To be fair, government employees, no matter what agency employs them, are awash in an ocean of fraud, waste, corruption and general mismanagement perpetuated by their so called "supervisors." These individuals are generally unemployable, mediocre and incompetent. Thank God for government service, the largest, most pernicious public employment and welfare system in existence next to the Pentagon and its arms suppliers, or they'd be on the streets.
"FBI Secrets" does more than expose specific secrets documenting COINTELPRo-type programs designed to deny and destroy the rights of American citizens to actively engage in political dissent, it exposes the moral dilemma faced by those who perpetuate them. Admittedly, this agent waited until after retirement to expose what he knows; but he reveals to the reader the torment of an agent who became disillusioned with the agency yet had a career to protect.
Swearingen could have simply walked away. it would not have stopped these invasive violations of American's civil liberties but, at least, he would nt have been involved. With hindsight, and through the work of many investigative journalists and authors, information concerning how the FBI violates the civil rights of American citizens is abundantly avaialble.
The history of the founding of the FBI, beginning in 1908 with the corrupt Bureau of Investigation, the Palmer raids, orchestrated by Attorney General Mitchell Palmer and executed by an unknown federal bureaucrat named J. Edgar Hoover, stands in stark contrast to the James Stewart inspired cinematic travesty, "The FBI Story." Certainly, the author's slim, yet powerful volume, stands as a beacon of truth next to this cinematic garbargio.
The peculiarities of the Director, his life-long homosexual relationship with Clyde Tolson, his liasons with other rich and pwerful gay men, such as Lewis Rosenthiel of Schenley, the red baiting Roy Cohn and New York's Cardinal Spellman made, in large measure, what the Bureau what it is today, the nation's political police.