Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to Al Qaeda

(NYRB/Granta, 2003)

Ron Rosenbaum, The New York Observer, 24 February 2003:

“But first a word about Tom Powers’s temperament and judgment in these matters. Mr. Powers is the kind of reporter not at all unaware of the metaphysical and melodramatic elements of his often arcane subject, but one who prefers a clam, just the facts-ma’am approach. He’s aware of the seven types of ambiguity in his analysis of spy enigmas, but is also content to spare his readers the seven times seven permutations they entail. It’s a discriminating thoughtfulness that Mr. Powers has developed in three decades of writing about American espionage… He writes calmly and thoughtfully about often incendiary matters with remarkable level-headedness… Mr. Powers possesses that very low-key but highly attuned sagacity of Le Carre’s George Smiley.”

Timothy Naftali, The New York Times Book Review, 23 February 2003:

“At first glance, a collection of reviews may seem less than compelling, somewhat akin to reading a play rather than seeing it staged. But for Powers, reviews are essays that use books to examine some larger theme or issue…

“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. There is as yet no single book that synthesizes all that we have learned in the past 10 years here and in Moscow about American intelligence since 1941. For the moment this collection fills the gap… [Powers] 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. And it is this dogged empiricism that creates confidence in him as a guide through topics as wide-ranging as McCarthyism and Soviet espionage, the Kennedy assassination and the war on terrorism.”

James M. Murphy, The Times Literary Supplement, 11 May 2004:

“Thomas Powers… is a veteran and much respected Washington observer whose journalist’s ear can distinguish sense from nonsense in the interminable babble that politics lives by. Reviewing Richard Perle’s latest work, he comes to… the conclusion… that the Neocon project simply does not provide a workable guide for modern state policy. Even so, Powers manages to allow Perle credit for at least a noble if confused idealism concealed within the tough talk of self interest and designer realism.”

Edmund Fawcett, New Statesman, 19 May 2003:

“It sounds odd to talk of sympathy for the CIA. But that is what Thomas Powers obviously feels towards the main spying agency of the United States and it makes for a remarkable, mind-clearing book… By nature a dove, he does not treat all hawks as fools or scoundrels, and is prepared to change his mind when faced with new arguments. His essay-review on the US-Soviet arms race is particularly interesting in this regard… He is familiar with the world of spies, understands how they think, and is not easily taken in. Intelligence Wars collects 24 review-essays Powers has written over the past three decades… The formula sounds weak, but works surprisingly well. Read end to en, the articles make an impressively coherent story of American spying from 1945 to Al-AQeda and George Bush’s war on terror. The profiles of the main personalities are strong.”

David Mehegan, Boston Globe, 25 March 2003:

“The most reflective writing on intelligence is Thomas Powers’s essays over the past twenty years… Powers deals with the history as well as the bureaucracy of the U.S. intelligence agencies and has a sophisticated grasp of irony, self-delusion and character.”

Heisenberg’s War

(Alfred Knopf, 1993)

Daniel J. Kevles, The New Yorker, 8 March 1993:

“In Heisenberg’s War… Thomas Powers argues that we can judge Heisenberg only if we can know his intentions, and those the historical record does not reveal. To ferret them out, Powers has meticulously searched through what he calls ‘the shadow history of the war,’ seeking in letters, diaries, recollections and intelligence files what Heisenberg and others ‘said to each other in the small hours of the night.’ An accomplished investigative journalist and historian of national security, Powers has exhumed a trove of material and deployed it brilliantly, though somewhat repetitiously, to illuminate the hidden history. His book is provocative and often gripping, and it inventively compels a reconsideration not only of Heisenberg’s war but of the relationship to it of several key Manhattan Project scientists…”

Rudolf Peierls, The New York Review of Books, 22 April 1993:

“Thomas Powers’s book covers these events in enormous detail. He has collected an impressive amount of information… He describes many episodes that are not widely known. Many of these concern the relations, and the squabbles, among the different US intelligence services, including their travels to and within Europe, with precise details of their departure and arrival dates. Readers who are not fascinated by intelligence operations may not find these accounts very interesting; but many of the stories are surprising and intriguing.”

Bruce W. Nelan, Time Magazine, 15 March 1993:

“In his superbly researched and well-written book, Thomas Powers proposes an explanation for the German failure. That his case is not entirely persuasive does not dull the book’s fascination. It is a kind of police procedural, an examination of international intelligence gathering – the sort of material Powers handled so smoothly in his splendid 1979 look at Richard Helms and the CIA, The Man Who Kept the Secrets… Heisenberg never claimed he blocked the program out of moral compunctions. This book asserts he did. ‘He killed it,’ Powers writes. It is a line of argument that has always upset Manhattan Project scientists because it suggests that Germans who worked for the Nazis struck a superior moral stance. Readers need not agree with Powers. He provides plenty of evidence and argument on all sides of the issue… Powers tracks the elaborate and unceasing efforts of the American project directors to find out what was going on in Heisenberg’s laboratories in Berlin and Leipzig. The great strength of his book is his ability to present precisely what the German team was doing and contrast it with the baseless but understandable American fears.”

