But in “My Jihad,” Collins’ memoir of his Muslim warrior days, the red-bearded American casts himself in a Zelig-like role, as violent militant Islam becomes an international force through the 1990s and into the early years of the new century. In 1993, in an Afghan training camp, Collins befriended Ahmed Omar Sheikh, who was sentenced to death this week for his role in Daniel Pearl’s murder. In the late 1990s, while he was a paid FBI informant based in Phoenix, he met Hani Hanjoor, who would later fly a jetliner into the Pentagon. He says that while he was working with the CIA, he was invited to meet Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, but that the agency denied him permission. He even claims that he’s mentioned — though not by name — in the infamous memo by Phoenix FBI agent Ken Williams that warned of a possible plot by Middle Eastern men in U.S. flight schools. His story has parallels with two other American converts to Islam: John Walker Lindh, who traveled from Marin County, Calif., to fight with the Taliban, and José Padilla, a Chicago street tough who was arrested in May and charged with conspiring with al-Qaida to detonate a “dirty bomb” in the United States.

But Collins’ odyssey is also singularly his own. He describes his nomadic childhood as anything but idyllic: When he was 4, his father split and his mother spiraled deeper into a world of bikers, criminals and drugs. When he was 8 and they were living back in Hawaii, she was murdered and her body dumped in a swamp not far from their home. “From that point forward,” Collins writes, “emotions like fear only strengthened me.”

By the time he was 17, he was a hard-assed punk doing eight years in the California Youth Authority for his part in an armed house robbery. But after a couple of years of bucking the system — both the CYA and its hardcore race-based gang system — Collins had a seeming chance encounter that would permanently change his life. One day, in a GED class, one of the other inmates left a Quran open on his desk. Collins took a look, and, he writes, he was transfixed. Within a couple of weeks, he had converted.

Out of prison, he gravitated to a ghetto mosque in San Diego run by the pacifist Tabliqis. But soon he became restless with their approach, and set off on a journey that would take him to Croatia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Chechnya in search of the “true jihad.”

The irony is that, especially in those early years, Collins had a hard time finding it. Even once he hooked up with other Muslims who shared his desire for jihad, he was constantly frustrated in his effort to penetrate war zones, by the dull routine of sitting around camps and waiting for battle. Though devout in his aims, he clearly loved weapons, all sorts of weapons, from handguns to rocket-propelled grenade launchers to tanks. In one Chechen camp, his delight in munitions and his impatience with authority earned him another nickname: Abu Mushakil, or father of trouble. Later, though, he would see people being killed up-close, and he himself would kill — and live to describe it all with an almost clinical lack of passion.

Even after his right leg was mangled in Chechnya — it was later amputated — Collins might’ve been just another soldier of fortune, albeit with a higher cause. But then he turned himself over to the FBI and CIA, because he believed the growing movement of Arab jihadis wasn’t policing itself, was growing ever more lawless and turning to terror. His informant role was ultimately as frustrating as being a jihadi. In an interview, Collins said he believes Sept. 11 could have been prevented. Based on a deep cynicism developed during years working undercover with the FBI and the CIA, he thinks it impossible both agencies could be caught unaware by the attack. It’s entirely possible, he says, that they knew very well what was coming — and that they let it happen anyway.

For its part, the FBI has confirmed that Collins was an informant who provided valuable information on Muslim extremists — but denies that he provided information that could have prevented Sept. 11. Salon spoke to Collins about his experiences the same week that John Walker Lindh and Ahmed Omar Sheikh were sentenced for their crimes.

On Monday Lindh pleaded guilty to two felony charges arising from his involvement as a soldier with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Last month, federal agents arrested Josi Padilla, and charged he conspired with al-Qaida to build and detonate a “dirty bomb.” Most Americans are surprised to find Americans fighting alongside al-Qaida. In your years of active fighting in Bosnia or Chechnya or the Middle East, how many Americans did you encounter?

