An interview with Thomas Powers

By Stuart Schrader

Thomas Powers writes trenchant analyses of a subject many recognize as important but few understand—that enormous realm of government activity defined foremost by its secrecy. Intelligence agencies and their leaders, as well as the relationships between these agencies and presidents, become palpable and comprehensible in his essays and reviews.

Powers' book Intelligence Wars is a compilation of his work that is essential reading to anyone interested in the CIA and other intelligence agencies in the United States. Last autumn, I saw him present the essay “The Vanishing Case for War,” on the Bush administration's reasons for going to war in Iraq, at the New York Public Library. In the months since its publication, it seems that Mr Powers's findings in this essay have become the conventional wisdom about the flawed and mendacious way President Bush convinced Congress to authorize the war. His most recent review of Richard Perle and David Frum's book An End to Evil, called “Tomorrow the World,” appears in the March 11, 2004 New York Review of Books. I caught up with him over the phone in January.

Stuart: I would like to start with the topic you discussed at the New York Public Library: the reasons why the Bush administration used faulty intelligence and why the CIA didn't prevent that, or the reasons why the CIA itself was faulty.

Thomas Powers: I think it's pretty clear that the administration determined that it wanted to go to war with Iraq, that it wanted to defeat them militarily, replace Saddam Hussein, occupy the country, and be in charge of establishing the next government. All of those things were part of a determined plan apparently reached early in 2002 by President Bush. In order to do that, they needed a classic cause for war, and the only one that was lying around was the question of weapons of mass destruction, which had been left unresolved when the U.N. weapons inspectors left in 1998, so they milked that. We did not know what Saddam had by way of weapons of mass destruction or where he had them or what kind of a threat they amounted to. We assumed that he must have something, and it seems clear that the administration figured that when they got there, they would find enough to be able to justify their arguments in the first place. And when they got there, they didn't find anything. So it was quite an embarrassment. It's a kind of a side issue in a way as to whether it was there or whether the intelligence really suggested it was there or not. The real issue is what was Bush after and how should Americans respond to the unilateral decision of a president to take the country to war under false pretenses. It may be that after we closely examine and think about his real plan and his real purposes, we'll say, well that seems like a good idea, sure. Or not. But whatever it was, we weren't invited to think about it and nor was the Congress, which should have known better.

SS: How do you see the CIA or the NSA or intelligence in general as fitting into this picture?

TP: All of these intelligence organizations had been collecting info about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. And they were, more or less, under the impression that there was something there, but they knew that they didn't know where it was. Down in the bowels of the organization, there are people who pay very close attention to very narrow fields of scrutiny. Those people know sort of what's known and what's not known. Those aren't the people who were saying there's an imminent threat here that America needs to act on. It was the White House that was saying that at the top end. In between the White House and the intelligence operatives at the very bowels of the organization is the estimate writing level, and that's where the abuse of the intelligence business was taking place. In other words, they were writing estimates that exaggerated and stretched what was known factually in order to come up with alarming conclusions. And they knew they were doing it. It's not like they knew they were making up lies; it's that they knew that what they had was incredibly thin and didn't justify the level of confidence they expressed in it. They knew that.

CIA collects ten thousand statements a day. Of those ten thousand, a hundred are of the sort, “Saddam has botulism and he's about to poison the president,” “Saddam has a nuclear weapon buried in his garden.” If you just take that and put it in there and treat it as a serious matter, you can make an alarming estimate, and that's what they did.

SS: You talk about the bowels of the intelligence agencies where this information is coming from and where it's stored and analyzed. Do you think there is a connection between the administration's ability to dupe the public and the level of secrecy? Or between decision-making being so far out of the public's eye and the public's inability to realize it was being duped or to do anything about it?

