With that, an audible gasp went up in the courtroom.

The judge, pronouncing the events “upsetting and disturbing,” denied bail and ordered Hammad moved to a maximum-security prison where he was locked down in solitary confinement in a 5-by-7-foot cell, given no contact with the outside world and forced to wait 24 days to see his attorney.

The news media swarmed to the case. Fox News, the Associated Press, the Miami Herald, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday and CBS Evening News all raised questions about the dramatic developments in Tennessee, including terrorist activities, late-night homicides and even al-Qaida connections.

There was just one problem: Hammad, a 24-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen, and his friends aren’t terrorists, and the evidence suggests the DMV worker committed suicide. For Hammad, who lost friends in the attack on the World Trade Center, the doomed road trip to Tennessee and his surreal, publicized run-in with the law have been devastating.

“My life is destroyed,” he says. “I lost my business. I lost a lot of my friends. I lost my fiancie. My apartment. You can’t really tell the story until you live it.”

In the nine months since last year’s terrorist attack on New York and Washington, government officials estimate that 1,100 people, mostly Middle Eastern-born men, have been arrested or detained. Independent observers, though, such as David Cole, professor of constitutional law at the Georgetown Law Center, suggest the number stands closer to 1,500 or 2,000.

The dragnet was intended to disrupt any other potential terrorist cells operating inside America. “The Department of Justice is waging a deliberate campaign of arrest and detention to protect American lives,” Attorney General John Ashcroft announced last November. “We’re removing suspected terrorists who violate the law from our streets to prevent further terrorist attack.”

Yet only a single man, Zacarias Moussaoui, has been charged with being a Sept. 11 conspirator, and he was detained for immigration violations even before the dragnet began. In the meantime, hundreds have been deported for routine visa violations. The U.S. Justice Department, under court order, reported last week that 147 detainees remain in custody — 74 on immigration-related charges and 73 on separate criminal charges.

“They essentially arrested people first and then investigated,” complains Cole. “Virtually all of them were cleared of terrorist charges, which illustrates how little accurate intelligence the FBI had if it was willing to arrest a large number of people who were innocent of any links with terrorism.”

A Justice Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, yesterday stressed that the detentions were lawfully conducted and fell within law enforcement’s mandate. “The information we have gained from our activities, whether it be the interviews we conducted or the people we detained, has been valuable to our investigation of 9/11 and to our preventive efforts,” the official said.

The sweep has been shrouded in secrecy throughout. Cole charged that investigators used ethnic profiling to target young, Muslim and Middle Eastern men. Immigration hearings were immediately closed off even to family members — a move that a federal appeals court this week ruled was unconstitutional — while Ashcroft refused to release the names of those detained. The attorney general announced late last year that suspected members of al-Qaida were among those being detained. And he effectively squelched political criticism of the dragnet when he appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee last December and said “fear mongers” whipping up concern about civil rights were aiding terrorists.

However, among the 128 criminal charges that have been filed against the 1,000-plus detainees, none, according to a Justice Department official, have been for terrorist activity.

As the one-year anniversary of 9/11 approaches, detainees are still trickling out of jail, being deported or pleading guilty to relatively minor offenses, but they are doing so without the news coverage that accompanied their arrests.

It’s unlikely that the public, politicians or the press will lose interest in high-profile cases such as that of American-born Jose Padilla, aka Abdullah Al Muhajir, the alleged “dirty bomb” conspirator, or Moussaoui’s unfolding trial. But scores of other once-intriguing terrorism cases have proven to be little more than wild speculation and have been largely forgotten by the press and the public. The men targeted, though, are still paying a high price.

Two weeks ago, Mohammed Azmath, an Indian national, quietly pled guilty to credit-card fraud. That’s a long way from last Sept. 12, when he and companion Syed Gul Mohammed Shah were taken into custody on an Amtrak train during a stop in Fort Worth, Texas. The men raised suspicion after they were found with $5,600 in cash, box cutters like those used by the Sept. 11 hijackers, and hair dye. The men had also flown out of the Newark, N.J., airport the morning of Sept. 11, just like the set of hijackers who commandeered United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania. According to the police report, both also appeared “extremely nervous” when confronted on the train.

The men, quickly deemed potential suspects, were held as material witnesses for two months in isolation with no access to attorneys. FBI agents raided Azmath and Shah’s Jersey City, N.J., apartment, taking away boxes of evidence while a crowd gathered outside and chanted “USA! USA!”

Their arrest was covered by every major news organization, as law enforcement officials assured reporters that the men had important information about the terrorist network behind the World Trade Center hijackings. Two anonymous investigators told the Dallas Morning News that “credible witness accounts” indicated the two Indian men “were seen with one hijacker at a mosque in Brooklyn, N.Y.” Some sources even hinted to the press that the men were connected to last year’s anthrax attacks.

When information emerged that the men had lost their jobs last summer managing newsstands at the Newark train station, where they routinely used box cutters, and were moving to Texas to open a fruit stand, CNBC’s Dan Abrams mocked their alibi as “the old fruit-stand defense.”

