Wedge

Prophetic when first published and even more relevant now, Wedge is 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, Wedge reveals and recreatesbattle by battle, bungle by bunglethe 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 CIAand the rival personalities of cops and spieshave 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, Wedge is 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 QaedaWedge shows the price America has paid for its failure to resolve the conflict between law enforcement and intelligence. Gripping and authoritativeand updated with an important new epilogue, carrying the action through to September 11, 2001Wedge is the only book about the schism that has informed nearly every major blunder in American espionage.