. We have to have liberty and security. They are opposing forces and there is a constant tug of war between them. We strive to strike the right balance.

I would argue that over the last three years we’ve been getting it less wrong than we once did. Have we been attacked in a serious way? No. Have we created any new secret prisons? No. It was the FBI who reported the abuses in Abu Ghraib. It was the FBI director, Robert Mueller, who stared down George W Bush and told him to scale back electronic eavesdropping. Robert Mueller is an ex-Marine and also a great respecter of civil liberties. He has said that he is not going to go down in history as the guy who won the war on terror but took away our civil liberties – because that would be a pyrrhic victory.

When the FBI makes mistakes under Mueller, it admits and corrects them. He and the people he reports to must strike the balance between liberty and security every day. Lately, we’re doing a pretty good job. There will always be mistakes. Getting the balance precisely right is extremely difficult and, like democracy itself, is a work in progress.

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More Eve Gerber.

Monday, Nov 14, 2011 6:00 PM UTC

The love J. Edgar Hoover does not deserve

Clint Eastwood's kindly biopic of the FBI director skims over the vicious racist

By Leonardo DiCaprio in "J. Edgar"

Historic verisimilitude has never been Hollywood’s top priority, and its latest blockbuster, “J. Edgar,” is no exception.

Director Clint Eastwood, who often played the part of a lawman on the big screen, is now serving up what amounts to a brief for the defense of the FBI’s legendary director, J. Edgar Hoover (played by Leonardo DiCaprio).  In the process, Eastwood distorts the historical record, omitting  facts about Hoover’s ruthless abuse of power, and even sanitizing the infamous cross-dressing rumors involving America’s top cop.

The film deservedly gives Hoover credit for establishing the first federal police force that used modern forensics to nab bad guys, especially Prohibition-era gangsters whose grisly kidnappings and murders had captivated the public’s appetite for the lurid underworld of criminals and their molls. Eastwood also provides a plausible rationale for Hoover’s lifelong paranoia about Communism:  Soon after World War I ended, the Washington home of Hoover’s boss, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, was bombed by an anarchist.

Fair enough.

But the biopic inaccurately portrays Hoover as a critic of Sen. Joe McCarthy. In fact, the FBI director was a crucial ally of the Red-baiting demagogue.  Indeed, at Hoover’s personal direction, agents spent hundreds of hours perusing FBI files to supply McCarthy with evidence of Communist subversion.   Hoover also coached McCarthy about how to insulate himself from criticism by labeling targets as “loyalty risks” instead of “card-carrying Communists,” which was harder to prove.  A Hoover deputy even instructed McCarthy on manipulating press coverage by releasing his attacks just before news deadlines so that reporters wouldn’t have time to interview the other side.

Nor does the film discuss Hoover’s order to “neutralize” Eastwood’s one-time costar, actress Jean Seberg, by falsely telling journalists that she was pregnant thanks to a leader of the Black Panthers.  Seberg later committed suicide; her family blamed the FBI smear.

The biopic does portray Hoover’s obsession with Martin Luther King Jr., ostensibly because of his ties to Soviet agents, which led to FBI bugs that captured the civil rights leader’s marital infidelity.  But here, too, “J. Edgar” underplays Hoover’s nefariousness.   In fact, the FBI planted listening devices in King’s home, office and hotel rooms, recording more than a dozen large tape reels whose contents Hoover provided to numerous parties: the president and vice president, the attorney general, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the CIA, the military, the United Nations, members of Congress, and the press.

What vital intelligence did Hoover disseminate?  That King, according to Hoover, was a “tom cat” with “obsessive degenerate sexual urges.”  The FBI claimed to have recorded King in flagrante during group sex parties in which, according to FBI transcripts, he boasted of his prowess (“I am the best pussy-eater in the world”) and invoked Jesus while in the throes of passion: “I’m fucking for God!”

Ultimately, FBI accounts of King’s sexual antics turned out to be embellished.  Although King committed adultery, a Hoover deputy involved in the smear campaign later admitted that the African-American voices captured on FBI bugs may actually have been those  of King’s associates;  to the white agents who made up Hoover’s force, all black voices evidently sounded the same.  Still, that didn’t stop Hoover’s minions from compiling yet another field report that spread the preposterous story that King, after accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, got drunk and chased prostitutes down the hallway of his Oslo hotel — while stark naked.

