Draws on agent interviews about famous FBI cases to reveal the Bureau's inner workings and some of its most deeply held secrets.

New York Times bestselling author reveals the FBI’s most closely guarded secrets, with an insider look at the bureau’s inner workings and intelligence investigations. Based on inside access and hundreds of interviews with federal agents, the book presents an unprecedented, authoritative window on the FBI's unique role in American history. From White House scandals to celebrity deaths, from cult catastrophes to the investigations of terrorists, stalkers, Mafia figures, and spies, the FBI becomes involved in almost every aspect of American life. Kessler shares how the FBI caught spy Robert Hanssen in its midst as well as how the bureau breaks into homes, offices, and embassies to plant bugging devices without getting caught. With revelations about the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound, the recent Russian spy swap, Marilyn Monroe's death, Vince Foster’s suicide, and even J. Edgar Hoover, The Secrets of the FBI presents headline-making disclosures about the most important figures and events of our time.

New York Times bestselling author reveals the FBI’s most closely guarded secrets, with an insider look at the bureau’s inner workings and intelligence investigations. Based on inside access and hundreds of interviews with federal agents, the book presents an unprecedented, authoritative window on the FBI's unique role in American history. From White House scandals to celebrity deaths, from cult catastrophes to the investigations of terrorists, stalkers, Mafia figures, and spies, the FBI becomes involved in almost every aspect of American life. Kessler shares how the FBI caught spy Robert Hanssen in its midst as well as how the bureau breaks into homes, offices, and embassies to plant bugging devices without getting caught. With revelations about the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound, the recent Russian spy swap, Marilyn Monroe's death, Vince Foster’s suicide, and even J. Edgar Hoover, The Secrets of the FBI presents headline-making disclosures about the most important figures and events of our time.

INVESTIGATIVE REPORTERS & EDITORS (IRE) BOOK AWARD WINNER • The story of the history-changing break-in at the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, by a group of unlikely activists—quiet, ordinary, hardworking Americans—that made clear the shocking truth that J. Edgar Hoover had created and was operating, in violation of the U.S. Constitution, his own shadow Bureau of Investigation. “Impeccably researched, elegantly presented, engaging.”—David Oshinsky, New York Times Book Review • “Riveting and extremely readable. Relevant to today's debates over national security, privacy, and the leaking of government secrets to journalists.”—The Huffington Post It begins in 1971 in an America being split apart by the Vietnam War . . . A small group of activists set out to use a more active, but nonviolent, method of civil disobedience to provide hard evidence once and for all that the government was operating outside the laws of the land. The would-be burglars—nonpro’s—were ordinary people leading lives of purpose: a professor of religion and former freedom rider; a day-care director; a physicist; a cab driver; an antiwar activist, a lock picker; a graduate student haunted by members of her family lost to the Holocaust and the passivity of German civilians under Nazi rule. Betty Medsger's extraordinary book re-creates in resonant detail how this group scouted out the low-security FBI building in a small town just west of Philadelphia, taking into consideration every possible factor, and how they planned the break-in for the night of the long-anticipated boxing match between Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali, knowing that all would be fixated on their televisions and radios. Medsger writes that the burglars removed all of the FBI files and released them to various journalists and members of Congress, soon upending the public’s perception of the inviolate head of the Bureau and paving the way for the first overhaul of the FBI since Hoover became its director in 1924. And we see how the release of the FBI files to the press set the stage for the sensational release three months later, by Daniel Ellsberg, of the top-secret, seven-thousand-page Pentagon study on U.S. decision-making regarding the Vietnam War, which became known as the Pentagon Papers. The Burglary is an important and gripping book, a portrait of the potential power of non­violent resistance and the destructive power of excessive government secrecy and spying.

Most people believe the Federal Bureau of Investigation began under J. Edgar Hoover in the 1920s or 1930s. Many also naturally assume it was developed for the express purpose of fighting crime. However, the reality is very different. The reality is it began years earlier, in 1908, under President Theodore Roosevelt. In The Birth of the FBI: Teddy Roosevelt, the Secret Service, and the Fight Over America's Premier Law Enforcement Agency, Willard Oliver details the political fight that led to the birth of America’s premier law enforcement agency. Roosevelt was concerned about conservation and one issue he wanted enforced were the fraudulent land deals being perpetrated by many people, including some members of Congress. When he began using the Secret Service to investigate these crimes, Congress blocked him from doing so. The end result of this political spat was Roosevelt’s creation of the FBI, which heightened the political row between the two branches of government in the final year of Roosevelt’s presidency. The truth of the matter is, the premier law enforcement agency in the United States was actually created because of a political fight between the executive and legislative branches of government. The Birth of the FBI reveals the true story behind the birth of the FBI and provides some useful insight into an important part of our American history.

Prophetic when first published, 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 re-creates -- battle by battle, bungle by bungle -- the 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 CIA -- and the rival personalities of cops and spies -- have 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 Qaeda -- Wedge shows the price America has paid for its failure to resolve the conflict between law enforcement and intelligence. Gripping and authoritative -- and updated with an important new epilogue, carrying the action through to September 11, 2001 -- Wedge is the only book about the schism that has informed nearly every major blunder in American espionage.

This text details the existence of the real x-files - knowledge held by the FBI and the US Airforce on UFO sightings between the years 1947 and 1954, and withheld from the media and the public.