We continue this morning with Wedge by Mark Riebling, which chronicles the historic gulf between the CIA and FBI, not that there seems to be any difference these days between the two, as they both appear to be working against the American people...

...IN MANY WAYS, William Casey was the second coming of Wild Bill Donovan. The parallels were striking; it was almost as if the old OSS director had been cloned. Both were blue-eyed, white-haired, husky-framed, sloppily dressed, Irish Catholic lawyers from the state of New York; both were disorganized, Republican, workaholic millionaires and anti-bureaucratic idea men; and both disliked J. Edgar Hoover and distrusted his FBI. Casey had served in OSS, then gone on to work alongside William Colby at Donovan’s New York law firm; he did not return to intelligence until decades later, but Wild Bill had been one of the great influences in his life. The moral tenor of Casey’s command at CIA, and the cause of much consequent conflict with the Bureau, was perhaps best expressed by Clair George, who for three years ran Casey’s clandestine operations. “William Casey, ” George would say, “was the last great buccaneer from OSS.”

Like his operational philosophy, the new director’s antipathy to the FBI went all the way back to World War II. As chief of OSS Special Branch in the European Theater of Operations, Casey had seen firsthand how Hoover tried “to walk off with a slice of [Donovan’s] franchise, ” and felt that his mentor had spent “an inordinate amount of time fighting a legal and bureaucratic war for survival.” Casey also believed that Hoover’s withholding of the Dusko Popov questionnaire from Donovan had caused the disaster at Pearl Harbor. Casey had, moreover, been a friend of Andreé Dewavrin, whose 1945 nomination for the U.S. Distinguished Service Cross had been staunchly fought by Hoover. And while spending several weeks on a 1946 committee advising Truman about peacetime intelligence, Casey had been depressed by Hoover’s attempts to stunt CIA at birth. Even twenty-five years later, when Casey was named to head the Securities and Exchange Commission, Hoover was making life difficult for him—unearthing a plagiarism suit over a tax-code manual Casey had prepared, which almost kept him from assuming the SEC post.

That Hoover was no longer around did not keep the Bureau from causing problems for the new director. He had not been at Langley long before Webster launched a criminal investigation into Casey himself, in the so-called Debategate scandal. White House Chief of Staff James Baker alleged that Casey had provided him, before a campaign debate, with Carter’s briefing papers. Casey denied this. The FBI questioned Casey on three occasions, rifled Republican files, and turned up a memo suggesting a Reagan mole inside Carter’s camp. Although no “smoking gun” was found to implicate Casey, the episode could not have warmed him toward the FBI.

But if Casey would always see law enforcement as a threat to his secret projects, he still had to get along with Webster. The hard-driving Irishman and the more genteel Webster were not a natural match, but they were not going to go through any Mongoose and Cobra routines either.
https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2021/08/part-9-wedgehow-secret-war-between-fbi.html