A Clandestine Clan

Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1979, 393 pp. Kermit Roosevelt, Countercoup: The Struggle for Control of Iran, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1979, 210 pp. Readers of Thomas Powers’ engrossing work, The Man Who Kept the secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA, should rejoice that the protagonist is so grey and seemingly uninteresting . Old CIA hands, Powers tells us, “do not tell anecdotes about Helms; there aren’t any.“ Though poised in the midst of tidal storms, Helms made faint footprints in the sand, footprints which have nearly a l l washed away. Charles de Gaulle once proclaimed, ”There is no greatness without mystery.” Perhaps so. But the converse may not hold; though Helms is shrouded in mystery, he is a personnage seemingly shorn of greatness. Still, for readers this is a good thing. They are thereby spared of excessive gossip on who said what to whom and why, the kind that clutters works on Kissinger for instance. They are also spared “personal interest” tidbits such as the color of Helms’ tie on the day the Bay of Pigs invasion began, the kind, for instance, that clutters Time Magazine. But with a bureaucrat par excellence as protagonist, t h i sbook can deal with grander, more critical questions. “Judging an intelligence service, or the career of a man who ran it, requires first of all a sense of what the job involves,” Powers tells us on the very first page. He is to be heartily commended for making a stab in this direction and he succeedsin presenting his “sense of what the job involves.” He falls short, however, since that ”sense” is inadequate, not so much in depth as in breadth. Thomas Powers is keenly aware of the Washington bureaucratic jungle and, more unusual, is squarely objective when describing this scene. He bringsto intelligence the sameperceptiveana‘pis that JamesFallowsbrought The author wishes to expresshis deep indebtedness to AmbassadorRobertF. Ellsworth,former Deputy Secretary of Defense, with whom he has worked closely on these mattersfor a number of years. Kenneth Adelman is currently Senior Political Scientist at the Strategic Studies Centerof StanfordResearch Institute International. During 1976-77, Dr. Adelman served as Assistant to the Secretary of Defense. 152 A Clandestine Clan I 153 to defense.1 Yet neither gifted writer ventures far enough. Each thus has a fatal flaw in failing to open the analysis with a perusal of the greater context and then to offer an appraisal of what the United States requires-be it in intelligence or defense-to cope in and with that world given national objectives . Were either author to apply half his talents to struggles on the global scene that he applies to struggles on the Washington scene, his work might become a classic in the field. (And perhaps the authors’ views and conclusions might change using this approach). To give but one illustration: the Powers book ends posing as the critical question: ”What will the CIA be asked to do . . . and the spirit in which it will be used?” This is not the critical question at all. How does Powers (or anyone else) know what future presidents will ask the CIA to do? The critical question is rather: what does the CIA need to do? What threats does the nation face? How can intelligence help overcome or sidestep or defeat these threats? So as not to fall into the same trap, this essay will grapple with these questions. WickednessI: Abuses af Home First, though, to sexier topics. Now Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations CommitteeFrank Church pontificated during his celebratedintelligencehearings a few years back, “We are not a wicked people and cannot have a wicked institution.” Such wickedness encompassed CIA abuses at home and alleged assassinations and real covert activities abroad. As Powers shows, the Church and Pike investigations gave the CIA a thorough scrubbing; the Agency “was in fact subject to the sort of scrutiny usually reserved for the intelligenceagencies of nations conquered by war”or even more so. The conclusion prevailing on Capitol Hill was that something had gone wrong, terribly wrong, that the CIA had overstepped its bounds. The excesses were...