Intelligence Wars

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
Saturday, February 23, 2003
'Intelligence Wars': The Secrets of the Secret War
By TIMOTHY NAFTALI

INTELLIGENCE WARS 
American Secret History From Hitler to al-Qaeda.
By Thomas Powers.
450 pp. New York: New York Review Books. $27.95. 
 
Early in his career as a journalist, Thomas Powers
went looking for that so-called Something -- the inner
conspiracy, the essential truth -- that many baby
boomers had come to believe lay behind the great
political traumas of their youth....
 
The Something that Powers found was not what his
editors at Rolling Stone had expected. It was neither
a secret government nor a capitalist cabal. Lurking
behind the top-secret stamps, the overseas covert
operations and the domestic spy hunts were the sad
realities of fighting a cold war, a war in which most
of the battles were secret. Americans made their fair
share of mistakes and the United States government was
by no means always on the right side. But to
paraphrase the most famous observation of Pogo, Powers
had seen the enemy and it was not us. 

The vehicle through which Powers chose to tell this
story was a life-and-times book on Richard Helms, a
legendary C.I.A. officer who rose to the leadership of
the agency under Presidents Johnson and Nixon. ''The
Man Who Kept the Secrets'' (1979) was a tour de force
that combined the freshness of hard research and cool
writing with the care and subtlety of good history.
Powers's skill was not so much his ability to crack
Helms's famous reserve (he didn't really) but his
talent for combining scores of interviews with the
frustrating patchwork of available documents to build
a persuasive portrait of the secret world of American
policy and politics. In a literature known more for
bluster than for hard information, the book earned
Powers widespread respect. Another fine work followed,
an important biography of the atomic scientist Werner
Heisenberg. But for the past quarter century Powers's
preferred mode of communicating has been the book
review. 

''Intelligence Wars: American Secret History From
Hitler to Al Qaeda'' is a collection of 24 reviews
written between the late 1970's and October 2002 .... 

Arranged chronologically by subject, the essays in
''Intelligence Wars'' provide a useful introduction to
a missing dimension of American history, from Wild
Bill Donovan and the Office of Strategic Services
during World War II to Sept. 11 and beyond....

Powers offers no revelations. Instead, he gives us his
best explanations for many of the most unsettling
enigmas of the last half century. "Facing the facts
won't kill us," he writes....

[...]

Powers calls for a new historical synthesis that
differentiates between sensible anti-Communism and the
McCarthyite variety, then helpfully provides some of
the guideposts.... he explores the painful irony that
the Soviets started closing down their espionage rings
at the very moment our Red scare began....

The essays on the Kennedy assassination speak of
phantoms of a different sort. Here the evidence
inspires Powers to look at the troubled side of the
American imagination. It is hard to think of a more
elegant summation of why Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone
than what Powers writes in his piece on Priscilla
Johnson McMillan's pathbreaking book "Marina and Lee."
The weakness in every conspiracy theory, Powers points
out, is Oswald. McMillan gave this cold, delusional
man flesh and blood -- as would Norman Mailer .... "If
the skeptics are to preserve their conspiracies,"
Powers concludes, "they will have to squeeze them into
the corners of Oswald's life." 

Equally powerful is Powers's commentary on why the
Kennedy assassination remains a seminal event in
American politics. It changed the United States from a
profoundly optimistic country, he says, to one where
"we stopped thinking about what we might become as a
nation, and started looking for whom to blame." The
conspiracy thinking that had largely been restricted
to the extreme ends of the political spectrum in the
McCarthy period became a national phenomenon after
November 1963. 

Although there is not much overlap among the essays,
certain large themes reappear. In the 1970's Powers
concluded that the president is the "the sun in the
C.I.A.'s solar system" -- despite fears that the
agency was some kind of rogue elephant -- and nothing
has since caused him to revise that view. If citizens
are uncomfortable with their government sponsoring
assassination attempts, then the blame belongs at 1600
Pennsylvania Avenue and not Langley. 

The plots against Castro are a test case of C.I.A.
accountability for Powers, and he makes frequent
reference to John F. Kennedy's ultimate responsibility
for the attempted assassinations. Although there is
not a single document that proves Kennedy knew the
details of the C.I.A.'s efforts to poison, shoot or
otherwise eliminate Castro, Powers makes a convincing
case for presidential authorization. He understands
how decisions were handled in an era where there was
even a special term -- "plausible deniability" -- for
keeping the president's hands clean. 

Powers uses the same logic in essays on Iran-Contra,
effectively weakening arguments that Ronald Reagan was
ignorant of the machinations of William Casey, his
director of central intelligence.... Powers is
critical of the agency's unwillingness to tell
presidents what they don't want to hear.... 

This idea that at times American intelligence has
exhibited insufficient courage assumes even more
importance in the three thoughtful essays about Sept.
11.... As in 1941, the difficulty has been not so much
an unwillingness to take risks as a failure of
imagination.... 

[...]

Allen Dulles once wrote to a friend that where
intelligence is concerned, "once one gets a taste for
it, it's hard to drop." ... this can be said of
Powers's entire collection. But more important, this
book is essential wartime reading. Intelligence
currently plays at least as important a role in the
war against terrorism as it did in World War II and
the cold war....

In meeting the new needs, intelligence will continue
to assume certain patterns.... Signals intelligence
(intercepts) are likely to be as tantalizingly
incomplete today as in the past.... There is context;
there are precedents. It is important to keep in mind
that intelligence can do only so much. Reading Powers
you get an excellent sense not of what to expect --
that's not the job of history -- but of the smart
questions we need to ask to be confident that we are
winning our current secret war. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/23/books/review/23NAFTALT.html

http://www.nybooks.com/shop/product?usca_p=t&product_id=1025&offer_code=20030121

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0301&msg=74428&sort=date

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