Hoover stubbornly believed his incendiary leaks would “destroy the burrhead.”  But they didn’t.  Despite Hoover’s best efforts to spread the dirty details, no member of the press reported on them; in the mid-1960s, such gossip-mongering was anathema to the mainstream media.  Still, no journalists had the courage to reveal the FBI’s witch hunt against King, either; news executives feared crossing Hoover no less than the politicians who were routinely blackmailed by him.  (According to author Curt Gentry, Hoover blocked a critical magazine article by circulating photos of the publisher’s wife performing fellatio on her black chauffeur.)

Even King’s assassination didn’t stop the FBI’s vilification.  Indeed, the worldwide grief over his murder made Hoover more determined than ever to resurrect the salacious stories about the martyr’s sex life.  This time, the FBI found a willing outlet: columnists Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson, who quoted from Hoover’s classified files about King’s “illicit love affair with the wife of a prominent Negro dentist.”  (Anderson later decided that Hoover had used him to implicate King in “a posthumous scandal, to turn even his death into a sordid affair.”  Three years later, Anderson paid him back by becoming the first prominent mainstream journalist to turn on Hoover — rifling through his trash, exposing his financial corruption and blackmailing techniques, even hinting that he was gay.)

And what about such gossip, including that Hoover had a secret double-life as a drag queen?  In Eastwood’s movie, the rumor is transformed from the erotic to the morose: Minutes after the death of Hoover’s mother, he grieves near her body, weeping mournfully as he dons her necklace and a favorite dress.  The lawman is not a sexual pervert, you see, just a faithful and bereaved son.

In truth, the outlandish cross-dressing story was circulated more than three decades after it allegedly occurred, when a witness of dubious credibility told writer Anthony Summers that she saw Hoover at a New York orgy, engaging in sex with young boys while reading a Bible. He was supposedly dressed in a red skirt, lace stockings, high heels and curly wig, a black feather boa around his neck and makeup with false eyelashes on his face.

Perhaps the posthumous vilification of Hoover as a depraved sexual hypocrite is only poetic justice; after all, during his lifetime, he was Washington’s consummate master of sexual slander and political blackmail.  But instead of ignoring the baseless transvestite story, “J. Edgar” attempts to sanitize it and rehabilitate Hoover’s image.

Even Eastwood’s depiction of the FBI director’s relationship with his longtime deputy and confidant — and reputed lover — gives Hoover the heterosexual benefit of the doubt.  Although Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer) is portrayed as Hoover’s loyally swishy sidekick, Hoover returns the adoration with only a manly love, rebuffing Tolson’s overture to turn the relationship physical.  However tormented, Hoover remains in the end closeted even from himself.

To be sure, cinematic license is to be expected in such movies; feature films are not nonfiction biographies.  But given the known facts of Hoover’s life, Eastwood has painted his subject in the best light possible—better than he deserves and infinitely kinder than Hoover ever treated his many enemies, who included some of the most heroic figures of that tumultuous era.

Somewhere, J. Edgar Hoover is smiling: Clint Eastwood has made his day.

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Mark Feldstein, Richard Eaton Professor of Journalism at the University of Maryland, is the author of Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and the Rise of Washington’s Scandal Culture, just released in paperback. More Mark Feldstein.

Wednesday, Nov 9, 2011 1:00 AM UTC

“J. Edgar”: Clint Eastwood’s lame and insulting Hoover biopic

Leonardo DiCaprio mumbles through this tepid, soft-focus saga of America's closeted secret policeman

By Leonardo DiCaprio as J. Edgar Hoover in "J. Edgar"

We gather today to pay tribute to two genuine American icons, but without saying anything nice about either of them. Clint Eastwood has made a movie — or at least I think that’s what it is; the lighting is often so dim it’s difficult to make out — about longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who acted as the wacko third rail of American law enforcement for almost half a century. “J. Edgar” is one of those prestige Hollywood pictures that sounds, at first, as if it might be a good idea: a name director, a supposedly big star playing a major historical figure, and a script by young screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, who since “Milk” has become the go-to scribe for what is no doubt described in story meetings as “gay material.” But instead of a good idea, “J. Edgar” turns out to be one of the worst ideas anybody’s ever had, a mendacious, muddled, sub-mediocre mess that turns some of the most explosive episodes of the 20th century into bad domestic melodrama and refuses to take any clear position on one of American history’s most controversial figures.

