About Mark Riebling

Rights: Sloan Harris, ICM, 212-556-5721 - Media: London King, Simon & Schuster, 212-698-7250

Mark Riebling is an author and editor in New York City. 

He directs the Book Program at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.  Tom Wolfe has hailed the Book Program’s “paradigm-shifting titles,” noting that the Manhattan Institute has “gained the widest possible hearing by securing mainstream publishers for their books and helping to market those books fiercely outside the monastery of scholarly journals.”   David Brooks contends that “we have seen a renaissance of cities, in part because of the influence of the ideas promulgated in the Manhattan Institute books.”

As a policy analyst in his own right, Mark Riebling is the author of Wedge: From Pearl Harbor to 9/11 How the Secret War between the CIA and FBI Has Endangered National Security.  First published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Wedge has been translated into Japanese, Chinese, Polish, and Czech, and was optioned by Martin Brest for Universal Pictures.   Simon and Schuster has republished Wedge in paperback, with an updated Epilogue, bringing the story forward through 9/11.

"Wedge changed the way everyone thought about national security, says Michael Ledeen, Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

In a Washington Post feature on Wedge, Vernon Loeb reflected: "If [Riebling's] thesis - that the FBI-CIA rivalry had 'damaged the national security and, to that extent, imperiled the Republic' - was provocative at the time, it seems prescient now, with missed communications between the two agencies looming as the principal cause of intelligence failures related to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.”

Former chief assistant U.S. attorney Andrew C. McCarthy, who led prosecution of the first World Trade Center bombers, has noted in the Wall Street Journal that “Riebling’s thesis… has now become conventional wisdom, accepted on all sides. … Such, indeed, is the reasoning behind virtually all of the proposals now under consideration by no fewer than seven assorted congressional committees, internal evaluators, and blue-ribbon panels charged with remedying the situation."

In June 2002, responding partly to criticism by Mark Riebling in the Wall Street Journal, the FBI changed its internal rules so that Director Robert Mueller would personally review any requests by agents for secret terrorism wiretaps denied by lawyers at headquarters.   In his January 2003 State of the Union Address, President George W. Bush announced an initiative to close the “seam” between foreign and domestic intelligence, as recommended in Wedge. 

Mark Riebling’s writings are used as course curricula for National Security and Intelligence in the Modern State, at the Carleton University Department of Political Science; for U.S. Intelligence and National Security, at Brigham Young University; and as research and instructional texts at the Air University (Maxwell Air Force Base), the Army War College, the Naval Postgraduate Institute, the CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence, the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies (London), and the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

He has contributed articles to The Guardian (London), The International Herald Tribune, National Review, Inside the Vatican, City Journal, Grand Royal, the Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times.

Mark Riebling has been interviewed on CNN American Morning with Paula Zahn, CBS News, CNBC Capitol Report, MSNBC, the ABC Radio News Network, The Laura Ingraham Show, The Mitch Albom Show, and Fox News (The Morning Show, The Big Story with John Gibson, and War Stories with Oliver North).  As a guest analyst and commentator, he has appeared frequently on National Public Radio (Talk of the Nation with Neil Conan, To the Point with Warren Olney, The Diane Rhem Show and The Leonard Lopate Show).

Before pursuing his own writing and research, he was a book editor at Random House.  Among the authors with whom he worked closely were Jean-Francois Revel, John S.D. Eisenhower, William F. Buckley, James Michener, Neil Peart, Margaret Truman, Vassily Aksyonov, and Carl Sagan.

Mark Riebling studied philosophy and comparative literature at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Columbia University, passing with High Honors the doctoral examinations in Ethics, Political Theory, and Aesthetics. He attended Dartmouth College and the University of California at Berkeley, as a President's Fellow, and graduated from the latter magna cum laude, as a Bachelor of Science in Philosophy.  He wrote his Senior Honors Thesis on Aristotle's Poetics.

He grew up in La Canada-Flintridge, California, a suburb of Los Angeles, where he was educated in Catholic, public, and preparatory schools.

Books

Articles

  • Who Watches the Watchmen?  CIA's Investigation of its own inspector general is perectly legitimate.  City Journal, October 17, 2007.

  • Litany of Blunders.  Tim Weiner's vital but flawed book about a vital but flawed agency.  City  Journal, October 5, 2007.
  • His Long War. Review of American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate, and Beyond, by E. Howard Hunt with Greg Aunapu (Wiley, 352 pp., $25.95)  National Review, April 30, 2007.
  • Freedom's Men.  The Cold War Alliance of Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II. National Review Online, 4-07-05
  • Riebling on Negroponte National Review Online (The Buzz by Eric Pfeiffer), 2-13-05.
  • And So You Must Go The resignation of CIA Director George Tenet Won't Cure the Agency's ills. National Review Online, 6-03-04
  • Jesus, Jews, and the Shoah.  Review of A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. National Review, January 27, 2003. 
  • Red Alert Al Qaeda is Planning. Are We? National Review Online, 11-20-02
  • Counter-Counterterrorism The debacle pre-9/11. National Review, 11-15-02
  • Jihad@Work Behind the Moscow-theater attack by Mark Riebling and R.P. Eddy. National Review Online, 10-24-02
  • Freeh at Last The former FBI director admits (and defends) the Bureau's incompetence. National Review Online, 10-17-02
  • Black Hole The Bush Intelligence Problem. National Review Online, 9-24-02
  • Lessons Learned … and others till to learn (with Elaine Donnelly, Kenneth R. Weinstein, and Martin Kramer), National Review Online, 9-11-02.
  • Getting Smart Three Steps toward a more intelligent intelligence community. National Review, 7-28-02
  • Watergate: The Gun is Still Smoking Tracing the roots of failure. National Review Online, 6-18-02
  • Uncuff the FBI Congress must un-do the Church Committee's damage. The Wall Street Journal, 6-04-02
  • The Real Intelligence Failure Congress’ role. National Review Online, 5-28-02
  • Why America Slept We Should Not Scapegoat Government. Markriebling.com, 4-24-02.
  • Counterintelligent System The New York Times, 3-22-94
  • Who's Warehousing Now?  City Journal, Autumn 1991.


Studies and briefings

Keynote speeches

  • “Knowing the Enemy: The War on Terror as a Humanities Problem.” The New York Discussion Group (Gallatin School, New York University), 12-12-02.

  • “Need to Know: A Model for Enhanced Federal Intelligence Sharing with State and Local Police in Counterterrorism Operations.” U.S. regional interagency counterintelligence working group (FBI), Jacksonville, Florida, 11-16-05.

MEDIA

Television

Radio