First of all, with Padilla, I don’t think he actually ever fought anywhere. So if al-Qaida recruited in that picture, he’s just an errand boy or something. What surprises me [about Padilla] is, from everything that we’re reading about the guy, it seems that he’s just a very low-level maybe errand boy at best that probably was just talking about some big ideas he had. And Ashcroft turned that into stopping a bomber on his way to Washington. John Walker Lindh, now he volunteered with the Taliban. And if his contact was with al-Qaida, it was for the simple fact that the Taliban usually instructs foreign mujahedin to go with the other foreigners, which would be the Arabs, which loosely you could call al-Qaida. Now in Bosnia, the war lasted what, maybe five years? There was a handful of black American Muslims who had gone there to fight, probably no white American Muslims, maybe one or two. So probably just a handful.

But is it your impression, having moved in this world, that there are a number of other Americans who might be fighting with the Taliban, fighting with al-Qaida?

Well, what’s your definition of American? You know, American-American, or a naturalized American? Naturalized Americans, of course, you’re going to find you have Pakistani Americans, Afghan Americans, that are going to travel back to Afghanistan and fight with Taliban or someone else. American-Americans, that’s another story. Probably very few.

After Padilla’s arrest, there was talk about there being an active Islamic movement with thousands of conversions in American prisons and detention centers. Could there be a class of people like Padilla who convert, and then go overseas to ally themselves with people who are fighting the United States?

No, no. I think Padilla, whatever he is, is the exception, not the norm. There’s a lot of people who become Muslims in prison, but if you sat down and tried to figure out how many of those people ever went for anything close to jihad or anything like that once they got out of prison, you’re talking about a tiny, tiny — maybe low two-figures — number of people. I was watching a report on MSNBC that al-Qaida is recruiting people in the prisons. That’s the biggest load of crap I’ve ever heard. The Muslims who do become Muslims in prison, the imams who teach them are generally Pakistani- and Arab-Americans, and they’re completely against any idea of jihad or radical talks, so the Muslims coming out of prison naturally take those lines. I myself, I’ve had conflict with many American Muslims at the mosques throughout the country — we would have arguments, and they wouldn’t even support the idea of supporting Chechnya even with money. They’ve been taught that this is radical, this could be related to terrorism or whatever. The idea they’re being recruited in prison, that’s just absurd.

Some of the accounts I’ve seen suggest Padilla converted to Islam while he was incarcerated, or maybe shortly after. Your conversion to Islam came while you were detained in the California Youth Authority. Do you see any parallels between yourself and Padilla?

Not really.

Do you see parallels between yourself and John Walker Lindh?

To a certain extent. Just the simple fact that we both accepted Islam. The media isn’t talking about it, but from reading between the lines I can see he first got involved with the Tabliq — the pacifist movement.

Was that in California?

Yes, it seems that way. Because they’ve interviewed people that knew him, his friends at the mosque, and they’re obviously Tabliq by appearance and by speech. So he got involved with Tabliq and he probably came to a point like I did, that, ‘OK, I’m ready to defend my religion.’ And he probably got the same thing from Tabliq that I did — that there is no jihad in Islam. So he progressed on from there. I believe from there he went to Yemen to learn Arabic, and then from there he went to Pakistan. And I think from there it’s simple: In Pakistan, he probably had an opportunity to go up and do what in his mind he thought was jihad, which was the Taliban fighting against the Northern Alliance. That’s where this whole traitor thing really confuses me. Because he thought that he was going to Pakistan to help the Taliban fight the Northern Alliance to establish an Islamic state in Afghanistan, which I can understand. The Northern Alliance are very bad people, even the U.S. [government] admits that now. They’re criminals, the drug dealers, the warlords, and the Taliban was created to counter them.

What was your reaction to Lindh’s guilty plea?

I agree with it. I don’t know what he did do and what he didn’t do, but if he believed that fighting for the Taliban was right, and all that stuff, then naturally you should plead guilty to it. If you did it, stand up and say: ‘I did it.’ I don’t think that — personally, I think that a lot of the charges against him are pretty outrageous and I think that if he did fight it, they would’ve had a hard time finding him guilty of anything, just for lack of evidence. But as a principle, I think pleading guilty is the right thing.

Lindh faces the possibility now of 20 years in prison, possibly a bit less. Is that punishment too harsh for what he did?

