The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA
Powers, Thomas
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA" equality is intended to open the door to a renewed encounter with a quite different and more farreaching notion of equality. To encounter Livingston's discussion of this...
...Why does Powers consider the American use of power to be callous, careless, and irresponsible...
...Powers does not discuss the alternatives available to the Meos during the Vietnam war, or bother to describe the Meos' dogged will to resist the North Vietnamese...
...A35 Indianapolis, Indiana 46250 Powers bypasses such questions in favor of moral reductionism and double standards...
...Helms and the Agency seem bolh deluded and incomprehensible...
...A guided tour through the history of civilization "-Saturday Review of Literature...
...Powers undersmn.,ts that the CIA did not and does not...
...Thomas Powers has a continuing interest in people who structure their lives around a political cause and he is especially interested in the kind of politics that mixes violence with visions of the public good...
...He disapproves of anti-Communism, of the Cold War, and of all efforts to oppose the spread of "socialist revolutions" and Soviet influence...
...FIRE IN THE STREETS: AMERICA IN THE 1960s Milton Viorst / Simon & Schuster / $14.95 A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES Howard Zinn / Harper & Row / $20.00 John Starrels A l l a r d Lowenstein was not the best congressman New York had to offer...
...that althougk 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 198( AIlende received only 36.3 percent of the vote, he attempted to consolidate a revolution--without the support of the Chilean congress but with the backing of an extra-legal, para-military force...
...No one predicted the modern totalitarian state more accurately "-Reinhold Niebuhr in The Nation...
...Is Castro...
...They wanted a credible Soviet threat, and they did not abandon the effort m get one...
...If Americanleaders invent the Soviet threat, then obviously the CIA gets no credit for turning it back...
...In Powers's p o r t r a i t , the CIA and the United States act in a vacuum, as it were, and if they act badly it is obviously a result of their own bad character...
...But Powers fails to take such arguments seriously because he is simply not interested in the deeper questions of morality and politics...
...It is, of course, that at the behest and with the permission of successive presidents, the CIA spied on the Soviet Union, c o r r u p t e d Italians and others with its filthy lucre, trained the Indochinese to fight the Vietcong, and attempted (however ineptly) to organize the assassination of Fidel Castro and to prevent the accession to power of Salvador Allende...
...The pressures that (-onccrn Powers, however, a r e n o t .lean," Kirkpatrick is Leavey Univ~'rri/3' t~rofe.r,ror o/ Governmenl at George/own Univerrit3: and Resident Scholar at Ibe American l~nlezpri.re Inxtilule...
...Instead of being uniquely guiliv in Powers's version of events, the CIA becomes a junior parmcr in a rnuch larger enterprise: the hit man in a big syndicalc...
...Indeed, a number of the "moveTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1980 39...
...Is a nation morally permitted to use force to counter force...
...has chosen for itself in the world, a role imporrantly supported and implemented by the CIA...
...Unfortunately--or is it in fact f o r t u n a t e ? - - w i s h i n g does not make it so...
...Did the United States have a moral obligation to attempt to save Jews from Nazis...
...Dennis Sweeney, on the other hand, is a dishonorable man...
...South Vietnamese from North Vietnamese...
...And Sweeney betrayed no less the political causes which he once--again, with Lowenstein--championed with so much idealism...
...Powers declares at the outset dam h( is less concerned with the moral stares of RichardHelms and the CIA than with that of the nation, less concerned with the CIA's crimes and fai!urcs...
...those that arise, say, from the Soviet Union, but those that originate elsewhere in the government of the United States...
...Too bad...
...What is it that so offends him in the period from the founding of the CIA to Richard Helms's public humiliation...
...He betrayed his earlier pledge of nonviolence (long forgotten, no doubt) by murdering his former friend and John Starrels is a political analyst living in Washington, D.C...
...But it is Powers himself who is avoiding the truly important questions...
...For having understood that the CIA has often acted as the agent of presidents, and not as the "rogue elephant" of Senator Frank Church's fantasies, Powers has won the gratitude of the CIA's employees and friends...
...that A l l e n d e ' s opponent, J o r g e Alessandri, was a former p r e s i d e n t of impeccable democratic credentials...
...policies as Although it has been well received by most reviewers, Thomas Powers's Tt)e Man Who Kept t/ae Secrets is a deeply flawed and r a t h e r curious book...
