These were the same words, almost verbatim, that a Harvard law professor had said to me in 1972. Not coincidentally, he was advising me on how to get away with violating the same U.S. espionage code that Lee had been accused of breaking.

The professor’s name was Charles Nesson, and I was, at the time, one of the editors of Ramparts, the largest magazine of the New Left. I had called Nesson in Los Angeles, where he was serving as part of the defense team for Daniel Ellsberg, a Pentagon official who had copied a classified history of U.S. Vietnam policy (subsequently known as the “Pentagon Papers”) and illegally delivered them to the New York Times. I had been delegated to make the call by my fellow editors to seek advice from a man who was one of the leading constitutional law experts in the country, because of a story we were about to publish.

The story had been brought unsolicited to us by a man who told us his name was “Winslow Peck.” (This later was shown to be an alias.) He had come to the Ramparts office with a tale about a secret U.S. spy agency called the National Security Agency, which was tasked with all U.S. electronic intelligence operations. He himself had been an intelligence operative stationed in Turkey, but had become disaffected because of the Vietnam War. Now he wanted to reveal to the world — including America’s enemies — the secrets to which he had been privy.

When we sat down with him, tape recorders running, “Peck” told us how the National Security Agency operated and what America’s intelligence professionals knew. He gave us the code words that they used to describe their operations. (One of our staffers, Bob Fitch, who had served in intelligence in the 82nd Airborne Division during the Cuban missile crisis, was so shaken at recognizing these codes that he refused to work on the article. He was that sure he would be sent to jail.)

“Peck” told us many incredible things. He said he had listened in on the last-minute telephone conversation that Soviet premier Aleksei Kosygin had with a doomed cosmonaut whose rocket was not going to make it back to Earth. He told us he had intercepted the communications between the Israeli command center in Tel Aviv and Gen. Moshe Dayan that relieved Dayan of his post. He told us that the United States knew the name of every Russian pilot and the destination of every Russian airplane, around the clock.

But the real secret that “Peck” was revealing to us (which I did not even realize at the time) was the fact that U.S. intelligence had cracked the codes of both the Soviet Union and Israel, and was able to read all their electronic communications. This information would have been among the most guarded intelligence secrets of all. By making public to both ally and enemy that the U.S. had broken their codes, our informant was in fact alerting the intelligence agencies of both countries to change them. Thus the information “Peck” gave us was, or might have been (we had no way of knowing), a major blow to U.S. national security in the midst of the Vietnam War.

As New Leftists, my fellow editors and I may have been arrogant, irresponsible and reckless, but we were not crazy. We understood that we had skated onto dangerously thin ice, with consequences we could only dimly imagine, and we wanted to know as clearly as possible what we might be facing if we decided to publish the story that “Peck” had brought us. I was delegated by my fellow editors to put in a call to the Ellsberg defense team to see just what risks we might be taking. That is how I happened to be talking to Nesson. I have reported the conversation that took place in my autobiography, “Radical Son”:

“After I had outlined the situation, Nesson explained the law. Technically, he said, we would be violating the Espionage Act. But, he added, the act had been written in such a way that it applied to classified papers removed from government offices, or material copied from government files. The government was able to indict Ellsberg because he had reproduced actual papers. It was important for us, in insulating ourselves from possible prosecution, not to acknowledge that any papers existed.” If any did exist, he added, destroying them would be helpful.

I now cannot help asking myself whether this same calculation might have been behind Lee’s destruction of 310 of the classified computer files he had illegally removed from the Los Alamos, N.M., lab after finding out that the FBI was on his tail.

But to continue my story:

“If we took his advice, Nesson suggested, we might get away with publishing [Peck's] article. To make its case in a court of law, the government would have to establish that we had indeed damaged national security. To do so, it would be necessary to reveal more than the government might want the other side to know. In fact, the legal process would certainly force more information to light than the government would want anybody to know. On balance, there was a good chance that we would not be prosecuted.”

Reading my account of this incident, I am struck by the fact that Nesson’s strategy (which columnist William Safire has called “graymail”) of daring government prosecutors to go into open court and reveal their hand is precisely the reasoning that Freeh volunteered to the congressional committees to explain the prosecution’s decision not to proceed with its case against Lee. To prove in a court of law that a defendant has endangered national security requires a prosecution to reveal far more information about a nation’s national security systems than any government may want to reveal. In concluding my account of the conversation with Nesson in “Radical Son,” I observed: “I had just been given advice by a famous constitutional law professor on how to commit treason and get away with it.”

