Intelligence wars : American secret history from Hitler to al-Qaeda
"The 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? Book jacket."--BOOK JACKET
Print Book, English, 2004
Rev. and expanded ed View all formats and editions
New York Review Books, New York, 2004
History
xxxix, 504 pages ; 22 cm
9781590170984, 1590170989
54611313
The underground entrepreneuer
The conspiracy that failed
Founding father
Phantom spies at Los Alamos
The plot thickens
Spy fever
The riddle inside the enigma
The bloodless war
Saving the Shah
And after we've struck Cuba?
The heart of the story
The mind of the assassin
The interesting one
Marilyn was the least of it
Soviet intentions and capabilities
The ears of America
Notes from underground
Doing the right thing
Last of the cowboys
The bottom line
No laughing matter
Who won the cold war?
The black arts
The trouble with the CIA
America's new intelligence war
War and its consequences
The vanished case for war
Tomorrow the world
"A New York Review collection"--Cover