...Obviously, he prefers to think of U.S...
...L ertyClasszs Reflections on History By Jacob Burckhardt Jacob Burckhardt, the nineteenth-century Swiss historian and humanist, was a friend of liberty and a skeptic of power...
...And if the struggle against Communism is a facade for the protection of American capitalists, then it has little to do with freedom and tyranny...
...interventions as self-generated...
...Was Stalin...
...its "offenses against common decency" (however"rcal and deplorable") than with the crimes and failures of the American government: "l'hc problem thai ought to concern and THE AMERICAN SPF(7['ATOR JULY 1980 3"1 s e l f contained, and of U.S...
...has chosen for itself...
...In Diana, for instance, Powers traced the history of the daughter of a prominent Midwestern business family from her home in Dwight, Illinois, through Madeira School and Bryn Mawr, and into SDS and the Manhattan townhouse where she and her friends fell victim to the bombs they concocted for "the system...
...We pay postage, but require prepayment, on orders from individuals...
...Hardcover $9.00, Softcover $4.00...
...Even so, one cannot help being struck by his easy scorn for a society that gives scope to selfi n t e r e s t and to ambition and to inequalities, his confidence that the e f f e c t of trying to " a l t e r our consciousness or activate our consciences" will be to make the world "more m o r a l , " and his cavalier refusal to demonstrate e i t h e r that s e l f - i n t e r e s t and ambition and inequality can be overcome at all or that the effort to do so would not lead to tyranny...
...How a history can be "comprehensive" when it takes no account of the context in which its protagonists acted, the problems and the adversaries rhey faced, or the consequences of ahernative courses ()pen to them neilher the publisher nor the revicwers bother to explain, but this is precisely tim case with Powcrs's history, and the result is that, abstracted from the approt>riatc cont(:xt...
...In fact, much of The Man Who Kept the Secrets is a bill of particulars in Powers's indictment of "the role that the U.S...
...e q u a l i t y " is intended to open the door to " a renewed encounter" with a quite d i f f e r e n t and more farreaching notion of equality...
...Are lying, spying, and conspiring ever justified, and, if so, when...
...Moreover, there are recurring hints that Powers does not believe the United States ,to be facing the kinds of problems such questions i m p l y - - h i n t s that American moral dilemmas are all of our imagining, that the Soviet threat is at least partly fictitious...
...in passing, acknowledges that " i t would be a mistake to credit the CIA with too much responsibility for the wrecking of Chilean democracy," he devotes a chapter to those efforts without mentioning that Allende's campaign was heavily financed by the Soviet bloc...
...First translated into English in 1943, Reflections on History was previously published in the United States under the title Force and Freedom...
...Holding the United States responsible for the Soviets and their surrogates, blaming anti-Communists for Communist atrocities, has become so common of late that it frequently goes unnoticed...
...These questions are as important to judgments about morality and politics today as when John of Salisbury, Marsiglio of Padua, and Niccolo Machiavelli confronted them...
...Was ldi Amin...
...That Sweeney was a disillusioned member of the "movement" --that "amorphous conglomeration of cultural alienation, political protest and racial unrest" (as one reviewer has called it) of the 1960s, not the least important derivation of which was a violent social disorder--might go a long way toward explaining his behavior: Violence and idealism in this case are probably not unrelated...
...or, " I t has not always been easy to tell when the struggle against Communism ends and defending American business begins...
...To order this book, or for a copy of our catalog, write: LibertyPress/LibertyClassics 7440 North Shadeland, Dept...
...Is the murder of a tyrant ever justified...
...Please allow four to six weeks tk~r delivery...
...With an introduction by Gottfried Dietze...
...But the moral dimension of Sweeney's crime will probably go unexplored, for an important part of our culture, represented most clearly by the media and intelligentsia, remains loyal to the "movement" even now...
...To encounter Livingston's discussion of this notion--including his praise of compassion as "the master political virtue, especially in a democracy," his defense of sympathy as opposed m self-interest, and his fondness for morality and disapproval of moral indignation-is to be forced to consider the fundamental premises separating liberal democracy from radical democracy...
...mentor, Lowenstein...
...Although certain aspects of Lowenstein's service in the civilrights and anti-war movements, and his role in the "defrocking of Lyndon Johnson," may be criticized from any number of angles, he was, for all of his misplaced energy, a good and honorable man...
