Surprised by the news about NSA surveillance? Read this book!

A review of Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State, by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin

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Note: This review first appeared here on September 11, 2011 (yes, 9/11/11). In view of the recent news about the NSA’s Prism program and other widespread and long-standing efforts to amass personal information about the American public, I’m posting it again. This superb book deserves a far wider audience than it received in 2011.

If you treasure your freedom as an American . . . if you’re concerned about how the U.S. Government spends your tax money . . . or if you simply want to understand how our country is managed . . . you owe it to yourself to read this brilliant book. Alternately mind-boggling and blood-curdling, Top Secret America is the most impressive piece of investigative journalism I’ve read in years. Dana Priest and Bill Arkin have written a book that, in a rational world, would usher in an orgy of housecleaning through the far reaches of the Pentagon, the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and every other department, agency, or office that pretends to be involved in strengthening our national security.

Even then — even if we somehow reined in the known alphabet agencies — we would only be scratching the surface. Here’s Priest writing about the work of her co-author: “After two years of investigating, Arkin had come up with a jaw-dropping 1,074 federal government organizations and nearly two thousand private companies involved with programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence in at least 17,000 locations across the United States — all of them working at the top secret classification level.” There is an additional three thousand “state and local organizations, each with its own counterterrorism responsibilities and jurisdictions.”

Perhaps there’s one saving grace in this brouhaha of activity. Priest again: “Post 9/11, government agencies annually published some 50,000 separate serialized intelligence reports under 1,500 titles, the classified equivalent of newspapers, magazines, and journals. Some were distributed daily; others came out once a week, monthly, or annually.” There is so much “information” generated by the counterterrorism establishment that senior managers frequently ignore it all and instead ask their aides to talk to people to find out what’s really meaningful.

Don’t be mollified by the belief that all this activity is carried out by designated intelligence agencies. The nation’s warriors have their own alphabet-soup of agencies, departments, and units devoted to the same ends. The Pentagon created a major new entity called the Northern Command headed by a four-star general (the military’s highest rank) to protect the “homeland.” However, the Northern Command has no troops of its own and, to take any action, must ask permission from the leaders of each state’s National Guard and other agencies on whom it depends for personnel.

Priest and Arkin clearly take a dim view of all this:

• Many, if not all, of the Federal Government’s most closely guarded secrets are vulnerable to theft through simple file-sharing software installed on 20 million computers.
• The Director of National Intelligence, a new position created in 2004 to coordinate the work of the 16 major U.S. intellgence agencies, possesses no power to do so and is frequently ignored by them. But his staff numbers in the thousands, and they hold forth from a new, 500,000-square foot office building.
• The degree of duplication in the national security world is chilling. “Each large organization [engaged in counterterrorism] started its own training centers, supply depots, and transportation infrastructure. Each agency and subagency manned its own unit for hiding the identities of undercover employees and for creating cover names and addresses for them and for their most sensitive projects. Each ecosystem developed a set of regional and local offices.”
• Duplication of effort runs so deep that there are three separate lists of “High Value Targets,” one each for the CIA, the Pentagon, and the super-secret Joint Special Operations Command (the people who killed Bin Laden). And “at least thirty-four major federal agencies and military commands, operating in sixteen U.S. cities, tracked the money flow to and from terrorist networks.”

The depth and quality of Priest and Arkin’s research is unexcelled, and their writing is brisk and easy to read. The book benefits from the straightforward, first-person approach Priest adopted. It’s written largely from her point of view, with Arkin’s contributions as a researcher noted in the third person.

Dana Priest has reported for the Washington Post for more than 20 years. She won the George Polk Award in 2005 for reporting on secret CIA detention facilities and the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for uncovering black sites prisons. Her exposure of the deplorable conditions at Walter Reed Army Hospital helped the Washington Post win another Pulitzer in 2007. She deserves another Pulitzer for this illuminating book.

Bill Arkin served in U.S. Army intelligence in 1974 to 1978 and had worked as a consultant, political commentator, blogger, activist, and researcher for a number of progressive organizations before teaming up with Priest to write the widely-acclaimed series of Washington Post articles on which this book was based.

