From its very origins, the FBI devoted the lion's share of its resources towards averting future harms, not towards solving past crimes, which remains a largely state and local function. There is nothing especially novel, it turns out, about the preventive mission assigned to the bureau in the war on terror. The first of these misunderstandings is that the FBI, after 9/11, had to be dragged reluctantly from its traditional law-enforcement approach towards an unprecedented preventive mission, aimed at stopping in advance those who might possibly harm the country.

Leaving Hoover's alleged personality disorders to Hollywood scriptwriters, Weiner focuses his efforts instead on refuting a series of misperceptions about the FBI that a lasting cult of secrecy has allowed to crystallise in the public mind. And although one of Hoover's chief deputies testified to his boss's smouldering bigotry ('He hated liberalism, he hated blacks, he hated Jews – he had this great long list of hates'), Weiner is more lenient in his own assessment, assuring us that Hoover 'was not a monster' and concluding, in an effort at balance, that the man's 'knowledge was enormous, though his mind was narrow'. Although Hoover unscrupulously exploited stories of homosexuality to discredit or silence political adversaries, Weiner begins his latest book, based in part on the freshly declassified documents, by dismissing the racy gossip that Hoover himself was 'a tyrant in a tutu'. Because deliberate cover-ups naturally excite scurrilous conjectures, suspicious students of the bureau have reacted to Hoover's well-oiled system for the undetectable destruction of government archives by mimicking his tendency to assume the worst, often on the basis of hearsay evidence, about the target of an investigation.Īuthor of a celebrated account of serial blundering and incompetence at the CIA, Tim Weiner is commendably impervious to this familiar temptation, refusing to replicate Hoover's paranoid style. D espite recently declassified materials, historians of the FBI remain painfully hostage to the fragmentary records that survived 'the routine destruction of FBI files' typifying J Edgar Hoover's 48-year, secrecy-obsessed directorship and especially 'the bonfire of his personal files after his death' in 1972.

Tim weiner cia book