Wedge
From Pearl Harbor to 9/11: How the Secret War between the FBI and CIA Has Endangered National Security
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Prophetic when first published, even more relevant now, Wedge is the classic, definitive story of the secret war America has waged against itself.
Based on scores of interviews with former spies and thousands of declassified documents, Wedge reveals and re-creates -- battle by battle, bungle by bungle -- the epic clash that has made America uniquely vulnerable to its enemies. For more than six decades, the opposed and overlapping missions of the FBI and CIA -- and the rival personalities of cops and spies -- have caused fistfights and turf tangles, breakdowns and cover-ups, public scandals and tragic deaths.
A grand panorama of dramatic episodes, peopled by picaresque secret agents from Ian Fleming to Oliver North, Wedge is both a journey and a warning. From Pearl Harbor, McCarthyism, and the plots to kill Castro through the JFK assassination, Watergate, and Iran Contra down to the Aldrich Ames affair, Robert Hanssen's treachery, and the hunt for Al Qaeda -- Wedge shows the price America has paid for its failure to resolve the conflict between law enforcement and intelligence.
Gripping and authoritative -- and updated with an important new epilogue, carrying the action through to September 11, 2001 -- Wedge is the only book about the schism that has informed nearly every major blunder in American espionage.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Based on documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and interviews with former agents, Riebling's expose of the bitter rivalry between the FBI and CIA is presented through the prism of national traumas that might have turned out differently had these agencies worked togther: the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the McCarthy-era loyalty investigations, the JFK assassination and the World Trade Center bombing. Relations have always been tense, shows Riebling, dating back to the early years of WWII when William Donovan, head of the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of the CIA), built a network of agents against the wishes of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Interagency animosity was further fueled by Hoover's suspicion that a later CIA director, Walter Bedell Smith, was a Communist. The FBI's obsessive search for Soviet moles during the '60s led to a formal disassociation in 1970, when Hoover abolished the Liaison Section. Relations are still so poor that the recent arraignment of Soviet spy Aldridge Ames was presented to the public, according to the author, less as a national-security catastrophe than as an example of something rare and wonderful-cooperation between the FBI and CIA. Riebling is a former Random House editor; this is his first book.