I’ll get to the historical and political insults of “J. Edgar” shortly, and they are legion. But most of all it’s a boring and silly movie, which features Leonardo DiCaprio bumbling around his dreary, post-Victorian suite of offices, looking worried under a mountain of latex and makeup (when he plays the 1970s-era Hoover) and talking in one of those unplaceable, old-timey Northeast Corridor accents. (Admittedly, Hoover in life had a strange voice; he lived from birth to death in Washington, D.C., but spoke in an affected manner that sounded nothing like today’s mid-Atlantic accent.) It’s like a combination of acting-school exercises and the History Channel, with all the production values and dramatic intensity that suggests. Hoover’s longtime deputy director and presumed lover, Clyde Tolson, is played by Armie Hammer as — how do I put this delicately? — an absolute flaming queen, who uses the term “fashion-forward” during a department-store shopping expedition set in about 1930. For just a minute there, it looks as if “J. Edgar” is about to become “Queer Eye for the FBI,” and I’m profoundly sorry it doesn’t.

Actually, if there’s one area where Black’s lumpy screenplay, with its awkward chronological backing-and forthing, deserves some credit, it’s in the highly plausible account of Hoover’s relationship with Tolson. From early on in Hoover’s FBI career it was widely assumed that he was gay, but the evidence was always circumstantial and the handful of people who knew him personally always denied it. (The allegations that he was a cross-dresser came from only one source, and don’t match anything else we know about this intensely cautious and private individual. Most historians view them as urban myth.) I think the fairest thing to say is that it seems likely Hoover was primarily homosexual, despite his purported romance with actress Dorothy Lamour, but not at all clear whether he acted on those impulses. Black imagines Hoover and Tolson cohabiting as “confirmed bachelors,” in a state of permanently unresolved erotic tension, which would go a long way toward explaining the secret policeman’s massively screwed-up psychology.

But when we get back to the question of how Hoover’s psychology affected his exercise of power, “J. Edgar” goes from being just a minor melodrama about a conflicted and closeted gay man to being simultaneously stupid, offensive and random. Historical characters appear and disappear in shticky little pieces — Jessica Hecht as Emma Goldman, Josh Lucas as Charles Lindbergh, Jeffrey Donovan doing the world’s worst “pahk the cah in Hahvehd Yahd” accent as Robert F. Kennedy, Christopher Shyer as Richard Nixon — without ever seeming to justify their presence on the stage. You get the feeling they’ve all got a problem with Hoover, but you’re never sure why. Maybe they just found him a weird and distasteful little man, which is certainly how he comes across. On the other hand, it might be helpful if this movie made the point that Hoover was as close as we’ve ever come (so far) to having an unelected dictator, and that the only real reason he didn’t become a Stalin-level tyrant was the constraint of a democratic political system he could not entirely subvert, much as he tried.

Eastwood and Black certainly bring up many of the things that made Hoover so noxious, beginning with the Palmer raids of 1919-20, which resulted in the arrests of thousands of communists and anarchists who had committed no crime. At the tender age of 24, Hoover was appointed to head a special Red-hunting branch of what was then called the Bureau of Investigations, which launched his long career as a self-appointed guardian of American political rectitude, devoted to stamping out dissident opinion wherever it cropped up, and whether or not constitutional rights got trampled in the process. “J. Edgar” makes clear that Hoover conducted secret surveillance on suspected Commies in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal administration, including first lady Eleanor Roosevelt (who purportedly had a lesbian affair with a reporter); perjured himself before Congress; conducted an especially vile counterintelligence program aimed at undermining the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil-rights leaders; and generally turned a blind eye to organized crime in his relentless persecution of left-wingers.

But you get almost no sense of the extent or intensity with which Hoover mobilized the federal government’s police force to crack down on unconventional political opinion. The second Red Scare of the Joe McCarthy 1950s is never mentioned, nor is the word COINTELPRO, and Hoover’s vicious racism is largely ignored. (Intriguingly, the rumors that Hoover was gay were echoed, during his lifetime, by speculation that he might be partly black.) Furthermore, all this stuff is presented as quirky side info in a story about a weird dude who lived with his mom (Judi Dench, giving the only tolerable performance in the whole film) and had a lifelong boyfriend he maybe never slept with. Oh, and he was way ahead of his time when it came to fingerprinting. Did I mention that? Everybody pooh-poohed his interest in bringing forensic science to law enforcement, and now look! Yes, Hoover was a liar, a cheat, a hypocrite, quite likely a paranoid sociopath and incipient fascist, a terrifying incarnation of many of the worst currents of American political opinion in one individual. OK, yeah, that’s all true — but his real legacy is found in “CSI: Miami.”

