CIA vs. FBI

[Wombaticus Rex]

Book length treatment: "Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and CIA"


Via: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-1 ... to-do.html

The disgrace of David Petraeus shouldn’t damage the Central Intelligence Agency. Congress may summon or subpoena the former director and his paramour to testify about their relationship; it may lash them for the sins of pride and lust; it may even try to blame the death of an American ambassador in Libya on a distracted CIA. That would be a waste of time and breath.

But the Petraeus affair may well tarnish the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And maybe it should. There are more than a few bad actors in this tragicomedy. Worst of all, as far as we know now, it was an FBI agent -- identified by the New York Times as Frederick W. Humphries II -- who took it upon himself to transmit a raw report on the case to a member of Congress. That isn’t whistle-blowing. It has nothing to do with the rule of law or the national security of the U.S. The singular significant fact of the affair thus far is the way in which it came to light. The agent, and the FBI as an institution, should be called to account.

The bureau has the awesome power to destroy anyone in the U.S. by searching their computers, rifling their records, reading their mail and stealing their secrets. It can do that under law, with a judge’s warrant. Or it can ruin people for no real reason, as it did for decades under J. Edgar Hoover.

The CIA as an institution has reason to resent the conduct of the FBI in this case. It would be a disaster if that resentment revives the long-standing rivalry between the agencies. For more than 50 years, they were at each others’ throats, constantly skirmishing and sniping. And the more they made war, the less safe Americans were.

Cooperation Failure

Their failure to cooperate contributed mightily to the success of the Sept. 11 attacks, as the 9/11 commission concluded. The national security chief at the FBI, John O’Neill, and the head of the CIA’s bin Laden desk, Michael Scheuer, refused to share crucial intelligence. They built walls between their agencies, mortared with mutual hatred. After O’Neill was killed inside the World Trade Center during the attack, Scheuer testified in public that his death was “the only good thing” that happened that day.

Hoover started the battle himself. He was a hater, and he truly despised the CIA from the day of its creation after World War II. He saw it as a rival for power; he cursed it as a haven for communist sympathizers; he cultivated secret informers within its walls. “It is a tragedy that the true phoniness of CIA isn’t exposed,” he wrote in royal blue ink on one of his innumerable broadsides against the agency.

Hoover’s political warfare drove his Cold War counterpart, Allen Dulles, the CIA’s chief from 1953 to 1961, to deep despair. “How in the world can I do business with the bureau?” Dulles shouted at his FBI liaison. “I try, and you keep striking back.”

But the balance of power always lay with the bureau, and that power came from presidents. Franklin D. Roosevelt gave Hoover the secret authority to eavesdrop on Americans, to plant hidden microphones in their bedrooms and boardrooms, and to purloin secrets through burglary and break-ins. When the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed telephone wiretaps, Roosevelt told Hoover: To hell with the court. Harry Truman worried aloud that the bureau would become an “American Gestapo.” John F. Kennedy knew Hoover had 20-year-old sex tapes of his tryst with a suspected Nazi agent; he shared his national security adviser’s opinion that Hoover was “a goddamned sewer” collecting and disseminating dirt.

Presidents want the bureau to give them secret intelligence (and sometimes political scuttlebutt). It serves as a sword and a shield. But in the FBI’s hands, the sword can cut both ways.

FBI Power

Unique among federal agencies, the bureau can break presidents. Richard Nixon fell because the FBI fearlessly investigated Watergate (and secretly leaked the facts to reporters). FBI agents made felony cases against Ronald Reagan’s national security team in the Iran-contra imbroglio (Reagan protected himself by appointing the bureau’s director to take over the CIA). The FBI literally drew blood from Bill Clinton; the DNA evidence led to his impeachment for lying about sex.

The bureau’s current director, Robert S. Mueller III, deserves great credit for trying to make peace between the bureau and the agency. That hasn’t been an easy task, but his endurance in office has been a blessing. The CIA, deposed from pre-eminence in the American intelligence establishment, discredited by bogus reporting on phantom weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, dishonored by brutal interrogations of suspected terrorists in secret prisons, rarely keeps its directors for long; five men have held the post in the past eight years. By contrast, Mueller -- who took office, God help him, on Sept. 4, 2001 -- has served with quiet distinction for more than 11 years in the J. Edgar Hoover Building.