You’ve got to figure out, what did he really do? As far as I can tell, he joined up with the Taliban and it seems that his intention was to fight for the Taliban against the Northern Alliance to establish an Islamic state. What happened after September, and whatever the ties there, that’s to the side. Just the idea of supporting the Taliban in their fight against the Northern Alliance, I mean, I myself had considered many times over the years starting back in ’95 and ’96, traveling to Afghanistan just to see what they were about. Because if they were truly fighting to establish an Islamic state in Afghanistan, as an idea, that’s something I would support. Now of course Sept. 11 and harboring Osama and all that, that changes everything. But initially when he went there obviously it was before September and I just don’t know if I find anything wrong with the idea. Now if he had actually sat down with bin Laden and said: ‘I can help you do this or that to kill some Americans,’ then obviously he needs to be punished for that. No doubt. But I don’t know if he ever did that. I’m trying to say that if the only thing he’s really guilty of is fighting with the Taliban against the Northern Alliance, I don’t think that’s even punishable.

You trained in an al-Qaida training camp in Afghanistan in 1993. What kept you from going to Afghanistan after the Taliban took over to see what the movement was all about?

If I would’ve gone, it would’ve been just that, to satisfy my personal curiosity. Because I had heard a lot of stories, for and against the Taliban, from people who had been there. Some people were Muslim, some people weren’t. Even from Muslims there was some question about what was the Taliban all about. Were they doing things correctly, Islamically? If I would’ve gone, it would’ve been just to see with my own eyes. But I never wanted to go there to get involved with any conflicts, like between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance, for the simple fact that it’s too murky. Why would you go to Afghanistan and get involved in an internal conflict where you may be killing other Muslims?

Let’s talk about your conversion to Islam. Can you describe your mind-set and the circumstances that led to your decision?

Well at that time, I mean, I didn’t have any religion per se. I’m sure my family considered themselves Christian but we weren’t raised any certain way. I was incarcerated almost two years before accepting Islam. And before those two years I really didn’t like the idea of people who find religion while behind bars. I figured that if you were behaving a certain way before you came to jail, why change it now? Now you’re going to find religion? That’s just too convenient. But you know, one day I found an open Quran and I started reading it and it appealed to me. I studied briefly just for two weeks and I just decided that it made sense. And so I became Muslim.

Did you make the conversion with the idea at the time that you wanted to fight in jihad?

No, because like I said, the Muslims in prison, the imams who teach there and whatnot, not only are they against the jihad, but they probably try to keep any information related to jihad away from the people converting. Which is easy, because if you’re in prison, it’s not like you have access to a lot of materials. It wasn’t in my mind at that time. I just saw Islam as something that would be good in my life, which it turned out to be. It was later when I got out that I started directing my attention to the war in Bosnia. And even then it wasn’t like there was a group of Muslims trying to recruit me. Like I say in the book, I ran up against opposition when I finally decided I’d like to go and help Bosnia. The Tabliq informed me that this wasn’t an option.

When you look at your own motivations for wanting to fight in jihad, what were they? What was the attraction for you?

At the time, back in ’93 when I got out of CYA, it was basically Bosnia — the height of the war was going on, Muslims were being slaughtered by the tens of thousands, literally, tens of thousands of women were being raped, and it wasn’t just so much a religious thing, but a human thing — that, you know, here these people are, being slaughtered, and the world isn’t doing a whole lot to help them. And of course by the fact that they were Muslim, I had a little more interest in the subject. Sure, there were plenty of conflicts going on at the time, but this one, my attention was drawn to it. I just wanted to go and help these people. That’s what jihad, the true jihad, is about. It’s about defending people who are being attacked.

So in 1993, you were encouraged to go for training to a camp in Afghanistan. While there, you befriended Ahmed Omar Sheikh — the same man who was convicted Monday and sentenced to death for his role in the kidnapping and execution of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. How did you come to know him?

He showed up in the camp in Afghanistan I was in a couple of weeks after I had gotten there. At this camp, I was just going through what you could roughly call basic training — it was just how to fire an AK — and most of the people in this camp were then going on to Tajikistan to fight the communist government up there. That was before the Taliban — and again, that wasn’t to get involved in Afghan conflicts. As I viewed it, the people of Tajikistan were tired of this communist government, which everyone could relate to. And I guess Islam was the only viable alternative to the oppressive regime up there. So that was my intention. When Omar showed up, it was just someone from the West, because he was basically raised in London and he spoke English so we took to hanging out together just because of that reason. At the time, he appeared to be a fairly normal guy. I didn’t sense, like, anything really radical from him.