Is Lee guilty of treason? He illegally removed 400,000 files from the nation’s top nuclear weapons lab during a period of years when he had repeated contacts with Chinese government scientists, and at a time when the Chinese Communist dictatorship was systematically stealing the secrets of America’s most sophisticated nuclear arsenal. His response to the FBI investigation was that of a seemingly guilty man, as he destroyed files in his possession and repeatedly tried to break into the lab after his access was denied.

Yet Lee has acquired an almost martyrlike status as a victim of government persecution, even of government “racism.” The presiding judge roundly condemned the ineptitude of Lee’s prosecution and his “punitive” treatment, in particular the fact that he was held in solitary confinement for months and was threatened by his interrogators with the specter of the Rosenbergs, who were executed for a crime similar to the one of which he was accused. President Clinton has apologized for his own Justice Department’s handling of the case. And the nation’s editorial rooms have resounded with outrage at the entire affair.

Yet it is all very unconvincing. Begin with Clinton’s peculiar apology (without explanation) for a prosecution he himself was responsible for. The U.S. attorney who handled the Lee case in the beginning, John Kelly, the attorney who sought the harsh restrictions on Lee, is Clinton’s friend and former college buddy. Within a week of Clinton’s apology, the president was in New Mexico to raise money for that same prosecutor’s run for a state office. The argument of some of Lee’s supporters that an anti-Chinese bias was behind an intemperate Justice Department prosecution is hard to square with the fact that the current deputy attorney general in charge of civil rights is Chinese himself.

Safire and others have suggested a more plausible explanation. The zealous pursuit of Lee followed the release of the bipartisan Cox Report detailing the theft of America’s nuclear arsenal by the Chinese government. Much of this theft took place during Clinton’s watch. Moreover, the Clinton administration had been aggressive in lifting security controls on satellite, missile and computer technologies, particularly those instrumental in developing nuclear-tipped ballistic weaponry, and it had even sold some of those technologies to the Chinese.

The Cox Report had come on the heels of investigations by congressional oversight committees into the unprecedented access given by the Clinton-Gore administration to Chinese military and intelligence officials and their agents, possibly in exchange for illegal contributions to the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton-Gore campaign. Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., had opened his hearings with the charge — based on CIA testimony — that the Chinese government had systematically set out to influence the presidential elections of 1996, which put Clinton and Gore in the White House. More than 100 witnesses called to testify about these facts took the Fifth Amendment or fled the country.

Finally, among the charges leveled was that the administration routinely authorized electronic surveillance of U.S. citizens (some 700 wiretaps were approved) but that the administration had turned down the FBI’s request for a tap on Lee. In fact, this was virtually the only tap the Clinton Justice Department refused.

In sum, the zealous prosecution of Lee, according to this theory, took place only after a period of endless foot-dragging and dangerous laxity on security issues, followed by the sensational revelations of the Cox Report. At this juncture, Clinton’s personal political interest dictated a vigorous effort to establish his vigilance, particularly in relation to the security threat from the Chinese. Only when his personal political jeopardy was over (for example, now) was he able to resume the posture of minimizing the problem itself.

The support for Lee and the view that he is an innocent victim of overzealous government security concerns are a familiar trope in American politics. The same attitude can be seen as a dominant feature of American liberalism in its approach to the Alger Hiss case over half a century, and even to the Rosenbergs. It is not insignificant that the Rosenbergs were actually the last spies executed in America.

Nesson, the law professor who counseled me on how to commit treason, is still a highly respected faculty member at Harvard and thus a legal lion of the establishment culture. In fact, the culture of Harvard is completely comfortable with Nesson, who has never, so far as I know, expressed regret for his subversive advice in the ’60s. At the same time, the political culture of Harvard is completely uncomfortable with someone like me, who has expressed such regret.