Christopher Lehman-Haupt, The New York Times, 8 March 1993:

“Thomas Powers’s important new book, Heisenberg’s War… is full of fascinating characters, deeds of daring and graphic accounts of important developments in modern physics… As Mr. Powers concludes his powerful narrative, Heisenberg ‘always insisted that no praise, thanks or credit were owed to him for the way things turned out.’ If this powerful book is right, then its reluctant hero may have saved humanity from an unimaginable catastrophe.”

Blake Morrison, The Independent on Sunday (London), 11 April 1993:

“How concertedly [Heisenberg] helped the Nazi war effort is the subject of Thomas Powers’s brilliantly researched and compellingly narrated Heisenberg’s War, which argues that Germany’s failure to develop the atomic bomb was due not to lack of resources or know-=how, but to Heisenberg’s procrastination… it’s a strength of Powers’s book that he does not ignore evidence which undermines his central thesis. At worst, Heisenberg made his peace with Hitler, and when travelling abroad defended German military actions. At best he was self-deluding about the pervasiveness of Nazi evil… Powers, though, gathers crucial evidence that Heisenberg did – in his own quite, self-preserving way – actively stall German nuclear research.”

Brian Pippard, The Times Literary Supplement, 28 May 1993:

“It is his interest in the people, and not simply the principal actors, that makes Powers’s long and seriously researched book so readable.”

Fergus Pyle, The Irish Times, 1 May 1993:

“This is a long book, and occasionally over-detailed, but Mr. Powers has a strong sense of the importance of setting – both of the interlocked nature of international science, and of the specific pressures of living and working in Nazi Germany, as well as the psychological inner workings of a man subject to both – and this needs space to describe. Heisenberg’s rejection by Bohr may have enhanced the difficulties he had later in talking about his war, but these were already complicated enough by the powerful counteracting allegiances to homeland and science. His dilemmas, and the scientific discoveries

in which they were rooted, are lucidly analyzed by Mr. Powers and in refreshingly non-scientific language.”

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The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA

Alfred Knopf, 1979.

William F. Buckley Jr., quoted in Women’s Wear Daily, 15 February 1980:

“I learned more about the CIA by reading The Man Who Kept the Secrets than I did working for the agency.”

John Le Carre, The New York Times Book Review, front page, 14 October 1979:

“Powers… has given us a splendid spy story, the best I have read for a long time, and all the better for being non-fiction.”

Ward Just in the Boston Globe, 7 October 1979:

“This book is too thorough, serious and intelligent to summarize in a review. Each reader will have a favorite part. Mine is the account of the assassination plot against Fidel Castro… Powers sets the scene wonderfully, the Senate Committee dimwittedly attempting to find the end of the string – who ordered the rubout?… Powers’s account of the cupidity, hypocrisy and posturing of the Church committee – Washington at its smarmiest – is brilliant.”

Edwin Warner, Time Magazine, 12 November 1979.

“With near clinical detachment, Powers has produced a remarkably realistic portrait of American intelligence beset by bureaucratic rivalries, personality clashes and presidential caprice…. The moral of this fair and searching book: America’s intelligence can be no better than the Presidents it serves.”

John Leonard, The New York Times, 11 October 1979:

“…the best book on the CIA ever written.”

R.W. Apple Jr., The Listener, 3 April 1980:

“”Powers… has the curious habit of putting some of his most cogent conclusions and some of his most important discoveries in the footnotes, which occupy almost 20 per cent of the book. But he gets the big things right. Most importantly, he avoids the sanctimonious tones of the casuist; he looks beyond the easy targets… The approach is sober, thoughtful and balanced.”

Stanley Karnow, Nieman Reports, Spring 1980:

“…Powers, an extraordinarily lucid writer, does a fine job of relating the CIA’s role to that of the president it serves.”

David Ignatius, The Wall Street Journal, 24 October 1979:

“Powers writes with the precision of a former wire-service reporter, but he’s also capable of stunning, lyrical passages about some of the agency’s great characters. His book is a pleasure to read, and it is without question the best introduction to the CIA that has yet been written.”

Thinking About the Next War

Alfred Knopf, 1983

Carolyn See, The Los Angeles Times, 19 December 1982:

“After I finished reading this little book, my jaws ached from having clenched my teeth for two hours… Thomas Powers, in short, melancholy sentences, writes down our worst fears, what we’ve ‘known’ all along… The 19 essays here are monstrously brief, and for a reason, I think. The information, the opinions, the sad facts, are so disturbing that reading them is like holding your hand to a hot iron..”

Patrick Reardon, Salt, July/August 1983:

“Over the last couple of years, Powers has struggled to keep the problem of nuclear war in focus. And his book, a collection of essays that originally ran in Commonweal, is a result of that struggle. It is, for the most part, a depressing book. Powers does not flinch – as nearly everyone else does – when it comes to examining the problem honestly.”

David C. Morrison, The Progressive, May 1983.

“Let others think the unthinkable; Powers feels the unfeelable… The temptation to go on quoting from this wise, sorrowful, and unflinching book is powerful.”