If the J. Edgar Hoover Building (aka the FBI headquarters) burns down mysteriously over the weekend, we might know who did it: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tim Weiner.

Bloomberg View:

The building’s ugliness is a perfect match for its shoddy construction. Rainwater pours into the building, and its thick skin is cracking. Passers-by run the risk of being brained by a falling chunk of FBI facade.

On the inside, things are worse. Never mind that the electrical systems, the air ducts and the elevators need $80 million worth of repairs. The Hoover building fails to meet basic security criteria established for federal buildings three years ago.

Today on the show, we’re listening back to an interview with Weiner about his book Enemies: A History of the FBI, which is now out in paperback.

Image of the FBI Headquarters in DC via smata2/Flickr

[FBI Director] Hoover instantly ordered a major investigation of the Free Speech Movement and assigned a lot of agents to look into it and whether it was a subversive plot. And they determined that while there were a few communists and socialists involved in the protest, it would have happened anyway, because it was really just a protest about this campus rule [a rule banning students from political engagement]. His agents repeatedly told [Hoover] that it would have happened anyway and it wasn’t a subversive plot, but Hoover ordered further investigation, and beyond that, dirty tricks to stifle dissent on the campus.

- Seth Rosenfeld on the FBI’s Interest in the Free Speech Movement 

Hoover’s war on gays in the government dates back to 1937 and lasted all his life. He conflated – and he was not alone – communism with homosexuality. Both communists and homosexuals had secret coded language that they spoke to each other and they had clandestine lives, they met in clandestine places, they had secrets.

— J. Edgar Hoover kept a secret list of homosexuals because he saw them as a threat to the nation.

Hoover saw the Civil Rights movement from the 1950s onward and the anti-war movement from the 1960s onward, as presenting the greatest threats to the stability of the American government since the Civil War.

— On today’s Fresh Air, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tim Weiner details the history of the FBI’s secret intelligence operations against “subversives.”

When there was a pushback later about enhanced interrogation techniques, we were giving alleged facts that enhanced interrogation techniques [like waterboarding] produced a lot of actionable intelligence that saved lives. We were told that Abu Zubaydah, after being waterboarded, identified Jose Padilla as the alleged dirty bomber and that Khalid Sheikh Muhammed was the mastermind behind 9/11. The problem with this [was that] these allegations were totally false because Abu Zubaydah gave this information well before these advanced interrogation techniques were applied.

— On today’s Fresh Air, a conversation with an former FBI interrogator who says the government missed key opportunities because of mismanaged interrogations and dysfunctional relationships.

Today: how a son’s betrayal brought down his father’s murderous Chicago crime family. We’ll talk to Frank Calabrese Jr. who details how he helped the FBI convict his father of several murders by wearing a hidden wire and taping his father’s conversations. (Picture of the Philadelphia jail cell of another Chicago mobster)

Eastern State Penitentiary - Al Capone’s Cell (by James Mundie)