This is not an anomaly in academia. The most prominent scholars to have used the newly opened Soviet archives to establish the guilt of Hiss, the Rosenbergs and other American spies are without exception conservative intellectuals, and they are shunned outsiders to the university culture. On the other hand, the most prominent scholars of American communism in that same culture are almost without exception apologists for American communism and partisans of the political left. The defining argument of their historical perspective, in fact, is to deny either treasonous activity or treasonous intent by actual Communist Party activists in the 1940s and ’50s. These are but two indicators of a phenomenon that is well-known but rarely discussed.

A large swath of the American intelligentsia that is shaping opinion toward the Lee case is what is often euphemistically called the “adversarial” culture. It is a community that is indifferent at best to perceived American interests, including national security. Since World War II, this community has never been persuaded that America has enemies it does not deserve. The adversary culture can find a moral equivalency between American democracy and virtually any oppressive regime. I have a vivid memory of the late conductor Leonard Bernstein being interviewed on television during the election of 1988, which was one year before the fall of the Berlin Wall and a time when the Soviet dictatorship was still intact. Bernstein practically spit into a television news camera the following comment: “I infinitely prefer Mr. Gorbachev to Mr. Bush.”

The adversarial culture assumes that America is so powerful as to be invulnerable to any foreign threat. Former Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary’s pronouncement at the outset of the Clinton administration typifies this attitude: O’Leary declassified 11 million pages of nuclear information, including the records of all American nuclear tests, saying that nuclear secrecy was part of a “bomb-building culture” that it was necessary to end. It would be ended, in her view, by sharing America’s national secrets with everyone, and thus “leveling the playing field.” This was precisely the attitude that inspired me and the other editors of Ramparts to divulge the secrets of America’s electronic intelligence agency to the world. We viewed it as an effort to level the military playing field so that America would no longer be the superpower that was able to lord it over everyone else.

In retrospect, the most important lesson of my ’60s encounter with a defector from our own intelligence service was the tolerance, sympathy and even support for treason that can be found in mainstream liberalism itself. Even though we thought of ourselves as radicals, the mainstream culture that we despised was so tolerant and even supportive of our radical postures that we were never prosecuted for the crime we had committed. Instead, we were given a kind of hero status for our “journalistic coup” in printing the revelations of “Winslow Peck.” The New York Times gave our story front-page coverage.

It is obvious to me now that the adversarial attitude that inspired me in the ’60s (and that I have since rejected) lies behind the sympathy for Lee and the preposterous belief that his activities were “innocent.” This attitude is both typified and given ominous expression in the role played by an old comrade of mine who preceded me at Ramparts, and who later became a national correspondent and then a powerful columnist at the Los Angeles Times — the very paper that led the attack on the Cox Report and also the defense of Lee.

There is perhaps no more outspoken champion of Lee in American journalism than L.A. Times pundit Robert Scheer, who has authored more than a dozen columns on Lee (including one filed from Albuquerque, where Lee was indicted and held). Scheer has even called Lee “an American Dreyfus,” after the French Jew who was falsely accused by anti-Semites of treason in the 19th century: “In a case that parallels the frame-up of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French army a century ago,” Scheer wrote at the time of Lee’s arrest, “the U.S. government is hellbent on destroying Wen Ho Lee, a naturalized American citizen and former Los Alamos nuclear weapons scientist … In both cases, the ‘foreignness’ of the suspect was used by officials and the media to stoke fears of betrayal of the nation’s security to a dangerous enemy.”

The idea that the Clinton administration singled out Lee for ethnic persecution is laughable. The notion that Dreyfus and Lee are parallel cases is simply ludicrous.

Even before taking up Lee’s cause, Scheer had led the attacks on the bipartisan Cox Report, released in the spring of 1999, which documented the theft of America’s nuclear arsenal, including the miniaturized W-88 warhead suited for placement on cruise-type ballistic missiles. Attacking Cox, and the Democrats who supported him, as “fear-mongers” and national security hysterics, Scheer actually asserted that there were no nuclear secrets to begin with, so the Chinese couldn’t have stolen them.

“The dirty secret of the nuclear weapons business is that there are no secrets,” Scheer wrote in the Times on Aug. 3, 1999. “Nothing has happened since Hiroshima and Nagasaki to render these weapons any more plausibly useful as weapons. A crude nuclear weapon dropped from a propeller-driven plane or carried in a suitcase does the job of terrorizing civilian populations — the only function of nuclear weapons — as effectively as the modernized warheads, whose technology some claim Beijing has stolen.”