...But he did a reasonably good job while in office, and nobody ever accused him of being dishonest or of consciously working against the public interest...
...In Powers's view, Helms remained silent about Chile during his congressional testimony in order to avoid answering those questions about national character which Powers himself is only too happy to take up: "If no one knows what we did, he might have told himself, then we aren't that sort of country, the CIA isn't that sort of secret institution, and I'm not that sort of man...
...policies in a context that includes Soviet policies, or to consider CIA activities in a context that includes the KGB...
...And though he "tried to avoid the prosecutorial approach" toward Helms and the CIA, he makes no such effort with regard to the United States as an agent in international affairs...
...In sum, Powers disapproves of the efforts of the United States government to fend off the expansion of Soviet power...
...But that gratitude only reflects the lowered expectations of those concerned with intelligence, for while Powers exonerates Helms and the CIA of the charge that they acted without authorization hc declares the American government guilty of all the crimes with which the CIA has been charged in recent years...
...that the United States neither prevented the election of Allende nor sponsored the coup that deposed him...
...The CIA and its defenders might argue," Powers writes at one point, "that they [America's enemies I do it too, they do it first, they do it worse, but these are arguments of last resort...
...He foresaw the coming of collectivism, and Nietzsche found in Burckhardt an historian who "was not dominated by the general whims and dared to see things realistically...
...This is why he can share with us all kinds of"inside" information about the CIA--about the people at the upper levels of the Agency, about their alliances and rivalries, and about the matters that preoccupied, and divided, them--without finally telling us anything about the meaning or morality of either the men or their actions...
...One part biography, one part institutional history, it tells us less about Richard Helms and the Central Intelligence Agency than is required adequately to understand or evaluate eithcr, and more than anyone not interested in understanding or evaluating them would care to know, but enough that reviewers generally agree with Powers's publisher that hc has "written the first comprehensive inside history of the CIA...
...He refuses to consider U.S...
...And in a time and place where myth has transformed Salvador AIlende into a hero of democracy, who should be surprised or bothered when an a u t h o r t r e a t s American opposition to Allende as hostility toward democracy ? Although Powers...
...operate in isolation bell instead responds to external l)ressurcs...
...What else are we to make of comments like: " K i s s i n g e r and Laird d i d n ' t much care who was right...
...THE MAN WHO KEPT THE SECRETS: RICHARD HELMS AND THE CIA Thomas Powers / Knopf/$12.95 Jeane Kirkpatrick trouble us is not primarily the existence of Agency wrongdoers who have escaped justice, bur the nature of the role that the U.S...
...It was the Kennedys who ordered the assassination of Castro, l,yndon Johnson who demanded Hae "pacification" of Vietnam, Richard Nixon who decided to lopple Sa Iwtdor A llendc...
...If Powers knows that the United States did not bring down the Allende government, he never makes it clear, which is outrageous if for no other reason than that it was Helms's conviction for lying about a related aspect of CIA activities in Chile that brought him, wrongfully, such notoriety and public denigration...
...Was Hitler such a tyrant...
...It is, I suppose, a mark of the times that Powers seems more puzzled by Richard Helms than by Diana Oughton...
...In the course of his r e s e a r c h e s , Powers may have revised his view of Richard Helms and the CIA--he seems to have developed a modicum of respect for their seriousness and professionalism--but his opinion of the role of the United States in the world did anything but improve...
...If William Shawcross, in his Sideshow, can find Kissinger and Nixon responsible for the d e s t r u c t i o n and starvation in Cambodia, why should we be surprised if Powers finds the CIA responsible for the destruction of the Meo tribe in Laos and South Vietnam, on the grounds that the CIA trained them to fight against North Vietnamese invaders...
...It is barely credible to Powers that an intelligent man of apparently good character should devote himself to an agency like the CIA, acquiesce in its activities, keep its secrets, remain loyal to his colleagues, and, throughout, maintain his conviction that what he has done is justifiable...
...Is murder morally preferable to war...
...Can a moral foreignpolicy be based on defense of the national interest...
...No responsibility is assigncd to North Vietnam for invading the Meos' homeland, and no mention is made of North Vietnam's merciless efforts to wipe out the Meo resistance, efforts that continue even today...
Vol. 13 • July 1980 • No. 7