TP: No. It's a question of an abuse of trust. The president is entitled to the trust of the American people until he proves himself unworthy of the trust. You can't know everything. Somebody is in charge of national security. He has the responsibility of keeping the nation safe. If he truly thinks something threatens it, he has a responsibility to act on it. And the rest of us have an obligation and a duty to give him the benefit of the doubt up to a point and once. He abused that trust. Any president who comes forward and says “I have received secret information that XYZ has happened or is happening,” you have to take that seriously because he's your president. Until you've been disabused, if you know what I mean. In other words, I don't feel there's a problem that ordinary Americans can't examine more closely what the people in the very bowels of the CIA know and do. If you did examine it more closely, you wouldn't know what to make of it unless you really devoted yourself to spending a lot of time on it. The average person can't do it and the average Congressman can't do it. But they are entitled to a trustworthy response, which they didn't get.

SS: If we should give the president the benefit of the doubt once, what about in similar previous cases? You described the president's rationale for war, weapons of mass destruction, as “notional.” Are there historical examples of notional reasons for going to war?

TP: Yes, we blamed the onset of the war in Vietnam on the North Vietnamese and the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, that was used as authorization for the war, was obtained under false pretenses. We created a notional attack on US forces in the Tonkin Gulf. A notional, unprovoked attack on US forces. Allegedly, there were two attacks, and allegedly they were both unprovoked. Only one actually occurred, and it was not unprovoked. So there was a fundamental misrepresentation of what was happening there. We described it as being attacked while sailing around innocently on the high seas. In fact, we were serving as a screen for undercover operations, landing troops on North Vietnamese soil—South Vietnamese paramilitary troops, all of whom were immediately shot.

SS: Do you think there's a parallel we should make between the war in Vietnam and the recent war in Iraq, as far as how the Presidential administrations got us into war?

TP: In both cases, the Presidents abused the trust of the people in order to impose a policy that they wanted. They each had their separate reasons, and they did not feel that they could explain their reasons to the public. So they manufactured a cause for war in both cases, I would say. I'm sure you would find a dozen people who would say the opposite.

SS: Do you think the actual reasons they had for going to war, which they felt they could not reveal the public, were worthy of keeping secret? Or should they have been honest?

TP: They should've, but if they'd done it, they never could've convinced anybody. In the first case, what they basically said was, “We are losing the war in South Vietnam, and unless we change the nature of the war which we're losing, we're going to lose completely and pretty quickly.” Our notion was that if we expanded the size of the war, made it much bigger, transformed its terms, turned it more into a conventional war at which we excelled, then we would be able to prevent defeat and maybe even win. If you'd said that clearly to the public, they'd have said “No no no! Let Saigon go down the tube.” In the more recent case, the president and his advisers appear to have a grand plan for how to transform the political and social landscape of the Middle East as a way of transforming the nature of the war on terror. In order to do it, they have to have a military presence. In order to have a military presence there, they have to occupy a country. And the only country they could justify occupying was Iraq. Plus, they were pissed at Iraq anyway.

SS: At the New York Public Library, you said that half the time you want to believe everything you read in the newspaper and half the time you don't or you can't.

TP: What I meant by that was half the time I believe that every really important secret eventually appears in the newspaper, and half the time I think big things are never seen. It's a little bit different. We have a clandestine relationship with many countries around the world, and we actually understand those clandestine relationships infrequently, and rarely, and with very little clarity. For all I know, some of them are really important, and really major drivers in the world. You just don't know. I'll give an example: there are a lot of people who believe that Lyndon Johnson secretly arranged to give fissionable material to Israel back in the 1960s. Well, did he? I don't know. That's an important fact. It's of a sort that you would expect to be in the newspaper eventually. It's what Churchill meant when he said, “Something that big and that important eventually gets into the paper.” Maybe it will and it hasn't yet. Or maybe that didn't happen. But it's that kind of thing.

SS: Are you familiar with Frances Stonor Saunders's book about the influence of the CIA on the arts? The book is called The Cultural Cold War.

TP: I'm not. I've seen it, but I haven't actually read it.

SS: I'm curious if you had an opinion about this: if during the Cold War, the CIA funneled money to the arts through groups like the Committee for Cultural Freedom, and supposedly influenced journals such as Encounter, in the grand scheme of things, do you think this is something that should appall us? In light of other things that the CIA has done, is this relatively minor?