The statement betrays an astounding ignorance of modern nuclear strategy for a columnist at the Los Angeles Times. But as though even this howling claim was not sufficient to make Scheer’s point, he also invoked O’Leary’s “level playing field.” Whatever weapons the Chinese Communist dictatorship did not already have, Scheer wrote, the United States should provide to it, in the interests of peace! “It would be in our national security interest to supply the Chinese with a Trident-class sub that works, as opposed to their lone sub contender that leaks radiation so badly that it isn’t operational. And, heresy of heresies, we should give the Chinese some submarine-suitable missiles armed with the miniaturized W-88 warhead that they are supposed to have stolen. That way, even if they thought a nuclear weapon was en route to them, they would not have to instantly respond, being secure in the knowledge that they possessed survivable retaliatory power.”

Where do such bizarre, alienated and delusional attitudes come from? As I have already mentioned, Scheer preceded me as the editor of the radical-left magazine Ramparts. In fact, my co-editors and I fired him in 1969, less than three years before we published the revelations of national security agent “Peck.” Although our firing of Scheer was not political, it turned out that he subsequently veered farther to the left than any of us were ever tempted to go.

Unlike me and others who have had second thoughts (but just like Nesson), Scheer has never had second thoughts. He has probably changed some of the beliefs he held in the ’60s and has probably reconsidered some of the actions he took. But he has never repudiated them, never acknowledged how wrong he had been and never relinquished the adversarial attitudes that led him astray in the first place. That is the real national security problem that the latest turn in the Wen Ho Lee case reveals.

Perlstein contrasts the Ohio arrestees with another recently arrested group: The American Front, a “known terrorist group” of Florida-based white supremacists who — without FBI encouragement — “took a break from training with machine guns for a race war in order to fashion weapons out of fake ‘Occupy’ signs which they planned to use to assault May Day protesters in Melbourne, Florida.” While anarchists, animal rights activists and Muslims pass muster as federal targets, organized hate groups do not.

The distinction between entrapment (which is illegal) and a sting (which is legal) now appears to be a much eroded line in the sand. As Perlstein’s piece points out, it is up to a jury once arrests have been made whether law enforcement set up a trap or a sting. In previous decades, defendants have been acquitted in cases of entrapment; but not in recent years:

Not a single “terrorism” indictment has been thrown out for entrapment since 9/11 – not the Liberty City goofballs supposedly planning to blow up the Sears Tower who had no weapons and refused them when offered; not the Newburgh, New York outfit whose numbers included a schizophrenic who saved his own urine in bottles. (Even the judge who sentenced them said “the government made them terrorists.”)

One of the most famous recent cases of FBI infiltration — which is not mentioned in the Rolling Stone article — hangs over anarchist networks worldwide. Brandon Darby, the once trusted activist and organizer-turned-FBI-informant and now writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government, is the dirtiest name to utter in anarchist circles. Darby infiltrated groups organizing protests around the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn. Darby fed the FBI information, which helped them seize riot shields made by a group from Texas. Enraged by the seizure (but still viewing Darby as a comrade) two young men from Austin, David McKay and Bradley Crowder, bought the materials for and constructed Molotov cocktails with the thought of using them against state vehicles. The two, however, decided overnight that this was a bad idea — and left the devices at home, with no intention of using them.

Darby passed information about the Molotov cocktail plans on to the FBI, and McKay and Crowder were arrested and charged with domestic terrorism. While Crowder accepted a plea deal without trial for a two-year prison sentence for making the devices, McKay went to trial, arguing Darby entrapped him. The trial ended with a hung jury. Before the retrial, however, McKay retracted claims of entrapment and agreed to accept a plea deal (and serve a four-year prison sentence, for making the Molotovs and perjury).

Perlstein notes that “the State is singling out ideological enemies” – and if federal sting targets are much to go by, the State’s position is clear: anti-capitalists, environmentalists and Muslims are threats; racists are not. We can respond by decrying FBI activity, and by arguing that their targets are not real threats. Or, we can take patterns of FBI activity more seriously and ask why anti-capitalists are more threatening than white supremacists. This line of questioning can likely be reduced to two questions, chanted again and again up and down the country when protest front lines are faced with lines of police: “Who do you protect? Who do you serve?”

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.)

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.

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.

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.