But after interrogation during a nine-month detention, it became clear that neither Shah or Azmath had anything to do with the deadly events of Sept. 11.

Should that really have come as such a shock, simply based on what was known publicly at the time? For instance, the fact that the men were from India, which has few documented ties with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network, should have raised a red flag. They are Muslim, but the terrorist plot was carried out predominantly by Saudis who arrived in America shortly before the attack; Azmath spent most of the 1990s living in the United States.

Meanwhile, it hardly seems significant that the men appeared “very nervous” while being detained in Fort Worth. Most immigrants in that situation would be nervous, especially in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11.

According to the New York Daily News, the duo actually showed up at the Newark airport with tickets for the wrong day and had to pay an extra fee to fly on Sept. 11 — hardly the work of a tight-knit terrorist group. As for the much-reported hair dye, it turned out to be “For Men Only” used to cover both men’s graying temples.

By December, any hint of terrorist connections evaporated when the Daily News quietly reported that a federal immigration judge, over the government’s objections, had ordered Shah voluntarily deported, which meant he was free to apply for a visa to return to America. That’s hardly the type of sentence that would be handed out to an al-Qaida operative.

As for Azmath, last week he pled guilty to fraud that cost credit card companies $58,000. He will be sentenced this summer and may be released for time already served. The Washington Post covered the news with a 300-word AP dispatch.

The same day last January that Azmath originally pled not guilty to the credit card charges in New York, Abdallah Higazy was being set free in a nearby courtroom.

Five days earlier, on Jan. 11, federal prosecutors in Manhattan charged Higazy, an Egyptian-born student, with perjury after he denied owning a ground-to-air radio transceiver recovered at a downtown hotel that has unobstructed views of the World Trade Center. Initial reports said the radio was found inside a locked hotel safe, along with a Quran and a passport, in the hotel room where Higazy was staying on Sept. 11. Higazy had been held as a material witness since Dec. 17, when he returned to the hotel to pick up possessions he left behind when all guests were ordered to evacuate the building. The FBI confronted him about the radio, which was found by a hotel employee.

After three sets of interviews, FBI interrogators got him to confess that the radio was his; then they charged him with making “false, fictitious and fraudulent statements” and interfering with the Sept. 11 investigation. Prosecutors insisted Higazy and his radio were “potentially a quite significant part” of an investigation into “the most serious crime in the nation’s history.” U.S. Magistrate Judge Frank Maas, citing a “very strong case” and Higazy’s incentive to flee, ordered him held without bail.

Five days later, another hotel guest, a U.S.-born private pilot unaware of the case against Higazy, showed up to claim the handheld radio he’d left behind on Sept. 11. FBI investigators re-interviewed the hotel employee who found the radio. He changed his story; suddenly the radio wasn’t found in a locked safe, but on a table in plain sight.

Higazy was released.

And then there’s former Boston taxi driver Nabil Almarabh, a detainee once considered a “notorious” associate of Osama bin Laden, who was held in solitary confinement for more than eight months without seeing a judge or being assigned a lawyer, according to the Washington Post.

Last year, Almarabh’s alleged terrorist activities were front-page news. In October, following the lead of anonymous federal investigators, the Boston Globe reported that Almarabh was probably one piece of an intricate al-Qaida terrorist cell operating in Boston.

Today, instead of facing terrorism allegations, Almarabh is facing charges of making a false statement about his citizenship and using a fake document to enter the country. If he pleads guilty, he will face a shorter prison term than the one he has already served behind bars since September.

All of these cases involving foreign men with Arabic-sounding names caught up in questionable activity immediately drew suspicion and, given the events of last year, grave concern. That was certainly true in Memphis with Hammad.

“In the context of Sept. 11, you can see why we viewed that with great suspicion,” says FBI agent George Bolds, a spokesman for the Memphis bureau. “That may not mean there’s a connection to terrorism, but we have to take a close look at it.”

Even Hammad’s court-appointed attorney, Jeffrey Jones, agrees that investigators were smart to examine the strange circumstances his Middle Eastern client found himself in. “Early on there was a point in time he and I could say, ‘OK, given what’s going on in the country after 9/11, there are certain amount of those dots to connect,’” Jones says. “But the lines between the dots broke down very quickly.”

Hammad’s trouble began when FBI agents received a tip that Katherine Smith, a local DMV employee, would be selling fraudulent driver’s licenses to some Middle Eastern men who had driven there from New York. (Tennessee, which does not require applicants to provide Social Security numbers, has become a favorite destination for people in search of false IDs.) On Feb. 5, the agents swooped in on Hammad and his colleagues, who were in the process of applying for licenses at the Memphis testing station where Smith worked.

Virtually all of the government’s suspicion about Hammad’s possible terrorist links revolved around a single piece of paper found in his wallet: a visitor’s pass for the World Trade Center dated Sept. 5. FBI agent Bolds says the finding was “startling.” The New York Times called it “alarming.” Again and again investigators and journalists used the pass to prop up the story, without ever explaining why the pass would be of any real importance. After all, tens of thousands of people worked at the World Trade Center, while thousands of visitors, including workmen, streamed into the complex every day.

