Wedge From Pearl Harbor to 9/11: How the Secret War between the FBI and CIA Has Endangered National Security

Prophetic when first published, even more relevant now,Wedgeis the classic, definitive story of the secret war America has waged against itself.Based on scores of interviews with former spies and thousands of declassified documents,Wedgereveals and re-creates -- battle by battle, bungle by bungle -- the epic clash that has made America uniquely vulnerable to its enemies. For more than six decades, the opposed and overlapping missions of the FBI and CIA -- and the rival personalities of cops and spies -- have caused fistfights and turf tangles, breakdowns and cover-ups, public scandals and tragic deaths.A grand panorama of dramatic episodes, peopled by picaresque secret agents from Ian Fleming to Oliver North,Wedgeis both a journey and a warning. From Pearl Harbor, McCarthyism, and the plots to kill Castro through the JFK assassination, Watergate, and Iran Contra down to the Aldrich Ames affair, Robert Hanssen's treachery, and the hunt for Al Qaeda --Wedgeshows the price America has paid for its failure to resolve the conflict between law enforcement and intelligence.Gripping and authoritative -- and updated with an important new epilogue, carrying the action through to September 11, 2001 --Wedgeis the only book about the schism that has informed nearly every major blunder in American espionage.

Mark Riebling is editorial director at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.