In Hoover’s day, instructors at the FBI Academy taught newly hired agents to revere Hoover by citing the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson: “An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.” Hoover ruled by fear. He invented the modern surveillance state. And we still live in his shadow.

Mueller cannot sandblast Hoover’s name off the FBI headquarters. He can come out of the building and rule that the FBI agent in this case was out of bounds. Backhanding raw case files to Congress is outside the law. For an agent to decide that he alone knows what is best for the U.S. -- a decision that destroyed the director of the CIA -- is a dirty business. At the least, a confession of error made by Mueller in public -- and by the agent, preferably under oath -- might help prevent renewed hostilities between the nation’s two best known intelligence services.

Mueller should make clear to the American people that the FBI will not and cannot countenance a return to an era of backstabbing and blackmail. That kind of blood sport was supposed to have died with Hoover, 40 long years ago.

(Tim Weiner, a former reporter for the New York Times, is the author of “Enemies: A History of the FBI” and “Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA.” The opinions expressed are his own.)

[Wombaticus Rex]

After O’Neill was killed inside the World Trade Center during the attack, Scheuer testified in public that his death was “the only good thing” that happened that day.

Really? Yes, really...

Via: http://icsr.info/2009/09/the-wrong-kind-of-respect/

September 11, 2001 was O’Neill’s first day as head of security of the World Trade Center. He was last seen heading back into the south tower after the planes had hit.

Scheuer had this to say about O’Neill at a 2007 congressional hearing (p. 31):


Mr. DELAHUNT. And John O’Neill…you had this to say about him: ‘Mr. O’Neill was interested only in furthering his career in disguising the rank incompetence of senior FBI leaders.’

Mr. SCHEUER. Yes, sir. I think I also said that the only good thing that happened to America on 11 September was that the building fell on him, sir.

According to CQ’s Jeff Stein, after Scheuer said that, ‘the room for once fell silent.’

Stay classy, Mr. Scheuer.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Via: http://articles.latimes.com/2002/may/26 ... a-ciafbi26 (fuck the LA Times)

CIA-FBI Feuding Runs Deep

Intelligence: Battles between the agencies over advance knowledge of Sept. 11 lead reformers to consider major changes.

May 26, 2002|RICHARD T. COOPER and JOSH MEYER | TIMES STAFF WRITERS

WASHINGTON — The controversy over who knew what in the days and weeks before Sept. 11 has vaulted the rivalry between the FBI and CIA--one of the oldest back-fence feuds in the nation's capital--outside the bounds of conventional controversy.

The question of why the deadliest terror plot in U.S. history went unstopped has exacerbated problems at the nation's already-troubled intelligence agencies. And disclosures made in the last two weeks indicate that, despite reform efforts at both the FBI and CIA, the interagency sparring is only getting worse.

''What we've seen in the past two weeks is changing everything,'' a Bush administration official familiar with CIA and FBI operations said Saturday. ''There will be more changes. It has made it apparent that we need to go deeper.''

From scandals of years past--Watergate, for example--have come major reforms. Already, pressure has grown for a broader inquiry into the intelligence agencies' operations and deeper reforms than most Washington officials wanted or thought likely just a few weeks ago. There is, for example, growing support for an independent commission to investigate the agencies.

Both the CIA and the FBI are well into their post-9/11 reorganization plans, which are designed to make them work better together. FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III has brought on board several CIA officials to work at FBI headquarters, and FBI agents have a stronger presence at the CIA's sprawling Virginia complex.

Perhaps most telling, top FBI and CIA officials--often Mueller and CIA Director George J. Tenet--gather each morning to go over the terrorism ''threat matrix'' so they can brief President Bush together.

But the recent disclosures suggest that the bickering, foot-dragging and bureaucratic gamesmanship continue.

The latest flare-up started with a leak that the CIA warned Bush of possible terrorist hijackings more than a month before Sept. 11. It continued with revelations that a Phoenix FBI agent warned of possible terrorist infiltration of flight schools. And it was capped by the detailed accusations of high-level Washington failures by an FBI lawyer in Minneapolis.