Isabel Allende’s latest novel is a triumph

A review of Maya’s Notebook, by Isabel Allende

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Pick up a copy of Isabel Allende’s new novel, Maya’s Notebook, and get ready for a wild and wonderful ride through the years and up and down the length of the Western Hemisphere. Though structured as a coming-of-age novel of young Maya Vidal, recounting the four seasons of her twentieth year, Maya’s Notebook ranges from the glorious madness of Berkeley, where she was born and raised, to the back alleys and casinos of drug-addled Las Vegas and an Oregon rehab center for incorrigible teenagers, to the magical solitude of an island off the Chilean coast. Along the way in this wrenching journey you’ll find yourself drawn back in time to the CIA-inspired coup that overthrew Chilean president Salvador Allende and the murderous repression that followed for seventeen years under the late unlamented Augusto Pinochet. Maya’s Notebook is a tour de force. Only a writer of Isabel Allende’s maturity and rare skills could pull together all these disparate threads and weave them together so artfully into such a pleasurable, and often laugh-out-loud funny, reading experience.

Maya Vidal is (of course) an unusual young woman. As she describes herself at the outset, “I’m nineteen years old, female, single — due to a lack of opportunity rather than by choice, I’m currently without a boyfriend. Born in Berkeley, California, I’m a U.S. citizen, and temporarily taking refuge on an island at the bottom of the world . . . I’m five-ten, 128 pounds when I play soccer and several more if I don’t watch out. I’ve got muscular legs, clumsy hands, blue or gray eyes, depending on the time of day, and blond hair, I think, but I’m not sure since I haven’t seen my natural hair color for quite a few years now.” Her father is Chilean, an airline pilot, “handsome as a bullfighter and just as vain,” her runaway mother a Danish flight attendant whom Maya long fantasized was a Laplander princess.

Why does this striking young woman find herself on an island in Chiloe, where she’s taller than everyone else? Therein lies the tale. On arriving, when she meets her designated host, Manual Arias, an aging sociologist friend of her grandmother, Maya introduces herself by saying, “Hi! I’m on the run from the FBI, Interpol, and a Las Vegas criminal gang.” Only deep into Maya’s Notebook does it become unmistakably clear that she’s not joking.

Maya is raised by her grandparents in a sprawling house in Berkeley. The great love of Maya’s life is her grandfather, her Popo, her grandmother’s second husband, Paul Ditson II, a huge and compassionate man as black as she is white, a professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley. In exile in Chile, her constant companions are the old sociologist whose tiny home she shares; the local schoolteacher who suffers from unrequited love for the lonely old man; and a lame dog christened Fahkeen the day Maya arrived when a cab driver hears her try to get rid of the beast, yelling “Shoo! Get away, fucking dog!”

Almost in passing, Allende tosses out unforgettable passages. Berkeley is “that gritty, radical, extravagant city, with its mix of races and human pelts, with more geniuses and Nobel Prize winners than any other city on earth, saturated with noble causes, intolerant in its sanctimoniousness.” The school where Maya’s grandparents sent her “taught using an Italian system of experimental education in which the students did whatever the fuck we wanted. The classrooms had no blackboards or desks, we sat on the floor, the teachers didn’t wear bras or shoes, and everyone learned at their own pace.”

Maya’s Notebook is Isabel Allende’s 19th book. Allende, a long-time Bay Area resident, is Chilean, a first cousin once removed of the late president (not his niece, other than in the Spanish vernacular). Clearly, she’s spent a lot of time in Berkeley.

Berkeley in 1969: Black Panthers, the FBI, and the Vietnam War

A review of Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party, by Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin III

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When I moved to Berkeley in 1969, the Black Panther Party was in its heyday. Only three years earlier, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale had begun building the party around an image and a name they’d appropriated from other Black organizations then active in those turbulent years of the Vietnam War and exploding ghettoes. Yet before the decade of the 1970s was out, the Black Panther Party had all but disappeared. Black Against Empire, Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin’s excellent study of the Panthers and their politics, makes clear why and how they grew into such a force — and why the party collapsed so few years later.

