THOMAS POWERS

Thomas PowersThe failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has riveted America's attention once again on the issue of secret intelligence -- how it is gathered and evaluated, and how it is ultimately used to determine policies. Why was the CIA's pre-war assessment of Iraq completely wrong? Did the Bush administration pressure the agency to come up with a justification for a war it had already decided to wage? Will we ever really know? To understand the current crisis of the CIA, we need to know how the intelligence business works, and no one outside it knows more about its culture than Thomas Powers. The essays collected in this volume tell stories of shadowy successes, ghastly failures, and, more often, gripping uncertainties. They range from the exploits of "Wild Bill" Donovan's OSS during the Second World War, through the CIA's long cold war struggle with its Russian adversary, to the failure to prevent the attacks of September 11. Here too are the Kennedys with their fixation on getting rid of Castro; real, suspected, and imagined Communist spies, moles, and double agents; and obsessive characters like James J. Angleton and Richard Perle. With a new preface and three new essays analyzing the Iraq war and its consequences, this updated edition examines urgent questions for an age of terrorism and preemptive war. What role should secret intelligence have in the policy debates of a democratic society? Can we trust the CIA to resist White House pressure, give the president accurate and impartial analyses, and then stand by them?