TP: It depends on how honest the undertaking is. If you go back and look at Encounter, I think you would find that pretty generally, it was taking a forthright and transparent stance against the influence of communism in world discourse. All the communist discourse was very heavily financed by Moscow. As you, I'm sure, are learning, writers are a miserably paid crew and barely live from month to month. For them to counter an intellectual onslaught of the sort that the communists were capable of doing was very difficult without some kind of help. Serious intellectual magazines require subsidy, with very few exceptions. Very few make money. For the most part, people consider the debate and the argument sufficiently important to put up the dough. And that's what we were doing there. Nobody else was doing it. No foundations were doing it. CIA did it with federal funds. My own feeling is if you go back and look at it closely, you don't find examples of some kind of special dealing where you're basically writing articles to make sure that Texaco gets the contract and not British Petroleum. That would be a dishonest way of doing it. It's problematic, and nothing of that sort should be secret forever. Nor should it be continued forever. But I don't get worked up about it.

SS: In a situation like that, don't you think it would be better for the government to say we're going to make a grant through a foundation?

TP: No, I don't. You can't do it. You immediately start having to explain every little opinion that's being expressed. You can imagine what the Republicans would do with what was in Encounter. There were articles in there about socialized medicine. Oh my God! Taxpayer dollars for socialization! This just proves the communist conspiracy. Politics would make it impossible to conduct that kind of an operation for long.

SS: As far as I understand it, that was the CIA's argument.

TP: It would've been their argument. But their argument isn't the important argument, it's the president's argument that's important. Presidents approved that stuff. CIA works for the president.

SS: I guess that's something always to keep in mind.

TP: It's very important to keep in mind. You read it both ways. When you know what a president is interested in, you know what an intelligence agency is doing. When you know what an intelligence agency is doing, you know what the president thinks about that. If they're out there trying to kill terrorists, then you know that's how the president feels about it. They ain't doing it because they want to.

SS: Shifting gears to the war on terror, you said a couple minutes ago that the CIA receives thousands of statements a day, and we also read things in the NY Times about there not being enough people who read Pashto or Arabic in the intelligence agencies. Do you think that receiving so much information, especially with the advances in technology that are going on now, do you think that we're in a position where there's so much it could never be analyzed? It seems that's what happened on September 11th. Is there any way this situation could be rectified?

TP: I think it represents a genuine problem. It's not just that they can't translate all the documents and can't put them on somebody's desk to be carefully considered before he writes up a report at the end of the week. It's the lack of engagement with a culture so that you develop a visceral understanding of who it is you're thinking about and dealing with. We're in danger, I think, of falling prey to the idea that we don't actually have to act or operate politically because our intelligence services are becoming so powerful and so all-knowing that we can control everything without ever having to persuade anybody or negotiate with anybody. There's a danger of an illusion of omnipotence. So they're all mad at the United States about XYZ, well we don't have to give a damn about that. We can make damn sure that none of them get on a plane to cross the Atlantic because we can catch every single guy who's ever said anything mean about the United States. That kind of an approach is the direction in which we seem to be drifting. I think it's a terrible mistake.

SS: So is it possible for intelligence agencies or defense agencies to make efforts at political understanding or a political solution rather than the direction we're going in?

TP: I think it's possible for us to have a deeper understanding of the cultures with which we're in conflict. I think that would be more likely to lead towards a resolution than this idea that we don't have to negotiate or deal, that we can just be tough. It's sort of like the way Israel deals with the West Bank. We're just going to go on killing them, so many of them that eventually they'll just stop fighting and take whatever they can get. And maybe they won't take anything. They'll just move away. It's an illusion. They're so strong militarily compared to the people they're fighting that for a time they have that actual control, but it's temporary. It's a mistake to confuse temporary things with permanent things. Military superiority is temporary.