The pivotal event in the history of the Black Panther Party was the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968. Before that day, the Party was just one of hundreds of activist African-American organizations, most of them vanishingly small, in Black ghettoes and on university campuses all across the country. The Panthers were set apart from others by their distinctive black outfits, by carrying guns in public to defend themselves against police brutality, by their outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War, and, perhaps most of all, by their willingness to encompass people of other ethnicities. As a result, they had grabbed headlines locally and were growing at a fast pace, attracting African-Americans in their late teens and twenties who were disillusioned by the timidity of their elders in the Civil Rights Movement — but the party’s activities were largely limited to Oakland, Berkeley, and nearby cities. However, when Rev. King was murdered, the Black Panther Party quickly emerged as the leading organization nationwide with the credibility and the activist ideology that could channel the fury and the hope of young African-Americans and attract alliances with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and other largely non-Black radical organizations. The Party quickly began opening offices around the country — a total of 68 cities by 1970 — and for three years remained a powerful and ever-present force in the activist politics of the day.

Soon, however, the party’s rapid decline began in earnest. Bloom and Martin emphasize two key factors — the Panthers’ establishment enemies and the shrinking U.S. engagement in Vietnam under Richard Nixon — to which I would add a third: the explosive personality dynamics of the Panthers’ leaders themselves.

The Black Panther Party’s sworn enemies included the FBI, the Oakland police, and, later, police in Chicago and many other cities. J. Edgar Hoover personally led the FBI’s campaign against the Panthers, introducing informers and agents provocateur to trigger violence and sow dissent within their ranks. The Bureau’s efforts went so far as to hand out explosives, spread destructive rumors to undermine the marriages of Panther leaders, and arrange the assassination of key Panther activists. The Oakland police used violent and often illegal tactics, invading Panther homes and offices without search warrants and arresting individual Panthers on transparently trumped-up charges. The most egregious incident took place in Richard J. Daley’s Chicago, when police, acting on information from an informer, illegally burst into an apartment in the middle of the night and murdered Fred Hampton, the local chapter leader, sleeping in his bed. All told, police murdered dozens of Panther activists around the country.

Richard Nixon played a pivotal role, too. “Nixon was the one who rolled back the draft, wound down the war, and advanced affirmative action.” The cumulative effect of these strategic moves was to erode the foundation of the Panthers’ support both in the Black community and among white radicals (whose popularity among young people, it became clear, was largely grounded in fear of the draft). Once regarded not just by themselves but by other self-appointed revolutionary organizations as the vanguard of the revolution, the Panthers increasingly found themselves alone as liberals attacked them and the revolution on the nation’s campuses went the way of the draft. The party was officially dissolved in 1982.

So far as it goes, this analysis of the principal forces that undermined the Black Panther Party is right on target. However, I would argue that the personality dynamics of the party’s leadership played a significant role as well. Judging from my own observations as well as the evidence advanced in Black Against Empire, the three leading figures in the party were all brilliant men. It’s idle to speculate what roles they might have played in society had they been born white in middle-class families — but it’s clear that their life experiences as African-Americans growing up in America in the 1950s and 60s, not to mention the cruel frauds worked on them by FBI agents and informers during the late 1960s and early 70s, wreaked havoc on their mental health. Of the three, only Bobby Seale survived the Panther years whole and sane. Both Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver were, by all accounts, unhinged in the final years of their lives. So far as I’m concerned, no further proof is needed than the bitter feud that erupted between the two of them, which led to dangerous and sometimes violent splits within the Panther organization.

For anyone who lived through those unsettling times on the margins of the day’s events, Black Against Empire is illuminating. Though I crossed paths with a number of the individuals named in the book, and we had a great many mutual friends, I was quite unaware of the Panthers’ early history and of the party’s years of decline. If you have any interest in East Bay history, Berkeley politics, or African-American history and politics, you’ll find Black Against Empire essential reading.

Joshua Bloom, the principal author, is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at UCLA. His collaborator, Waldo Martin, is a Professor of History at UC Berkeley specializing in African-American history.

