BROKEN

The battered police agency gets smacked one more time—hard.

Powers (History/CUNY; Not Without Honor, 1996), a specialist in the history of the FBI and American anticommunism, opens by observing that the Bureau is not necessarily shot through with incompetence from top to bottom: after all, a field agent in Phoenix reported to Washington that a bunch of Sunni Muslim flight-school students appeared to be up to no good, outlining “a plan of action for the Bureau to follow that, had it been implemented across the country, would have had a very good chance of uncovering several, maybe all, of the strands of the plot.” Incompetent the agency is, though, and the plan wasn’t followed at least in some measure because the FBI, thoroughly politicized and “politically correct . . . scrapped promising investigation rather than risk accusations that by tracking suspicious Middle Eastern men they were racial-profiling everyone from the Middle East.” How did the agency become so timorous, so sensitive to criticism? That’s the meat of Powers’s thesis, which alternates between praising true accomplishments—the stunning destruction of the continent-wide Nazi spy ring in 1941, for example, and the taming of Murder, Inc.—and decrying a long succession of foul-ups. By Powers’s account, these errors include the failure to track Lee Harvey Oswald’s movements in the fall of 1963 and the bungling of the Symbionese Liberation Army/Patti Hearst kidnapping case in the 1970s, the latter of which spoke to profound public disaffection for an agency whose reputation had been golden until the Nixon years, for which reason “no one . . . came forward with information on what was clearly, even from the perspective of the radical left, a dangerous, anarchic, and murderous gang.” By the 1990s, things had degenerated, Powers writes, to the point that the FBI scarcely had any domestic surveillance capabilities and was utterly unprepared for the terrorist threat of recent years, which “could not be solved with a stroke of public relations.”

Necessary reading for would-be reformers and critics of the agency alike.