cover image Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and CIA

Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and CIA

Mark Riebling. Alfred A. Knopf, $27.5 (563pp) ISBN 978-0-679-41471-1

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. (Oct.)