Christopher Buckley: Funny ha-ha, and funny strange

A review of No Way To Treat a First Lady, by Christopher Buckley

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

Humor is a funny  thing. Not long ago I introduced Christopher Buckley to an audience of about 100 people in Berkeley. (No, I didn’t go to Yale with him. This was solely on the strength of having given favorable reviews to several of his novels.) Buckley spoke off the cuff rather than read from his writing, and I found him hilarious. So did about half the audience. Some seemed to be on the verge of falling off their chairs from time to time. But the other half of the audience sat stone-faced, often with arms crossed and eyes darting right and left, apparently waiting for a chance to sneak out of the room.

All this is to say that I read No Way to Treat a First Lady, laughing all the way — and maybe you won’t. Whenever as a child I told my mother that something was funny, she would ask, “Funny ha-ha, or funny strange?” Well, this one is a little of both. No Way to Treat a First Lady tells the tale of a philandering President and a long-suffering wife who has, apparently, murdered him in his sleep. See what I mean?

Christopher Buckley’s humor is grounded in such situations, not too many steps removed from reality. Don’t get me wrong. The leading characters in this novel in no way resemble two recent residents of the White House. And the supporting cast would be a better fit in a Marx Brothers film than in today’s Washington, DC: the best criminal defense lawyer money can buy, who incidentally was the jilted law-school lover of the First Lady; a blonde Court TV superstar, who is the current, much-younger squeeze of the self-important defense lawyer; bumbling rival trial attorneys; and a motley assortment of FBI and Secret Service agents and White House hangers-on. Even so, you can practically see them behind today’s headlines.

I won’t spoil the story by summarizing the plot, which is deliciously complex and as full of surprises as a best-selling thriller. You deserve the chance to discover it on your own.

Forewarned, then, that I think Christopher Buckley is one of the funniest writers currently walking the planet, I commend you to my previous reviews of his books: Little Green Men, Florence of Arabia, The White House Mess, and They Eat Puppies, Don’t They? If you read (or have read) these reviews, you know that I don’t think they’re all equally good — Florence of Arabia, for example, was just a little too real for me.

Pretty soon I’m going to run out of Buckley’s books, and I’ll just have to start reading them all over again.

New proof how J. Edgar Hoover and Ronald Reagan stirred up violence in 1960s Berkeley

A review of Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power, by Seth Rosenfeld

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We’ve known for some time that the FBI and Ronald Reagan’s gubernatorial administration were involved in the sometimes-violent conflicts that roiled Berkeley in the 60s. What we didn’t know — or, at least, what I didn’t know — was that J. Edgar Hoover and Ronald Reagan were personally and directly engaged not just in monitoring but in managing the secret government campaigns that helped raise the temperature to the boiling point again and again. Seth Rosenfeld’s exhaustively researched recent book, Subversives, documents this story in often minute detail yet manages to keep it eminently readable.

Anyone who lived through those times as a sentient adult will surely remember some of the seminal events: the protest against the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1960, lodged in memory through the iconic footage of students being fire-hosed down the steps of San Francisco City Hall; the 1964 Free Speech Movement that pushed the University of California at Berkeley into the forefront of student protest, brought Mario Savio to prominence, and began to change public attitudes about the police; the 1965 Vietnam Day Teach-In that fastened students’ attention on the escalating U.S. war in Vietnam and initiated the public’s disillusionment with the U.S. government; and the violent clash over People’s Park in 1969, which led to the death of young James Rector and confirmed in so many minds the view that law enforcement officials were out of control.

Subversives breaks new ground in several ways because of Rosenfeld’s dogged, three-decade pursuit of classified government files that cast new light on the events themselves as well as the major players whose decisions drove them. The author keeps the story from getting out of hand by maintaining a tight focus on Hoover, Reagan, Savio, and UC Berkeley President Clark Kerr.