''Obviously it is still going on,'' another Bush administration official said of the CIA-FBI rivalry. ''And we all hope that our leaders ... can find a way to get their agencies to stop worrying about protecting themselves and worry more about protecting all of us, even if it means taking a couple of hard knocks institutionally.''

In the twilight struggle of the Cold War, when lives seemed secure at home, U.S. intelligence officials could battle foreign enemies without missing a step in their fights against political and bureaucratic rivals.

If CIA superiors seemed blind to a mole like Aldrich H. Ames, or if a Robert Philip Hanssen could betray his country from the comfort of an FBI executive office, the country at large took such setbacks in stride.

That may no longer be true.

Today, when warnings of horrific new dangers pour out almost daily and a natural gas explosion at an Encino apartment building sends shivers down the whole country's spine, public tolerance for the old infighting may be evaporating.

The question now is whether Mueller's proposed changes at the FBI go far enough--whether the government should simply shake up the entrenched bureaucracy or reinvent the bureau in a far more dramatic way than Mueller plans.

"In some ways, this is out of his hands now," the Bush administration official said.

But in the meantime, the debate is a hardball contest of leaks and spin, fought by the agencies themselves but also by partisans on the Hill, in news media and in the policy establishment. It is a potent formula that is already nicking careers.

Last week it was that of Mueller himself, who had only been on the job a week when Sept. 11 arrived. The broadside by Minneapolis-based agent Coleen Rowley--in a letter leaked by members of Congress--criticized Mueller personally, saying he made misleading public statements about how the FBI handled the terrorism investigation before and after Sept. 11, downplaying and even leaving out details that would make the bureau look bad.

Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), a fierce FBI critic, lambasted Mueller for withholding Rowley's letter, vowing, "A cover-up is not going to work."

Another Republican, maverick Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, ranking minority member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has repeatedly demanded the head of Tenet, a holdover from Bill Clinton's presidency. He has also discomfited a Republican White House and many of his Senate colleagues by spreading the alleged shortcomings in the CIA and FBI across the public record.

Law enforcement officials shoot back that Congress itself tied the hands of the CIA and the FBI in the 1970s by restricting the gathering of intelligence--barriers that were lifted after Sept. 11 with the passage of the Patriot Act, which also encourages the sharing of information among the FBI, CIA and National Security Council.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Via: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Wedge_-_Th ... BI_and_CIA

The existence of major FBI CIA problems has typically been denied by the parties in power, while the sins of previous generations are acknowledged readily. In this, both sides have been much like the Soviet rulers they spent so long fighting attacking past administrations as bankrupt and moribund, in order to make the present seem more perfect.

After more than fifty years of rivalry, Agency people are still perceived by FBI agents as intellectual, Ivy League, wine drinking, pipe smoking, international relations types, sometimes aloof. The Bureau's people are regarded by CIA as cigar smoking, beer drinking, door-¬knocking cops. What kind of restructuring might overcome such stereo¬typical perceptions especially when they are generally true?

Why should counterintelligence duties be divided between two agencies? The traditional view is that it was Roosevelt's political instinct, in keeping with the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers, that made him avoid concentrating secret powers and overall intelligence responsibility in a single law enforcement agency. In fact, however, the foreign domestic split was originally effected on bureaucratic, not constitutional grounds. The issues of political dictatorship and division of intelligence jurisdictions have nothing inherently to do with each other. The civil liberties argument, which equates these two issues, is to that extent false.

American culture has always been tormented by the idea of government secrecy in a way that European nations have never been.

That CIA counterspies operated in the U.S. for fifty years without greater civil liberties violations than actually occurred was a function of the uniquely American character -- a pragmatism far more idealistic than usually recognized.

Every Government inquiry into intelligence, from the first Pearl Harbor inquiry to the 1992 Iraq-Gate probe, cited interagency non-coordination as a major problem to be solved. Failure to solve it damaged the national security of the Republic, and imperiled the Republic itself.

