PUTNEY — As Tim Weiner describes it, the FBI's role in secret intelligence operations is “the most important, but the least known” aspect of the federal agency.
Why might that be?
“The reason is, it's secret,” says Weiner, a 1973 graduate of The Putney School, who will return to Windham County to speak about the dual roles of the FBI and sign books this Saturday night at a benefit for the Next Stage Arts Project.
Weiner has made a career of covering national security issues. His latest book, Enemies: A History of the FBI, was published in April.
The FBI and its iconic director, J. Edgar Hoover, are “encrusted in myth and legend,” says the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.
While the public face of the agency has centered on its meat-and-potatoes law enforcement duties like apprehending bank robbers, the parallel role of the FBI in domestic espionage - bugging, wiretapping, and other forms of spying on American citizens - has been there since the beginning.
Those roles inevitably create thorny problems, ranging from the philosophical to the constitutional: they involve “arresting people for words or speech,” he says.
Weiner points to the recent arrest of “self-proclaimed anarchists” in Chicago protesting the NATO summit. The three, which includes a man formerly from Keene, N.H., were under FBI surveillance and charged May 19 with material support for terrorism, conspiracy to create terrorism, and possession of explosives. All three refute the charges, claiming they are being persecuted for their political beliefs.
It's an example of what Weiner describes as “a uniquely American dilemma”: to what extent should an agency have “all-encompassing power to read email and listen to telephone calls?”
The theme, he says, runs through the agency's history, from its roots as the Bureau of Investigation (BOI) as a division of the Justice Department.
The fear of violence from subversive anarchists, and the brazen theft of oil, coal, minerals, and timber from federal land by the industrialists of the Gilded Age prompted President Theodore Roosevelt and his attorney general, Charles J. Bonaparte, to create a new investigative service, “which would report to no one,” except the AG.
Roosevelt signed an executive order in 1908 creating the BOI, after Congress emphatically rejected his administration's request.
Hoover began working for the Justice Department in 1917 and by 1924 became the sixth director of the BOI, which became an independent service in the Department of Justice and was rechristened the FBI in 1935.
He served until his death in 1972, leaving a lifelong legacy of investigative activity, arrests, and detainment of those on his list of “enemies of the United States” who he considered communist, anarchist, radical, or otherwise subversive.
Weiner gives credit to FBI Director Robert Mueller, who next to Hoover has spent the longest time in the role. “For the past couple of years, they've been trying very hard to get the balance right,” Weiner says.
In an interview on NPR's Fresh Air, Weiner described Hoover's legacy.
“Hoover is the inventor of the modern American national security state,” he said. “Every fingerprint file, every DNA record, every iris recorded through biometrics, every government dossier on every citizen and alien in this country owes its life to him.”
The FBI's own documents
Weiner has built Enemies on years of research of several significant collections of declassified documents - including Hoover's personal files - that slowly bring into focus the role of the agency, its secret activities, and its enigmatic founder.
The book, which also derives from oral histories of FBI agents that the agency has also declassified, documents a “tug of war,” a natural tension that Weiner describes as “the two strands of DNA that run through the book and, I hope, give it life” - liberty and security.
“My methodology is to use sources on the record,” says Weiner, who has reported on secret intelligence and national security for 30 years, roughly half that time at The New York Times . “No anonymous sources, no anonymous quotes. I use the FBI's own documents.”
“I owe that to readers to establish a base of trust,” he says.
Weiner wrote Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA in 1997, which won a national book award for nonfiction. He is working on a history of the Pentagon, which, he says, will connect with his other books to chronicle “our history as a superpower.”
Windham County connections
According to Billy Straus, the co-chair of the Next Stage board of directors and a founder of the young arts organization, Weiner has remained in touch with a Putney School classmate - Straus's cousin Martha.
“Between Martha and me, we descended on him,” Straus says, laughing.
Weiner, whose first paid job was washing dishes in the kitchen of the Common Ground restaurant in Brattleboro in 1973 and who says he visits Windham County several times a year, was more than willing.
In addition to his Next Stage reading, the author will speak and sign books on Friday at 7 p.m. at the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester.
He says he also is planning a meal with his high school English teacher, David Calicchio of Westminster West.
“He's really the guy who taught me how to write,” he says.
He pauses.
“Or tried to, anyway,” he adds dryly.