CI Centre Book Event: "The Origins of FBI Counterintelligence" By retired FBI Supervisory Special Agent Raymond J. Batvinis

CI Centre Book Event - March 30, 2007

"The Origins of FBI Counterintelligence"

By retired FBI Supervisory Special Agent Raymond J. Batvinis

As the world prepared for war in the 1930s, the United States discovered that it faced the real threat of foreign spies stealing military and industrial secrets—and that it had no established means to combat them. Into that breach stepped J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI.

Although the FBI’s expanded role in World War II has been well documented, few have examined the crucial period before Pearl Harbor when the Bureau’s powers secretly expanded to face the developing international emergency. Former FBI Supervisory Special Agent Raymond Batvinis now tells how the Bureau grew from a small law enforcement unit into America’s first organized counterespionage and counterintelligence service. Batvinis examines the FBI’s emerging new roles during the two decades leading up to America’s entry into World War II to show how it cooperated and competed with other federal agencies. He takes readers behind the scenes, as the State Department and Hoover fought fiercely over the control of counterintelligence, and tells how the agency combined its crime-fighting expertise with its new wiretapping authority to spy on foreign agents.

Based on newly declassified documents and interviews with former agents, Batvinis’s account reconstructs and greatly expands our understanding of the FBI’s achievements and failures during this period. Among these were the Bureau’s mishandling of the 1938 Rumrich/Griebl spy case, which Hoover slyly used to broaden his agency’s powers; its cracking of the Duquesne Espionage Case in 1941, which enabled Hoover to boost public and congressional support to new heights; and its failure to understand the value of Soviet agent Walter Krivitsky, which slowed Bureau efforts to combat Soviet espionage in America.

In addition, Batvinis offers a new view of the relationship between the FBI and the military, cites the crucial contributions of British intelligence to the FBI’s counter-intelligence education, and reveals the agency’s ultra-secret role in mining financial records for the Treasury Department. He also reviews the early days of the top-secret Special Intelligence Service, which quietly dispatched FBI agents posing as businessmen to South America to spy on their governments.

With an insider’s knowledge and a storyteller’s skill, Batvinis provides a page-turning history narrative that greatly revises our views of the FBI—and also resonates powerfully with our own post-9/11 world.

“A richly detailed account of the FBI’s response to the world crisis of the 1930s and 1940s that overturns much accepted ‘wisdom’ about FBI intelligence failures and turf battles. Batvinis stays close to his sources while telling an engrossing story that should become the new standard account of FBI counterintelligence. A stimulating and fascinating work.”—Richard Gid Powers, author of Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover

“A strong and compelling book on the FBI’s pre-World War II transformation.”—Katherine Sibley, author of Red Spies in America: Stolen Secrets and the Dawn of the Cold War

“An important book on a little-explored aspect of FBI history.”—Athan Theoharis, author of The FBI and American Democracy: A Brief Critical History

March 2007
360 pages, 19 photographs, 6 x 9
Cloth ISBN 978-0-7006-1495-0, $39.95

CI CENTRE BOOK EVENT:

Author Ray Batvinis gives a talk about his new book, "The Origins of FBI Counterintelligence"

Friday, 30 March 2007

6:00 pm

CI Centre in Alexandria, VA

Light refreshments will be served. His book will be available for purchase at the event so you can have it signed by Ray Batvinis.

The event is free. Please RSVP as space is limited. Call the CI Centre at 703-642-7450 or 1-800-779-4007 or RSVP online via this form:

RAYMOND J. BATVINIS is a retired FBI Supervisory Special Agent who served in the Bureau from 1972 to 1997. He spent the majority of his career conducting counterespionage, foreign counterintelligence and counterterrorism investigations both domestically and overseas. Batvinis served as the supervisor and coordinator for the National Foreign Intelligence Program at the Baltimore Field Office. In this capacity, he was directly involved in the investigation of many of this nation's most important espionage cases. His other assignments include the FBI Intelligence Division Training Unit. Batvinis received his masters degree and his doctorate degree at Catholic University in Washington, DC.

Table of Contents:

Chapter One: Rumrich
Chapter Two: A Look Back
Chapter Three: Controversy and Confusion
Chapter Four: Interdepartmental Intelligence Conference
Chapter Five: Following the Money
Chapter Six: Wires and Bugs
Chapter Seven: Opportunities Missed
Chapter Eight: Special Overseas Assignments
Chapter Nine: British Security Coordination
Chapter Ten: Special Intelligence Service
Chapter Eleven: Ducase
Appendix A: Sebold's List of Abwehr Requirements
Appendix B: Duquesne Ring Conspirators
Appendix C: Unindicted Duquesne Ring Coconspirators
Appendix D: Sentences of the Duquesne Ring Conspirators
Appendix E: Expenditures for Special Intelligence Service Operations, July 2, 1940-June 30, 1947
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index