That such a phrase as The American Way of Life could no longer be uttered uncynically, at the end of what was once called The American Century, could be conceived as the consequence of various national traumas, and to catalog them was to review, for the large part, the circumstances of interagency strife. Japanese dive-bombers in the Hawaiian dawn; atomic bomb secrets stolen by Soviet spies; failure to prevent or properly investigate the death of a young President; an inability to understand student protest during the Vietnam War; the Watergate coverup; the blowing of CIA's illegal Iran-Contra networks; a bank raid that exposed U.S. complicity in arming Iraq; spy scandals which showed that our secrets were not safe; the deaths of nearly 3,000 innocents on a beautiful September morning -- in such episodes could be discerned the FBI-CIA war, both as symptom and cause of an unmistakable national weakness.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Via: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm? ... wnload=yes

Abstract:
If anything came out of September 11, it was the revelation that our ability to collect and process intelligence has become the foundation of our national security infrastructure. The internal war between the CIA and the FBI has existed for decades, and has severely hampered our nation's ability to provide for defense. The reasons behind this war involve aspects of each organization's chartered responsibilities, the culture within each organization, and the channels of communication that have seemed to restrict rather than nurture effective sharing of information. In this study, these aspects will be explored in a historical context, through the breakdown of significant communication failures that led to disasters as a result of a weakened national security. Through analyzing the reasons behind selected interagency failures, the paper is able to expose not only the primary areas where the structural integrity of communication channels failed, but also able to suggest solutions to support the current channels. Further, the study suggests solutions for facilitating improved interagency communication, with a focus on technological solutions. Intelligence, our national intelligence community, and our national security are all vital concepts in a new age of warfare. This study, along with those to come, will hopefully enable the eventual progression toward a more effective defense.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Via: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... suits.html

Spooks vs. Suits

Why the FBI and CIA don't cooperate, and why they shouldn't.

After investigating the intelligence snafus that preceded Sept. 11, 2001, the members of Congress' Joint Intelligence Committee are offering some homespun wisdom to the FBI and CIA: Learn to share.


The demand for greater cooperation between spooks and G-men is compellingly simple, but it dangerously misunderstands the lessons of the 9/11 intelligence failures. It's true that the FBI and CIA don't communicate well. It's also true that an intelligence operation that crosses international borders as seamlessly as the terrorists do will be a key to preventing future attacks. But if Congress and the Bush administration are going to create an effective response to al-Qaida, they must realize that the communication breakdowns between the FBI and CIA are not evidence of the agencies falling short of their individual missions. In fact, they show just how successful the two sibling rivals are.


While geography represents an obvious difference between the FBI and the CIA—the Bureau takes the homeland, the Agency the rest—it is far from the most important. The FBI is a law enforcement organization that was designed to track down and arrest the crooks that local cops can't. The CIA is an intelligence agency that was designed to tell policy-makers what's really going on in the world. One measures its accomplishment by successful convictions, the other by successful predictions. Both use intelligence to do their jobs, but catching the kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby and determining whether Gen. Badenov still has influence with Khrushchev are two very different goals. And because the work is so different, the two agencies differ in how they collect, analyze, act upon, and share intelligence.


Take, for instance, a piece of information that was shared but not acted upon. In 1998, congressional investigators discovered, the CIA told the FBI that a group of Arab terrorists was planning to fly a plane filled with explosives into the World Trade Center. The FBI dropped the report in its bombing file and forgot about it. And why shouldn't they have? What investigation would it support? Like most CIA intelligence products, it didn't include the sources or the methods used to acquire the information because that might jeopardize the Agency's ability to continue collecting intelligence. For the FBI, a vague prediction without names, sources, or methods is useless. CIA analysts are trained to paint the big picture. "The FBI," says former CIA analyst Larry Johnson, "wants to know about a target: Who are his immediate associates, who is his family, who does he call, where does he eat? Most of that is never disseminated … because it would compromise sources."


The FBI complains that intelligence officers are too untrusting, but the Bureau has earned its reputation for burning sources. In 1985, for instance, the FBI rushed to arrest ex-National Security Agency staffer Ronald Pelton, who was suspected of spying for the Soviets. As the investigation began, then-NSA Director Lt. Gen. William Odom gave explicit instructions to watch Pelton until the case against him was rock solid and investigators learned if others were working for the Soviets. Such patience is a classic intelligence investigation technique that the FBI didn't appreciate. Odom was expecting to wait a year or more, but the Bureau arrested Pelton after only a month of surveillance. The only reason the FBI eventually gained enough evidence for a conviction was that Pelton offered to work for the Bureau as a double agent. The FBI thanked Pelton for his confession, and he was sentenced to life in prison. But, Odom says, "There's no reason he couldn't have just walked. Now, if you've had that experience, would you give the FBI any information?"