But he discussed with you the possibility of doing some kidnapping?

Yeah, later on in our stay there, when I finally decided to call it quits, he started talking about, as an idea — he wanted to go to Kashmir and possibly take hostages. And I’m assuming that by some twisted logic, he thought this would somehow bring some kind of attention to the cause there in the media. As far as I know he never expressed any desire to actually hurt anyone. It just seemed kind of like a twisted idea to get attention. Like I say, that’s when I decided to call it quits as far as that area, because things were starting to get murky and I didn’t want to be involved in anything like hostage-taking. I’d come to fight in Tajikistan and that wasn’t panning out.

Were you surprised to see him emerge in the Daniel Pearl case?

Yeah. I didn’t even know he was out of prison from his 1994 scheme, where he was caught after a shootout with the Indian military. I thought he was still in prison. I didn’t find out that this was the same Omar that I knew until I saw a picture of him in the newspaper.

You were a little bit vague in the book about why you decided to become an informant for the CIA and the FBI. In one passage you mentioned fear of terrorism; in another passage you said: ‘As long as Arabs control the way the jihad was handled, it will never progress or accomplish anything. I felt that big changes were needed.’ What did you hope to accomplish in turning to the FBI and CIA?

Looking back, here I was coming out of the war in Chechnya, fighting on the front lines for our religion, for our people, for the true jihad. And there was true terrorism going down in Egypt at the time. Tourists were killed and whatnot. I just saw that the real mujahedin and those in the real jihad are against those terrorist attacks. The point being that [the Arabs] weren’t doing anything to try to prevent it, to police their own, so to speak. I don’t think it was that they didn’t want to, but if you have a small group of people in Chechnya fighting the Russians, they’re kind of overwhelmed with that problem. So I looked at myself as being in kind of a unique position. I could get into places and groups that probably no other Westerner could. I looked at that as a way to help the CIA, the FBI, whatever, combat true terrorism.

Did you feel that your effort was successful?

Ultimately, in the end, I hate to say it, but I don’t think so. I tried my hardest; I risked my life, literally, for almost four years. I’ve complicated my life a great deal by writing this book and coming out — it doesn’t take much imagination to think there are probably a few people out there right now who would like to get their hands on me. But ultimately, what did I accomplish? I never saw that the FBI or the CIA did fight true terrorism. From what I saw they spent their time and their resources infiltrating mosques that were of no interest to anyone.

What is it in the makeup or the mind-set of the CIA and FBI that caused the kind of failures that you describe in the book?

I don’t know enough about anything to really say. Just looking at them, it’s their whole mind-set, their whole culture — most of them are like middle-aged, upper-middle-class white American guys and they think that only their way is right. And like I was saying before, that no one else in the world has a right to fight for independence or anything like that. So they’re confusing true terrorism and a true fight for independence somewhere and they’re mixing the two together. That’s why, first of all, that they’re not able to stop terrorist acts, because they don’t know where to start looking. They’re always barking up the wrong tree, so to speak.

During the time you were an FBI informant, you also knew Hani Hanjour, one of the pilots who later flew a jet into the Pentagon in September. How did you get to know him, and what did you tell the FBI about him?

A friend of mine who is also a pilot, but who has no involvement in all of this, was roommates with Hani back in maybe late ’97, ’98. This was a mutual friend — I worked for some Arabs who owned some liquor stores in the valley, in Phoenix. This friend of mine also worked for them, and he worked at another store. So sometimes when I would get off duty working security at the main store in Phoenix, I would go out to their smaller store in Mesa where my friend worked. And Hani being his roommate, he would sometimes come around and hang out behind the counter, which was common with a lot of the Arabs there. All of the guys who became involved in flight training were in this little circle, and it wasn’t uncommon to go there on any night of the week and find three or four guys hanging out behind the counter at this store. That’s where Hani came into the picture.

I never had any direct relationship with him. I never even had many conversations with him — he was always there in the crowd. I reported on him [to the FBI] just like I reported on everyone else who came around that was new. If some Arab would come around that I wasn’t familiar with, I would pass that information on to the FBI as a matter of practice and then they would further the investigation from there. Usually people just turned out to be people, and not anyone who was worth an investigation. Obviously, that wasn’t the case with Hani.