Just in case you think I have some kind of personal bias when it comes to J. Edgar Hoover, well, I plead 100 percent guilty. He ruined the lives of countless innocent people and was instrumental in spreading the idea that the Constitution doesn’t apply to people who say bad things about the government. He pretty much built the slippery slide that led to the national-security state of the last decade, when civil liberties have been eviscerated and privacy is a sham. (I will further add that he personally supervised the surveillance and harassment of my mother, her then-husband and many of their colleagues in the 1940s labor movement, and I’ve seen the files to prove it.) If there’s a darker figure in American history since the Civil War, I’m really not sure who it is. Nixon? George W. Bush? Not even close. Dick Cheney? Only in his undead dreams. I only wish I believed in hell so I could believe that it wasn’t hot enough for John Edgar Hoover.

But in all honesty, I’d much rather see a vigorous, propagandistic, right-wing defense of Hoover as a bastion of true Americanism than this tepid, long-winded and phony-looking exercise, which sort of implies that, on the one hand, he wasn’t a very nice man but, on the other, he was an actual human being who suffered pain. But honestly, what can we expect from Clint Eastwood at this point? This movie says a great deal more about him, I’m afraid, than it does about J. Edgar Hoover. And what it says is that one of the greatest American screen actors of the 20th century has squandered much of that legacy in the 21st by becoming a director of indifferent Oscar-bait movies that look handsome on the surface but have nothing to say, and that nobody ever wants to watch twice. Even by the dismal recent standards of “Hereafter” and “Invictus” and “Changeling” this movie is a disappointment, because watching it once is bad enough, and because it may leave younger viewers with the impression that J. Edgar Hoover was mostly important to history because he wasn’t gay enough to have decent fashion sense.

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Andrew O

More Andrew O'Hehir.

Wednesday, Nov 2, 2011 3:04 PM UTC

FBI entraps old white guys in terror sting, just like it does to young Muslim men

The Justice Department proves its commitment to equality by indicting right-wing Christians for an unlikely plot

By

Every now and then, right-wingers like to argue for the inherently violent nature of Islam by pretending the very of idea of a “Christian terrorist” is unimaginably ludicrous. These right-wingers also tend to ignore abortion clinic bombers and other Christian and right-wing murderers who follow the terrorist script, so don’t expect them to devote much time to the story of the Waffle House gang recently indicted by the FBI.

Four aged right-wingers apparently plotted to carry out a mass murder based on the plot of a thriller written by frequent Fox guest Mike Vanderboegh. They planned to “save this country” by attacking Washington, D.C., and Atlanta with ricin and botulinium toxin. And they were targeting the government:

What was the ostensible purpose of all this killing? Saving the country of course. “There is no way for us, as militiamen, to save this country, to save Georgia, without doing something that’s highly, highly illegal: murder,” Thomas reportedly said. “When it comes time to saving the Constitution, that means some people have got to die.” The FBI also alleges that “Thomas, Roberts and others discussed the need to obtain unregistered silencers and explosive devices for use in attacks against federal government buildings and employees, as well as against local police.”

The group also had a “bucket list” of politicians and members of the media that they planned to kill, which seems to be a misreading of the “bucket list” concept. Two of the men bought “what they believed was a silencer and and unregistered explosive” from an FBI informant, as well. They also — with the informant — drove to Atlanta to “scope out” IRS and ATF buildings.

The “good news,” I guess, is that now the Justice Department is carrying out the same ridiculous stings on old Christian guys that it regularly carries out on young Muslim guys. Because let’s be honest, we have no way of knowing whether these four guys would’ve actually acted on their anti-government beliefs if they hadn’t been led to action by the “informants.” They met at a Waffle House and called themselves “the covert group.” They range in age from 65 to 73. How much of a real threat could they possibly have been? How much of a role did the “informant” play in pushing the men toward formulating an actual terror plot instead of just grumbling fantasies of revolution over omelets?

They may have been able to manufacture ricin — one of the men “used to work as a lab technician for a U.S. Department of Agriculture agency known as the Agricultural Research Service,” according to ABC News — but it’s unclear how practical ricin is as a chemical weapon. A terrorist needs tons of ricin to kill people through mass dispersal. Ricin is what terrorists turn to when they fail to make anthrax.

This looks like the same “entrapment in all but name” approach to fighting terror that the Justice Department has been pursuing against American Muslims for years. What will be interesting to see is whether the entrapment defense works any better for a gang of four elderly white guys than it does for teenagers with names like “Hosam Maher Husein Smadi.”

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Alex Pareene

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.

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