FBI agents are similarly skeptical toward the CIA agents who always seem to be getting in the way of their arrests. As Mark Riebling details in Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and CIA, the CIA in 1979 told the FBI that fugitive financier Robert Vesco had sought sanctuary in the Bahamas, where he gained protection by bribing Bahaman officials. Just before the FBI arrested Vesco, the CIA station chief objected on the grounds that busting Vesco might scuttle the Agency's attempts to work with those same corrupt officials to find a new home for the recently deposed Shah of Iran. While the FBI and CIA were going back and forth, Vesco figured the decidedly un-Rasta-like men following him for FBI agents and fled for communist Nicaragua and eventually Cuba.


Seen through each agency's lens of experience, the mistakes leading up to Sept. 11 begin to make slightly more sense. One can perhaps understand why the CIA might have failed to tell the FBI that two suspected al-Qaida operatives who would eventually become hijackers had entered the United States. Why risk the FBI arresting two guys who may eventually lead them to Bin Laden's cave? So, too, can one understand why the FBI failed to give the CIA the names of al-Qaida informants who were helping the investigation of the 1998 Nairobi Embassy bombing. Why risk the prosecution by involving an agency that knows little and cares even less about law enforcement? Had either been more forthcoming, the other might have been able to do more to prevent the attacks. But had either done so, it wouldn't have been doing its job, at least not in a strict sense.


That's why the reformers' calls for intelligence-sharing, personnel exchange, and token increases at the Joint Counterterrorism Center at Langley are, in the end, so empty. Ultimately, the people of each agency are going to abide by the goals of the very different organizations for which they work. They have done so for more than 50 years, despite every director of the FBI and CIA's well-meaning promises to improve coordination. And as much as Congress tries, rhetorical whippings or budgetary enticements will not fix what is essentially a problem of structure.


It's tempting, then, to change the structure. And, indeed, there have been plenty of proposals flying around the Hill that would do just that. There are two lead possibilities likely to be considered when the Joint Inquiry Committee completes its report next year. The first is separating the coordinating role of the Directorate of Central Intelligence from the CIA director's office. The second is creating a domestic surveillance agency, distinct from both the CIA and FBI, that could follow suspected terrorists once they enter the United States. The first sensibly elevates the DCI above bureaucratic bickering but will most likely not have an appreciable effect on the midlevel analyst-to-analyst coordination that counterterrorism requires. The second would address the CIA's fears by divorcing law enforcement from domestic surveillance but would probably run into too much interference from civil libertarians and the turf-protective FBI.


So here's something that might work. Create a dedicated counterterrorism agency not from scratch but by yanking the counterterrorism divisions out of the FBI and the CIA. For good measure, they should also add the counterterrorism departments of the NSA and Justice Department. By putting the string-'em-up FBI agents and the string-'em-along CIA officers in the same room, reporting to the same bosses, following the same rules, you would allow them to hash out strategies on specific information and cases. The goals of intelligence collection and criminal prosecution will still interfere with each other, but decisions of how to prioritize can be made by a single, top-level official, rather than by innumerable agents and analysts deciding on their own what to pass along and what to keep to themselves.

Admittedly, such a move would be politically impossible if it were designed to be permanent. But why would it need to be? There's no reason to believe that al-Qaida and international terrorism will be the No. 1 intelligence priority five years from now. (It barely is now, just one year after the attacks.) By sunsetting the new collaboration in, say, five years, Congress could, with presidential muscle, get around the bureaucratic resistance. After all, even J. Edgar Hoover, who tried to smother the infant CIA in its crib in the late '40s, was able to tolerate its forerunner, the OSS, when he thought that it wouldn't survive the end of World War II. If, after five years, a centralized counterterrorism agency is still needed, it can be renewed. But if terrorism returns to its previous position as just one of many potential threats, it can be disbanded or reduced. Then the FBI and CIA can go back to doing what they do best: driving each other nuts.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Tons of gems here: http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/ ... a-dispute/

[thatsmystory]