In Subversives, Rosenfeld relates the roles (hitherto largely undocumented) of J. Edgar Hoover and Ronald Reagan in these familiar events, demonstrating the ruthlessness with which both men pursued “Communists” and their lack of respect for the truth. We see Hoover aggressively pushing his agents to seek out embarrassing personal details — largely rumors — about Mario Savio, Clark Kerr, and their collaborators, illegally passing the information along to Right Wing publications, and later citing it as documented truth in reports to the President and to the public. We see Reagan eagerly seeking out the FBI to inform on his rivals in Hollywood and secretly naming names behind closed doors with HUAC, destroying the careers of talented actors, directors, and writers because he disagreed with their political beliefs. From a vantage-point of half a century, both men appear to be thoroughly unscrupulous and careless about the sometimes tragic consequences of the action they directed from their privileged positions.

Seth Rosenfeld, a winner of the coveted George Polk Award and now a staff member of the Berkeley-based Center for Investigative Reporting, was previously an investigative reporter for the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle.

John Grisham’s “The Racketeer” — a walk on the dark side, for a change

A review of The Racketeer, by John Grisham

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When you’re reading somebody’s 25th novel — the 31st of all the books he’s written — you’d be right to expect that he’d gotten the hang of writing. Especially if the guy had already sold more than a quarter of a billion copies of his work. And so it is with John Grisham’s fiendishly clever new novel, The Racketeer. It’s another winner from a man who’s been turning them out for more than two decades.

One aspect of Grisham’s fiendishness is his capacity to surprise, not just with twists and turns of plot — he’s great at that — but also by switching gears emotionally. For example, his most recent crime story before The Racketeer was The Litigators. That was a very funny book. The Racketeer isn’t (unless you have a tendency to cackle whenever a crook outsmarts the FBI). Grisham’s spare, no-nonsense style varies little, but he has a rare gift to make the most improbable characters both credible and likable. But no matter how sly and underhanded, his   leading characters are almost always guys (or gals) in white hats.

Malcolm Bannister is Grisham’s protagonist here. Bannister is a hapless small-town attorney in Virginia who seems to have lost his white hat. He’s about halfway through an unjustified ten-year sentence in the Federal pen for violating the RICO act — yet another brilliant example of the FBI’s manipulation of that misbegotten law. He is 43, a former Marine, African-American, and wicked smart. Oh, and has he got a yen to get even with the FBI!

Suffice it to say that, at the outset, this book’s title is ironic. By the end it’s anything but ironic. And all the fun lies in how Bannister gets there. If you can guess how he does it before the plot fully unfolds, you’re a better person than me.

By the way, another of Grisham’s tendencies is to show off his liberal, reformist side, and The Racketeer is no different in that respect. Here, he takes on the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Prepare to be horrified.

I’ve previously reviewed The Litigators and The Confession. 

A thriller that explores the intersection of high finance and high crime

A review of Buried Secrets, by Joseph Finder

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Buried Secrets opens much like a standard-issue detective novel, with Nick Heller approached by an old friend to investigate the mysterious disappearance of an old friend’s daughter. Heller is not a PI, really, but, well . . . a sort of private spy who just happens to be a former Special Forces soldier with connections in the FBI and other, unnamed federal agencies.

Gradually, we learn that this is by no means a typical detective story. As he searches for Alexa, the pretty teenaged daughter of hedge fund billionaire Marcus Marshall, Heller soon finds himself enmeshed in a deadly game involving international criminal forces and probably the Russian regime to boot. Along the way, Heller rekindles an old love affair that seems to suggest a partnership in future stories.

Buried Secrets, like all the other Joseph Finder novels I’ve read, is a cut or two above other thrillers — in its intricate plotting, its in-depth charzacterizations, and its hard-hitting writing.

Buried Secrets is the second of Joseph Finder’s Nick Heller novels and his tenth overall. His books are all thrillers set in the world of business and finance. However, Finder first gained notice as a graduate student in Russian affairs at Harvard in the early 1980s when he wrote an expose about the controversial American oilman Armand Hammer, tieing him to the Kremlin. Though Hammer threatened to sue for libel, he never did, and the opening of the KGB files years later confirmed Finder’s assertions. Hammer, who was close to Richard Nixon, was effectively a KGB agent.

