FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION

General Overviews

Pre-1990s

A - K

Ayer, Frederick W., Jr.

Petersen: "In charge of FBI-attached personnel in SHAEF."

1. "The Intelligence Services." Vital Speeches of the Day (1 Feb. 1958): 247-251.

2. Yankee G-Man. Chicago: Regnary, 1957.

Bell, Griffin. Taking Care of the Law. New York: Morrow, 1982.

Bell was Attorney General in Jimmy Carter's administration. He discusses both intelligence and internal security matters.

Cochran, Louis. FBI Man: A Personal History. New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1966.

Wilcox: "Personal account of the adventures of an FBI agent, including spy cases."

Collins, Frederick L. The FBI in Peace and War. New York: Putnam's, 1943. New York: Ace Books, 1962. [pb]

Columbia Journalism Review. Editors. "CIA, FBI, and the Media: Excerpts from the Senate Report on Intelligence Activities." 15 (Jul. 1976): 37- 42. [Petersen]

Cook, Fred J. The FBI Nobody Knows. New York: MacMillan, 1964.

Chambers suggests that this book is a "disinformation exercise."

Cook, Fred J. "J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI." Lithopnion 6, no. 2 (1971): 8- 15, 58-63. [Petersen]

Demaris, Ovid. The Director: An Oral Biography of J. Edgar Hoover. New York: Harper's Magazine Press, 1975.

Wilcox: "Critical biography."

De Toledano, Ralph. J. Edgar Hoover: The Man in His Time. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1973.

A positive presentation of Hoover's career.

Donner, Frank.

1. "Hoover's Legacy." The Nation, 1 Jun. 1974, 678-700. [Petersen]

2. "How J. Edgar Hoover Created His Intelligence Powers." Civil Liberties Review 3 (Feb.-Mar. 1977): 34-51. [Petersen]

3. "Investigating the FBI and the CIA." Current 172 (Apr. 1975): 31-37. [Petersen]

Elliff, John T. The Reform of FBI Intelligence Operations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979.

Constantinides: "Reform of FBI intelligence operations is analyzed from the legal point of view: how to eliminate legal abuses and violations of civil liberties in conducting such operations, not how to increase the operations' effectiveness.... The study is thoughtful and basically sound..., but there is debate on some of Elliff's recommendations as lacking realism, being too restrictive, or not being valid.... For the historian of CI, Elliff discusses (in a general way) the little-known case of a U.S. scholar engaged in espionage for the East Germans."

Exeter Books. Editors. The FBI. New York: Brompton Books, 1989.

Felt, W. Mark. The FBI Pyramid from the Inside. New York: Putnam's, 1979.

Felt retired as the FBI's number two executive; he was later revealed to have been Woodward and Bernstein's "Deep Throat."

Fitch, Stephen D. "The FBI Library Awareness Program: An Analysis." Intelligence and National Security 7, no. 2 (Apr. 1992): 101-111.

"In 1987 a national controversy erupted ... over the revelations of an FBI operation called the 'Library Awareness Program', which involved an effort by the FBI to recruit librarians to report on library patrons.... The FBI's initiation of this program can be understood as one response to an era in which several new problems have emerged concerning the protection of scientific information."

Flaherty, John J.

1. Inside the FBI. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1943.

2. Our FBI: An Inside Story. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1951.

These are pro-FBI accounts, very similar to much of the writing on the Bureau of the period. The second is an update of the first.

Hart, Scott. Washington at War, 1941-45. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970.

Wilcox: "Account of FBI activities during World War II."

Huminik, John. Double Agent. New York: New American Library, 1967. London: Hale, 1968.

Constantinides: The author worked as an FBI double agent against the Soviets. The story includes "much on Soviet techniques for developing a prospective agent in the private sector and the inducements offered."

Keller, William W. The Liberals and J. Edgar Hoover: The Rise and Fall of a Domestic Intelligence State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989.

Feinman, Presidential Studies Quarterly 21.1, sees the author demonstrating that from the late 1940s to the late 1960s "liberals were willing to delegate extensive powers to Hoover to fight domestic Communism and to infiltrate and undermine the Ku Klux Klan." The alliance between the liberals and Hoover began to falter only "when it became obvious that Hoover was unwilling to promote civil rights."

Kelley, Clarence M. Kelley: The Story of an FBI Director. Kansas City, MO: Andrews, McMeel, 1987.

Kessler, Ronald. Spy vs. Spy: Stalking Soviet Spies in America. New York: Scribner's, 1988. Spy vs. Spy: The Shocking True Story of the FBI's War Against Soviet Agents in America. New York: Pocket Books, 1988. [pb]

Cram says this is an "interesting and useful compendium" that constitutes a "valuable contribution to counterintelligence literature on the FBI experience."

According to Evans, IJI&C 3.3, Spy vs. Spy is "easy for laymen to read and entertains." However, the subtitle is misleading because the case of the Koechers, who were Czech spies, takes up "a large part or all of five of the nineteen chapters." Pollard, who spied for Israel, takes up most of Chapter 13. And Chapter 14 belongs to Larry Wu-Tai Chin, a PRC spy. The book "reflects ... many institutional prejudices and parochial viewpoints, especially regarding the CIA."

NameBase comments that "[m]ost of this book recounts the story of Karl F. Koecher and his wife Hana, whom Kessler interviewed in 1987. In 1965 they orchestrated a phony defection from the Czechoslovak Intelligence Service, after which Karl became a naturalized U.S. citizen, worked full-time for the CIA beginning in 1973, and continued as a contract agent after 1977. He ... spent many of his weekends as a 'swinger' at spouse-swapping parties with Hana. By 1982 the FBI's counterintelligence squad was getting suspicious. In 1984 Karl Koecher admitted that he had been spying for the East all along, and in 1986 he and Hana were traded for Natan Sharansky."

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