Tag: Riebling

June 19, 2003

Mark Riebling

Although I know the CIA better than I do the FBI, I have spent time in the past ten years with law enforcement officers from over 40 countries including the US, and the bottom line is that the FBI bureaucracy (Supervisory Special Agents and the politically-motivated upper tiers of FBI management) are a worse threat to US security than individual terrorist groups, for the simple reason that as long as the FBI leadership remains in denial, in secret, and ineffective, the entirety of our homeland defense is incapacitated.The earlier version of this book focused on the decades of historical enmity between CIA and FBI–in the early years, Edgar J. Hoover was clearly to blame for a culture of hostility between the two agencies and between the FBI and military intelligence–in one instance he actually suppressed early knowledge of Japanese intentions on Pearl Harbor obtained from a German agent tasked to fulfill their targeting requirements.

In later years the CIA took on more responsibility for shutting out the FBI, consistently refusing to brief them in to either internal counterintelligence failures, or foreign operations with a strong domestic counterintelligence matter.

What the author has done in the aftermath of 9-11 is update the book and make it even more relevant to every citizen and every elected official and every bureaucrat. The earlier edition made me very angry about how the senior FBI bureaucracy can sacrifice the national interest at the altar of its own selfish agenda of self-preservation and aggrandizement–from Special Agent Rowley to Special Agent Robert Wright, the FBI leadership consistently spends more time censoring and punishing its own people for honesty, than it does chasing terrorists. This new improved edition should make every citizen, every voter angry, and they should instruct their elected representatives that the time has come for a National Security Act that finally reforms national foreign intelligence, military intelligence, and law enforcement intelligence, and in passing, creates the homeland security intelligence act to create a federated system of state and local intelligence and counterintelligence cadres that operate under the jurisdiction of governors and mayors rather than the federal government.

Pogo had it right: we have met the enemy and he is us.

April 8, 2000

Mark Riebling

I cannot do this book justice, other than to say that I had never understood the depth and stupidity of the bureaucratic hostility between the FBI and the CIA-mostly the fault of the CIA these days but certainly inspired in part by Hoover in the early days-until I read this book; and that it should be required reading for every senior CIA manager. From the FBI's failure to communicate its very early knowledge of Japanese collection requirement on Pearl Harbor via the Germans, to the assassination of President Kennedy, the World Trade Center bombing and the Aldrich Ames case, this book makes me ashamed and angry about how bureaucracy and secrecy subvert loyalty, integrity, and common professional sense on both sides of this “wedgie” contest.