A refreshingly original new thriller that explores international intrigue with minimal violence

A review of The Silent Oligarch, by Chris Morgan Jones

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If you imagine today’s Russia to be in the grips of gun-toting mafiyas bound by their own Slavic brand of omerta and competing with Mexican drug cartels to rack up impressive body counts, you’ll be set straight by this thoroughly credible tale of high-level skullduggery based in Moscow and played out in London, Berlin, and the Riviera. In The Silent Oligarch, Chris Morgan Jones’ debut in the world of present-day espionage, you’ll encounter a sophisticated version of intrigue much more reminiscent of John Le Carre than Robert Ludlum.

This finely crafted novel revolves around an obscure Russian bureaucrat named Konstantin Malin, a lifer in the Ministry of Oil and Industry who controls a large share of his country’s oil and gas industry, the world’s largest. His front man is an English expat lawyer in Moscow, Richard Lack, whose Russian wife and child have left him for the less morally ambiguous clime of London. Lack is at the helm of a vast and almost impenetrably complex global network of shadowy enterprises, the sole purpose of which appears to be to launder enormous quantities of Malin’s money and funnel it back to Russia for investment.

Lack’s cozy life in Moscow begins coming apart when a Greek oilman, one of the many wealthy businessmen Malin has cheated, decides to unmask Malin’s fraud and put him out of business. Enter Ben Webster, a former journalist posted to Russia now employed at a significantly higher salary by a private, London-based intelligence agency. As Webster sets out to unravel the real story behind Lack’s role as “owner” of an enormous global energy conglomerate, Lack himself is forced to testify in court in several countries as a result of the Greek tycoon’s lawsuit. The truth begins leaking out, and even the FBI becomes interested in the case.

Tension builds as both Lack and Webster are tormented by their seeming helplessness in the face of the unfolding events, and the suspense never lets up despite minimal violence. The jarring conclusion will surprise all but the most insightful of readers.

This is a book written for readers, not for Hollywood. It’s told in the third person, with chapters alternating between Lack’s and Webster’s perspectives. With scenes set largely in such colorful places — the Kremlin, the Riviera, and luxurious hotels in Berlin and London — a talented screenwriter might manage to fit this twisted tale into the confines of a filmscript, but the interior dialogue that forms the heart of this novel would very likely be lost.

A fascinating novel of terrorism written before 9/11

A review of The Zero Hour, by Joseph Finder

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Imagine a thriller set in New York City. It’s a story about an impending terrorist attack on Wall Street. The cast of characters includes a chameleon-like terrorist-for-hire reminiscent of Frederick Forsyth’s Jackal, a fugitive financier thirsting for revenge against the banker and the system that forced him to flee the U.S., a brilliant American investigator whose life is complicated by a jealous ex-husband and a precocious 8-year-old son, a prominent and wealthy banker with a taste for masochistic sex, and a crusty New York City police lieutenant who knows all the tricks ever tried.

Now imagine this cast of characters acting out their roles a decade and a half ago, five years before 9/11 — when the book was published. Given the tragic turn that history took in September 2001, you might suspect that The Zero Hour would come across as lame. It doesn’t. In the skillful hands of Joseph Finder, for whom this was the third of what by now is a total of ten thrillers about espionage and business, The Zero Hour is compelling. In fact, it’s fascinating to look back across a gap of just 15 years and realize how much our world has changed. Then, New York’s Joint FBI/NYPD Terrorism Task Force was sorting through the disquieting lessons of the first World Trade Center attack and the Oklahoma City bombing.

The Zero Hour tells the tale of a South African-born terrorist best known as Henrik Baumann or “The Prince of Darkness.” We never learn his birth name. Baumann has been sprung from a high-security prison near Cape Town to do a job for hire — unquestionably, the biggest in his long, blood-streaked career and, necessarily, the last. As he moves ahead methodically to complete his assignment, Baumann eventually squares off against FBI Special Agent Sarah Cahill, who has been put in charge of the Joint Terrorism Task Force’s operation to thwart his attack. To reveal more of the story would be cruel.

This is a complexly plotted and highly satisfying novel of suspense. What elevates The Zero Hour out of the pack is the extraordinary technical detail that Finder weaves into the story, revealing a level of understanding of the practical side of his story that only very thorough research could produce.