By Thomas Powers - The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms And The CIA (Book Club) (1979-10-27) [Hardcover]

by Thomas Powers

Richard Helms is the quintessential CIA man. For 30 years--from the very inception of the Central Intelligence Agency & before--he occupied pivotal positions in that shadowy OSS operator, spymaster, planner, plotter, &, finally, for over 6 years, Agency director. No other was so closely & personally involved, over so long a period, with so many CIA activities, successful & otherwise. His story is the story of the CIA. In portraying Helms' extraordinary career, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Thomas Powers has in fact written the 1st comprehensive inside history of the CIA itself. It's a history, moreover, that is entirely uncensored. While the information on which it's based has been drawn from intensive interviews with dozens of former key Agency officials, including Helms himself, as well as from exhaustive research thru hundreds of published & unpublished sources, the author isn't subject to the kind of legal restraints that have burdened others writing about the CIA. The result is a picture of the Agency more objective, more complete & more revealing than any hitherto available. Because it's written with an eye for character & anecdote, it's as readable as it's important.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Biography, Espionage, Politics, American History, Conspiracy Theories

Unknown Binding

First published October 1, 1979

About the author

Thomas Powers is an American author and intelligence expert.

He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 1971 together with Lucinda Franks for his articles on Weathermen member Diana Oughton (1942-1970). He was also the recipient of the Olive Branch award in 1984 for a cover story on the Cold War that appeared in The Atlantic, a 2007 Berlin Prize, and for his 2010 book on Crazy Horse the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History.

Reviews

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thomas Powers' The Man Who Kept the Secrets isn't strictly a biography of American spymaster Richard Helms, but rather a highly critical history of the CIA's first three decades...not that you can easily distinguish the two. While Powers, writing in the shadow of the Church Committee and increased press scrutiny of the CIA, avoids conspiracy theories, he shows the documentary record against Helms and the Company is damning enough. In a clear-minded approach to the subject, he examines the CIA's successes and failures in intelligence gathering, while showing the obvious excesses of the Cold War era - assassinations, foreign subversion, internal espionage and political meddling. Some events are recounted in detail - there are multiple chapters on CIA operations in Cuba, and the Agency's Watergate entanglements take up an outsized chunk of the book - while others, like the overthrow of Iran's Mossadegh or domestic spying programs, receive relatively terse coverage. Though Helms is nominally the book's focus, he's more of a lodestar for the narrative as Powers probes and profiles the usual figures (Dulles, Bissell, Howard Hunt, etc.) in equal depth. The book may disappoint readers inveighing against the Deep State by showing the CIA as an instrument of American policy, rather than its common depiction as a "rogue elephant" or "Secret Government," indicting Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon in the Agency's assorted misdeeds by viewing it as a tool for the Presidency's darker impulses. Even so, I found this tackling of the subject more convincing than other, more paranoid works on the subject without sacrificing its central argument that the CIA has arguably done more harm than good since its inception.

[John Smiley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating book. A bit dated (written in 1979) but very illuminating, particularly in regards to the United States planting a lot of "fake news" in foreign press to influence elections.

Does that remind you of anything?

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This, to my knowledge, is the only full biography of Richard McGarrah Helms (3/30/13–10/22/02), Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 1966 to 1973, a convicted perjurer, a man substantially responsible for bringing Saddam Hussein into power, the not-entirely-successful destruction of records of the MK-ULTRA mind control program, the overthrow of the democratically elected president of Chile and uncounted deaths and mutilations during his career with the agency from its origins as the Office of Strategic Services.

Upon being brought to heel by Congress, he was appointed by Nixon as ambassador to our client, the Shah's Iran.

In 1983 Ronald Reagan awarded this Eichmann-like criminal the National Security Medal.

[Jack Townsend · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a great read -- in many ways reminding me of history I sort of knew (having lived through the period through my schooling and early career at DOJ Tax Division and in other ways educating me as to things I did not know. The author's research and presentation is outstanding. At the end of the book, I could just say "Wow!" I highly recommend the book for it teaches a morality story about good people -- Richard Helms seems to have been a good man -- caught up in power but he, himself, not abusing the power even when the power went off the rails. He just kept the secrets which, in his business, he thought that was his duty. The book is a lot more complex than that, so it will be sinking in for some time now as I digest and think over its history and its lessons. I look forward to discussing it with my book club Wednesday.

One thing particularly interesting for me was in Chapter 16 dealing with plea negotiations. Helms was represented by the famous Washington attorney, Edward Bennet Williams. The trade-offs in plea negotiations are fascinating. The offering in Chapter 16 is a great read on that, particularly with a fair but lengthy summary of what preceded it.

[Barbara Osterdock]

I own this Book.

[Stuart · Rating 4 out of 5]

A clinical and critical history of Richard Helms' tenure of the CIA, nearly a biography of the bureacracy itself rather than of the man who ran it. Carefully apolitical (or at least avoiding the histrionics and conspiracy that permeate the more entertaining/overtly political works).

At first I found myself wishing Mr. Powers (whose dad was an associate of Allen Dulles) would take a more adversarial stance but as the narrative wore on I began to appreciate how in-depth and thoroughly-sourced Mr. Powers' research was.

While purporting to be a biography of Helms, the book is really a biography of the type of civil servant Helms was--a man committed to a specific idea (the intelligence service is a form of black diplomacy working exclusively at the behest of and answerable only to the president) and capable of the bureaucratic wrangling to execute that idea effectively.

While I detest the CIA and think the cold war was a a colossal error that served only toe extend American corporate imperialism at the expense of other nations, I found the CIA's internal propaganda/rhetoric/logic fascinating, and can understand how committed cold warriors would build such an ugly, unconstitutional and immoral institution.

Probably a foundational text for any student of the cold war.

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

A detailed history of the Company told through the 30 year career of Richard Helms. Some choice quotes: History is not what happened but what surviving evidence says happened. If you can control what history survives you control the narrative of history. Intelligence is not written for history; it’s written for an audience. The bedrock of CIA metaphysics was not “either/or” but “maybe/if” and it drove decision makers crazy.

Something I learned: Nixon publicly discredited the CIA in a similar manner to Trump and the FBI. Nixon credited the CIA with his loss to Kennedy in 1960 and even conspired with foreign agents of China and Vietnam to win his election.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 Written nearly 50 years ago, at a moment in time when the scope of the CIA's foreign and domestic activities had only recently begun to come to the surface before the American public, this is a very good introduction to the career of Richard Helms and the growth of the Agency in its first 30 years. Powers' approach is even-handed and nuanced: yes, the CIA engaged in illegal actions both within the United States and overseas, but the President had approved them or Congress chose to ignore them, and Helms in particular was not motivated by self-interest or power. An important part of American history in the second half of the 20th Century.

[Nate Hendrix · Rating 3 out of 5]

Richard Helms only seems to be interesting because he worked at the CIA when it did all of these interesting things. The portion of this book that deals with Helms is pretty boring. The part of the book that covers the antics of the CIA from the post war years until the 1970s is very interesting. I learned a lot of details about event I only knew in passing. Worth reading, but could do without the "Richard Helms" and stick with "And The CIA".

[Hailey · Rating 3 out of 5]

good, exactly what you’d expect from a Richard Helms biography. incredibly interesting information but tends to drone on

[Colby · Rating 3 out of 5]

It could have been so much more ...