Review

Athan Theoharis has a long-established reputation as a scholar of American anti-Communism, the post-World War II Red Scare and J.Edgar Hoover's Federal Bureau of Investigation. It will be further enhanced by this most recent work, the thesis of which is succinctly summarized in the subtitle. In a thorough examination of FBI counter intelligence practices during and after the Second World War, Theoharis posits that the agency, though privy to crucial decryptions of Soviet messages provided by U.S. military intelligence, broadly failed to use the information to ferret out and prosecute Soviet agents and their American contacts. He argues further that, as of the late 1940s, Hoover politicized the FBI as he increasingly deflected FBI resources into monitoring American individuals and organizations whose beliefs and activities he deemed "subversive." Through much of the 1950s, the results of FBI surveillance activities were then made available to antiCommunist (usually Republican) politicians for the purpose of giving weight to allegations of widespread Communist influence in government, Hollywood, the schools and even churches. Theoharis offers a chilling portrait of a national law-enforcement agency turned to largely political purposes and away from the real needs of national security during a dangerous period of the Cold War.	1
Theoharis grounds a major portion of his thesis on the FBI's evidently inept use of intelligence emanating from the "Venona Project," a wartime effort by U.S. military intelligence to intercept and decode both German and Soviet consular messages. Records released in 1995 indicate that as of 1946, U.S. intelligence officials were aware that Soviet agents operating out of the Washington D.C. and New York City Soviet consulates were engaging in espionage and were recruiting sources in several federal agencies, some of whom were American Communist party members. Noting that expanded FBI surveillance authority and massive appropriations increases predate even this discovery, Theoharis addresses the issue of why the FBI was so ineffectual in actually uncovering Soviet espionage operations and prosecuting its American agents and suggests that this is a question far more relevant than the contemporary debate over the alleged "softness" of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations toward communism and domestic subversion. In short, Theoharis maintains that in many instances, some involving high-profile cases, the FBI shot itself in the foot by depending on information obtained illegally, such as through breakins and wiretaps. The inadmissibility of such evidence precluded prosecution in numerous instances. Theoharis is unsparing in his criticism of FBI counterintelligence efforts, noting that many of the Bureau's successes were the consequence of luck and good fortune "more than the skills and diligence of FBI agents."	2
J. Edgar Hoover was a master of bureaucratic intrigue and dissimulation and proved more than adept at protecting the Bureau and maintaining its public image of non-partisan public service, and he carefully deflected any significant public scrutiny or discussion of the FBI's inadequacies or direction. By the 1950s, Hoover increasingly focused a disproportionate amount of the agency's energies on domestic communism rather than the threat of foreign espionage.The FBI file on the American Communist Party, the author notes, is "conservatively" estimated at 1,275,000 pages. During the height of the McCarthy era, Hoover readily provided Bureau information to Congressional anti-communists, providing ostensibly unimpeachable "evidence" to both the House Committee on Un-American Activities and Joseph McCarthy's Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in an effort to "educate" the public about the Red Menace and, in some instances, to aid the prospects of the Republican party. Hoover, likewise, shared confidential information, much of it merely alleged or from second-hand sources about homosexuals in government service, when some in Congress sought to make that a "national security" issue.	3
Ultimately, Chasing Spies portrays Hoover's FBI as an agency that reflected the director's myopic and obsessive concern with the ostensible threat posed by domestic subversives, which in Hoover's broad definition, included virtually every progressive and civil liberties organization in the country, together with those individuals who espoused views that Hoover found objectionable. Consequently, the author maintains, the FBI devoted disproportionate energy and resources to pursuing a clearly political agenda to the detriment of more serious duties. Theoharis does offer, more than once, a caveat. Many of the pertinent documents, FBI and otherwise, that might conclusively prove his contentions, are either unavailable or so redacted that they are of marginal utility to researchers. That considered, the author nonetheless proffers some disturbing theories about FBI counterintelligence failures during a crucial phase of the Cold War. This well-argued and meticulously researched book may be suitable for use as a monograph in upper-division or graduate courses and seminars. Its level of sophistication presupposes some knowledge of the period, events and historiography.	4
Broward Community College/ Coconut Creek, Florida Blaine T. Browne

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