This really isn’t Ronald Kessler’s 1,518th book on the bureaucrats, spies and special agents of our nation’s capital. It just feels that way. A one-time reporter for the Washington Post — he sat beside Carl Bernstein during the Watergate years, which is just so cool — Kessler has been cranking out these general interest, middlebrow books for so long, I doubt there is a bookshelf in Washington that doesn’t have a Kessler on it. Come on, I bet you can name a few yourself:
“Inside Congress”
“Inside the White House”
“Inside the CIA”
“Escape from the CIA”
“Inside the Agriculture Department”
“Inside a Large Trash Bin Outside the Agriculture Department”
“Escape From a Large Trash Bin Outside the Agriculture Department.”
OK, I made up those last three. Let’s just say that Kessler is a reliable writing machine, producing a new book every year or so that features solid original reporting, punchy, workmanlike prose and a fresh headline or two, usually of the salacious variety. He’s been doing this so long that, were he a musical group, one would think it time for a greatest-hits compilation. Well, voila! That’s pretty much what his latest offering, “Secrets of the FBI,” amounts to.
This is a strange book — not an awful one, mind you, just a trifle odd. With no introduction to provide context, Kessler opens with a section on the FBI team responsible for legal break-ins and buggings, then circles back to J. Edgar Hoover, spends a few pages exploring (and discounting) those moldy old cross- dressing canards, then ambles through five decades of random cases and Bureau lore, the more lurid the better. There is new reporting here — FBI Director Robert Mueller gives Kessler a sit-down or two — but a good deal of this material appears shaken out of old notebooks or recycled from other Kessler books, especially “The FBI” and “The Bureau.” (No, there wasn’t an “Escape from the FBI”; I checked.)
I hate to slight a writer for commercial ambitions. I mean, every author, including this one, wants to sell. But Kessler’s last book, “In the President’s Secret Service,” did pretty well, and one senses the publisher’s taste for another best-seller. You can almost hear the pitch: Ron, come on, just do the FBI one more time, but only the really juicy stuff. The marketing materials promise that “Secrets'” “will be filled with revelations about the Bureau and Page 6 tidbits, just like those that made ‘In the President’s Secret Service’ so successful.”
Revelations? OK. There’s a nice section on what Kessler bills as the untold story of how the Russian spy Robert Hanssen was caught; that probably qualifies. More representative, though, is a chapter called “Threesomes” that recapitulates the 1970s-era Elizabeth Ray scandal — the news here is Capitol Hill’s purported appetite for the menage a trois — and tosses in a quarter-century-old tale about an unnamed young lady who supposedly had sex with groups of men in the upper reaches of the Dirksen Senate Office Building. “Attic Girl,” Kessler says she was “affectionately” named.
Then it’s on to a 1980s-era tale of a CIA mole who frequented sex clubs. Not too sure what any of this has to do with, you know, the FBI — they made the arrests, I guess — but hey, sex sells. Maybe these would be Page Six bites on a slow day.
One does appreciate that Kessler, unlike some authors, takes the time to track down and interview retired FBI agents and administrators, and gets them on the record to boot, no easy task. Based on his track record, Kessler has certainly earned the right to jog a victory lap here. But that’s what makes the book disappointing. He’s better than this. Isn’t he?
