To fix the FBI, abolish it

Editor’s Note: This piece by Phillip Linderman is based on J. Michael Waller’s recent book, Big Intel.

Your perspective on the FBI depends a lot on when you grew up. If you are a reader of The American Conservative today and old enough to remember the classic television series The FBI starring the memorable actor Efrem Zimbalist Jr., you almost certainly still hold, somewhere hidden deep inside, a positive image of J. Edgar Hoover and the bureau.

The 1965–74 TV series was one of Hoover’s most brilliant PR successes. It burnished the FBI’s reputation in turbulent times, putting the bureau squarely on the side of millions of law-and-order Americans (many of us kids), who believed, rightly, that many radicals of that era were at war with our country.

As violent political insurgency and thousands of random bombings rocked the nation, we were reassured that a professional and patriotic FBI, personified by Zimbalist, was out there working the cases. It was always only a question of time, we believed, before Hoover’s G-men nailed dangerous radicals like the notorious Weather Underground, who planted bombs in public buildings, and the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), who could ruthlessly kidnap prominent citizens like Patty Hearst.

We had no way of anticipating that the FBI’s failure to close down these violent radicals shrouded an even greater weakness: the bureau’s inability to protect American institutions from the Fabian revolutionaries who were subverting them from inside.

In an open society, it is a classically difficult mission for any undercover police or counter-intelligence service to counter a dedicated, home-grown enemy. The Weimar republic famously failed to prevent a repackaged Hitler from emerging as a “democrat.” In The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper should have added a chapter on the deviousness of Weathermen Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who papered over their Marxist–Leninist past to reappear as counselors to a young politician named Barack Obama.

In his ambitious new book Big Intel, J. Michael Waller takes on these large questions, examining the historic performance of U.S. federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies, most significantly the FBI and CIA, in battling the subtle forces that have for decades eaten away at the country’s institutions and traditional values.

Read more.