“Show me one plumber in New York who doesn’t have a World Trade Center pass,” says Hammad, who says he was doing work on a twin tower sprinkler system on Sept. 5. “The FBI looked into that and it checked out completely,” adds attorney Jones.

Considering that the deadly Sept. 11 attack was launched by airplanes dropping out of the sky and slamming into the towers, Jones wonders what would have been the advantage of having an al-Qaida operative inside the World Trade Center days in advance. “It’s absurd, as if somebody needed to scout out the buildings,” he says. “The whole thing doesn’t make sense.”

Six days after the arrest came the news of Smith’s death, which catapulted the story to national prominence. At the hearing before the magistrate judge, FBI agent Suzanne Nash testified that Smith’s car had been found just after midnight on a desolate stretch of U.S. 72 in Fayette County, 25 miles south of Memphis. The 1992 Acura Legend had crashed into a utility pole and burst into flames, leaving Smith’s body charred beyond recognition. According to witnesses, the car was moving slowly at the time of impact and investigators later determined the gas tank did not explode, yet a residue of gasoline was found on Smith’s body.

All five men were behind bars the night of Smith’s death, but that didn’t stop commentators from trying to find a connection. On Fox News’ “O’Reilly Report” Feb. 15, there was this exchange between the host and guest, terrorism analyst Steven Emerson:

O’Reilly: “Miss Smith was assassinated when someone set her on fire inside her car. It looks like a professional hit.”

Emerson: “FBI officials and agents are definitely investigating whether this was a political assassination, meaning terrorists actually assassinate her. I think this is a very intriguing case.”

O’Reilly: “Yes. I do believe that it’s a bigger story than we think it is.”

Jones insists that investigators could have stopped that type of wild speculation if they had wanted to. “We had stories in the press about this case for three consecutive weeks,” he complains. “But within one week the FBI knew my client absolutely had no terrorist leanings. They were all over him, checking out his story, his family. They knew all of this. Yet there was no attempt to make a retraction or water it down. It was politically popular, what they were doing. You had a prosecutor who saw a chance to get some ride out of going after terrorists, or some suggestion of terrorists. And the press was anxious to jump on it.”

Leigh Anne Jordan, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Western District of Tennessee, which prosecuted the case, noted that the case is ongoing and declined to comment. All five men face upcoming sentencing hearings.

Officially, Smith’s death remains unsolved. A final autopsy report, which may or may not say whether her death was a homicide or a suicide, may be released soon.

But while FBI agents initially told reporters that the evidence suggested a murder, nearly as much information pointed to suicide. For instance, Smith left her sleeping daughter home alone late at night and drove out to a deserted highway. Investigators found no trace of any explosives in the car, which meant the fire was likely caused by gasoline being doused deliberately inside the vehicle. Witnesses who saw the Acura catch fire did not report seeing anyone else in the car or fleeing from the scene. They also reported that the car was moving slowly when it became engulfed, suggesting that Smith, if she had wanted to, could have stopped the car or jumped out.

And then there was the note Smith wrote to her children, John and Vernola, shortly after her arrest. Investigators found it within days of Smith’s death in February as stories flourished in the press about possible murder plots, but it was not made public until attorney Jones showed it to local reporters in late May. In it, Smith said she was only trying to help Khaled Odtllah, Hammad’s friend and codefendant.

“He didn’t give me any money. He was I thought my friend. I was trying to help him. Now I’ve lost everything and am called a liar when I was telling the truth. I can’t live without any honor. I live a lonely life true enough but I didn’t lie to the FBI. Forgive me John and Vernola. I can’t live this way. I love you both and wish and pray for the best. Love Mama.”

Could that be read as a suicide note? “I think that’s fair,” concedes FBI agent Bolds.

The note did not generate much news outside of Memphis. The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Miami Herald, Newsday and the CBS Evening News, which all weighed in early on, failed to report on the anticlimactic conclusion.

Fox’s O’Reilly also has avoided the story, despite the fact that in February he had a Tennessee radio talk-show host on and stressed he wanted to be kept updated: “I’m very interested in this Katherine Smith, and if you get anything on that, please call us right away. That woman got hit. That’s a pro hit. And we want to know why.”

A spokesman for Fox News says O’Reilly hasn’t updated viewers because he most likely doesn’t know about the recent developments. “I’ll let him know,” the spokesman said. “He’ll probably go back and examine it.”

Hammad is now back at home in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. Like the others, he eventually pled guilty to a one-count conspiracy indictment related to the driver’s licenses. Last month in court, the prosecutor assured the judge there was “no proof of any terrorist activity” among the men and recommended a lenient sentence. The men are expected to be released on time served.

Hammad is nonetheless angry about the circumstances that led to his round-the-clock lockdown in a maximum-security prison. “Just because we’re Arabs doesn’t make us any less American,” he says. “I grew up here. It’s my country. I’ve been here eight years, working hard and paying taxes. I never had a problem with anybody and look what happened to me.”

But investigators aren’t the only target of his frustration: “If I ever saw Osama bin Laden,” he says, “I’d kill him myself for what he did to ruin so many lives, to ruin my life.”

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.