On Sept. 11 or 12, when you learned that he was one of the pilots — what was your reaction?

This is why I find it funny that the FBI emphatically denies that I ever reported on him or anything like that. Because I forget what day it was exactly after the 11th, but when the first picture of him came out in the newspaper, I called the Phoenix office to talk to a woman there that — sometimes we had discussions just on a personal level. And I called her and said, ‘Hey, do you see who’s in the newspaper today?’ I didn’t say any names, I just said, ‘Did you see who was in the paper?’ And she said: ‘Yeah, I saw him, can you believe that?’ And the conversation went on from there. And now they claim they showed me photos after that and that I couldn’t identify him. Yet, I called prior to that to see if they’d seen who was in the newspaper.

There’s been a lot in the news this summer about the memos that came out of the FBI in Phoenix and Minneapolis before Sept. 11. Were you surprised to learn of those memos?

Well, no. I was surprised to learn that they were only claiming they had limited information as far back as August or sometime in 2000. They had more than just vague information, dating back from probably 1997, 1998. Not just myself, but there’s this guy who said he also did what I did as an asset for the FBI. He’s claimed the same thing that I have — that he gave them information regarding Arabs flight training, all this stuff, as far back as 1998.

Were you surprised by Sept. 11?

Surprised just as everybody was — you’re watching this thing on TV and it’s shocking. I’m not surprised that something like that finally happened. It was just a matter of time I figured before somebody, I don’t know who, struck out at America like that. But it’s not surprising that somebody did.

Why not?

Everybody now who publicly tries to tell America, ‘Hey, maybe you guys got to sit back and look at yourselves for a minute, look at your foreign policy,’ everybody immediately jumps on that person. ‘How can you make excuses for Sept. 11, and how can you suggest …’ Well, it’s not making excuses for Sept. 11. Wrong is wrong. A tragedy is a tragedy. What happened on Sept. 11, nobody can justify it. It’s just impossible. And if somebody sat down and tried to tell me, Islamically it was permissible, I would never accept it. And I don’t think they could try to say that.

But, you know, it doesn’t change the fact that, say, since World War II, America has seriously been stepping on people’s toes. They prop up the most oppressive dictators of any given country. They back people with the worst human rights records. Finally, eventually, somebody’s going to push back. Again, that’s not saying it’s right, but you can only push people so far before they push back.

To the extent there was any appeal to Americans who were born here or naturalized Americans to go and fight jihad, and possibly to end up alongside al-Qaida or Taliban, do you think Sept. 11 is going to diminish that appeal? Or is there a chance that it would increase the appeal?

There were non-Muslims that were very sympathetic to the jihad. Not the Taliban and not al-Qaida, nothing like that, but the true jihad in Chechnya. There were American Christians in Chechnya, volunteering with the Chechen rebels. So, yeah, of course Sept. 11 has changed a lot of that. It’s taken people who might’ve been sympathetic before and willing to help and squashed that in them. And it’s taken other people that were probably neutral before, and they’re probably anti-Islam, or whatever. That’s why myself I don’t understand the whole Sept. 11 thing. Who in their right mind would’ve done such a thing? First of all, just because it’s such a horrific act, and second of all, if it was an Islamic group that did it, why would they do it? They set us back 20 years.

Do you think Sept. 11 could have been prevented?

Oh, definitely. I cannot accept that the CIA, FBI, that they didn’t know. The only thing I’ll give them is that they might not have known the day it was going to go down. But did they know the target? Did they know the mode of attack? It’s 100 percent [certain] that they did, for sure. Just think about it — how could a group of people plan such a big operation full of so many logistics and probably countless e-mails, encrypted or not, and phone calls and messengers? And you’re telling me that, through all of that, that the CIA never caught wind of it? And for that matter the Mossad, they have every Islamic group, every jihad group, every everything in the world penetrated, and they’re an American ally. So they didn’t give America a heads-up either? Of course they did.

What’s been the reaction to your book from the FBI and the CIA?

Other than minor harassment, so far, not a whole lot. But that doesn’t mean that things are over yet.

What kind of minor harassment?

Just letting their presence be known, outside where I live and things like this.

How do they do that?

[Chuckles] Just by letting their presence be known.

You mean that you’re being tailed?

Not so much being tailed as letting me know that they’re out there and that they’re watching.

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.