Many journalists who point to the CIA/FBI turf war as an explanation for 9/11 tend to ignore internal FBI obstruction. The given narrative blames Alec Station for sharing the information too late to do any good. What actually happened (according to public information) was that the intel side FBI obstructed the criminal side Cole agents. Nobody at the FBI wants to talk about this. IMO these FBI vs. CIA explanations are misleading considering they are based on a false notion that the public is on the same page as intelligence officials. AFAIK the only person from the UBLU (the FBI intel side Bin Laden unit that obstructed both the Cole investigation and the search for al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar) who has ever commented publicly about 9/11 is Kevin Foust who was transferred from the Washington Field office to become unit chief on 9/11. He was supposed to assume command in late September but that timetable was moved up by CT Division Chief Dale Watson (who worked for the CIA before going to the FBI). For some reason Rodney Middleton, acting chief up to 9/11, was not asked to stay on. In 9/11 books there is usually about two paragraphs about the UBLU. Typically the author quotes something outrageous and has nothing else to add:

From The Threat Matrix: The FBI at War in the Age of Global Terror by Garrett Graff:

Steve Bongardt was on a 2:30 conference call with Liguori and Maxwell. Also at the other end were Mike Rolince, headquarters supervisor Rod Middleton, and analyst Dina Corsi, whom Bongardt and Fincher had clashed with that spring.

Maxwell opened. "What do we know? Do we recognize any of the hijacker names?"

Corsi replied affirmatively and began to read some. Bongardt came alert quickly at one name in particular. "Dina!" he interrupted. "Khalid al-Mihdhar? The same one you told us about? He's on the list?"

Middleton broke in from Washington. "Steve," he said, "we did everything by the book."

Bongardt exploded. "Hope that makes you fucking feel better! Tens of thousands are dead!"

Maxwell, sitting in New York, hit the mute button on the conference call and pointed at Bongardt, saying "Now is not the time. There will be a time for that. Now's not it."

from pg. 313

Suffice to say there has never been a time that "by the book" was explained by anyone at the FBI.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Thank you! I am looking forward to procuring & digesting Kevin Fenton's Disconnecting the Dots.

I should probably be upfront that my interest in procuring this thread is 60s ==> 70's ==> 80's, and not motivated by any belief in 9/11 narratives.

Just the same, I have of course just quoted a lot of post-9/11 memes (and memes are surely narratives) so I appreciate the points you're making here and I'm glad they got made on page one.

Also, I had never read the Threat Matrix material. Would you recommend the book?

[thatsmystory]

Thank you! I am looking forward to procuring & digesting Kevin Fenton's Disconnecting the Dots.

Just the same, I have of course just quoted a lot of post-9/11 memes (and memes are surely narratives) so I appreciate the points you're making here and I'm glad they got made on page one.

One other aspect of CIA/FBI/9/11 that the media has never covered: In May 2001 Tom Wilshire, the deputy chief of Alec Station, was moved to the FBI ITOS. He is the same official who noted that any al Qaeda operatives liked to Khallad Bin Attash would likely be at the center of the next al Qaeda plot. He knew that al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar were linked to Bin Attash by way of a terrorist meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in early January 2000. He also knew they were in the US.

Did Wilshire bring different mission priorities? If so how did he convince a bunch of FBI agents to risk their careers by obstructing al Qaeda investigations? The public has no idea what really went on. The one thing CIA and FBI officials agree on is that the public should be left in the dark. That is why these pat answers about lack of communication are so nauseating. They explain almost nothing.

Also, I had never read the Threat Matrix material. Would you recommend the book?

It's a mainstream book so anyone expecting an expose will be disappointed. Typically such books have info that isn't available elsewhere. He had some details about the 1998 embassy bombings investigation that was new. Also I found the FBI retrospective view of the Mafia cases interesting. I believe he had unusual access to Mueller which definitely worked in Mueller's favor. I think at one point the author blamed the public in part for 9/11 for being so outraged by FBI excesses that it led to "risk aversion." It's the usual arrangement with sources. Journalists who get access tend to waste that access which is probably why they got access in the first place.

[Wombaticus Rex]

One aspect of this topic which really interests me is those rare & enterprising souls who have been both CIA and FBI over the course of their NatSec careers, so thank you for the data point on Tom Wilshire.

And, I'll definitely pass on Threat Matrix -- simply too much good stuff to read this year. Thank you for the response!