SS: This reminds me of another temporary solution in the news very much now which is the helicopters that are being shot down in Iraq. It seems to me that the techniques used—shooting out the tail rotors—are very much the same techniques that were taught in Afghanistan to the rebels who were fighting against the Soviets in the 1980s. That was the technique taught by the CIA, through ISI perhaps, and now the same technique is being used against the Americans.

TP: That would certainly be one in quite a list of examples of that sort.

SS: My question is: how do we, as a nation, find the route away from temporary solutions and more towards solutions that can last and are sustainable?

TP: Always try to see through the cant and denounce it. Push for clarity and openness. It's not something that there's any little knob that you can twist this way or that and make it right. You just have to stick with it forever. Insist that people not try and slip things onto the agenda, but deal with it openly and directly.

SS: Do you think that's possible?

TP:. What I was thinking about is the way things can come back to boomerang against you and the way in which the enemy of today becomes the friend of tomorrow. The ally of yesterday becomes the enemy of today, which is sort of the Afghanistan situation. We needed to be open and straightforward about what it was we were doing in Afghanistan, and we need to be able to respond openly to the actual grievances directed at us from the people who were fighting the Russians in Afghanistan, which we have not done. Now that doesn't mean that you beg Saddam Hussein to come to the table and explain how we can censor Hollywood so he's not mad at us any longer or anything remotely like that. But it means in general, actually looking at what it is that makes the Muslim world angry at the United States and not indulging in the reassuring notion that it's our culture and our freedoms and our wealth. They're actually mad about real stuff.

SS: OK. Last question: as you I'm sure know, on the Internet, conspiracy theory is the second most popular place for people to go after pornography.

TP: I didn't know that.

SS: That's according to the NY Times. I wonder if you have any ideas about how to explain the popularity of conspiracy theory. And do you ever find yourself leaning towards some sort of paranoia or conspiracy theory?

TP: No, I don't. I have been engaged in long-running arguments with lots of people at different times about this, that, or the other conspiracy theory. Long-running polemical disputes about the guilt of Alger Hiss or who killed Kennedy. There's a guy who's a retired New Jersey policeman who calls me up from time to time with conspiracy theories he wants to try out on me, which he believes and which he's trying to get me to take seriously and pursue. I run across a lot of that, but my own temperament doesn't run that way exactly. One reason I think people gravitate towards them is that a conspiracy theory actually gives you a certain amount of power. An ordinary person cannot impress the assembled guests at dinner by explaining what he knows about Washington because he doesn't know anything. He doesn't go there. He doesn't meet the people. He doesn't have any inside skinny. But if you master the details of a conspiracy theory, you're almost certainly going to be more capable in argument than anybody else at the table. And conspiracy theorists don't usually sit quietly alone spinning them. They're out there proselytizing all the time. It's their way of exerting a sort of intellectual dominance. I think that has a lot to do with it: just pure aggressiveness in argument.

SS: But at the same time, academics tend to ignore them or be derisive.

TP: You can get noticed. All kinds of crazy people have gotten noticed in the Kennedy case.

SS: Do you think the urge to be an academic is similar to the urge to be a conspiracy theorist?

TP: I don't think so. No, I do think so, in the sense that intellectual dominance is important to some people. I think the average person who becomes an academic is not actually interested in bullying other people with his ideas, but actually likes them. He finds that he can operate in that world and it feels less threatening and more important. It keeps him interested when he's drifting to sleep at night and when he wakes up in the morning. At least I hope that's the case when they're spending their lives learning about something. The personality's a little bit different. A conspiracy theorist typically has a kind of pugnacious personality. When I was a kid in New York, I used to spend a lot of time arguing with sidewalk preachers. Believe me, I wasn't alone. I really had a lot of first-hand experience with that kind of intellectual bullying, and was guilty of it myself at times when I was an adolescent. I don't think there are a lot of conspiracy theorists because there's a big conspiracy, but it's so deep that it takes a whole lot of people milling around it to even have a hope of figuring it out. It's not like they're all picking up little pieces of the puzzle. There is no puzzle.

SS: I think that's a good place to end. I thank you very much.

TP: My pleasure.