Intelligence Wars

(Paperback, Main)

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The author of The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA and other illuminating books on America's intelligence infrastructure chronicles the CIA's postwar record of successes and failures in its various wars against communists, dictatorships, and terrorists. Reprint.

Reviews

"Essential wartime reading.you get a sense not of what to expectthats not the job of historybut of the smart questions we need to ask to be confident that we are winning our current secret war."
Timothy Naftali, The New York Times Book Review

"A remarkable, twisted tapestry of intrigue."
Ron Rosenbaum, The New York Observer

"The most reflective writing about intelligencePowers deals with the history as well as the bureaucracy of the US intelligence agencies and has a sophisticated grasp of irony, self-delusion, and character."
The Boston Globe

"Mr. Powers is one of our most thoughtful writers on espionage.But its not just that Mr. Powers knows the material; he knows what to make of it."
Dallas Morning News

"It is a deeply thought-provoking bookwide-ranging and readable, incisive, expert but without jargon, able to challenge all its own assumptions.
Katharine Sale, Financial Times

"These discerning essays span 25 years and provide a revealing history of the victories, defeats and ambiguities of Cold War and post-Cold War intelligence gathering. Powers portrays in vivid human terms repeated FBI failures in counterintelligence, the intelligence agencies inability to infiltrate terrorist groups, chronic reluctance to share information and a management structure that leaves no one in charge of and accountable for the entire effort.Powers brilliantly conveys the ethos and culture of intelligence agenciesa complexity he has been studying and writing about for almost 30 years.a formidable contribution to the difficult work ahead in re-aligning the intelligence agencies Cold War-vintage structure."
Lorraine Adams, The Washington Post Book World

Author Bio

Thomas Powers is the author of The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA, acknowledged by the National Intelligences Study Center in Washington as the best book on the subject, and Heisenberg's War: The Secret History of the German Bomb which was the inspiration for Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen. He won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 1971 and is a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, New York Times Book Review, Harper's, The Nation, Rolling Stone and the New York Review of Books.