Penguin Books Australia

'Such creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy  must be crushed out. The hand of our power should close over them at once.' 
President Woodrow Wilson, 1919

The United  States is a country founded on the ideals of democracy and freedom, yet throughout the last century it has used secret and lawless methods to destroy its enemies. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is the most powerful of these forces. Since its creation before the First World War the FBI has been a secret intelligence service, a fact few outsiders know. It has made war on Russian spies, Italian anarchists, Nazi saboteurs, American Communists, the  civil-rights and anti-war movements and, for forty years, Islamic jihadists. Presidents have used the FBI as a personal instrument of political warfare  against Americans, using illegal wiretaps, electronic surveillance and burglaries. At the heart of its story lies J. Edgar Hoover, who ran the FBI with an iron fist for forty-eight years, and whose legacy still haunts American today.

Following his award-winning history of the CIA, Legacy of Ashes, Tim Weiner has now written the first full history of the FBI as a secret intelligence  service. Drawn entirely from first-hand materials in the FBI's own files, Enemies brilliantly brings to life the entire story, from the cracking  of anarchist cells to the prosecution of the 'war on terror'.