Thomas Powers (born December 12, 1940 in New York City) 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 Weatherman member Diana Oughton (1942-1970). [1] 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.
Born in New York City in 1940, he was a 1958 graduate of Tabor Academy. Powers later attended Yale University, where he graduated in 1964 with a degree in English. At first he worked for the Rome Daily American in Italy, later for United Press International. In 1970 he became a freelance writer. [2]
Powers is the author of six works of non-fiction and one novel. His The Man who Kept Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (1979) is "widely regarded as one of the best books ever written on the subject of intelligence." [2] His work on Werner Heisenberg tracks secret developments in nuclear physics during the 1930s and early 1940s.
The revised edition of his Intelligence Wars contains twenty-eight articles previously published in the New York Review of Books and the New York Times Book Review from 1983 to 2004. His most recent book follows the life of Crazy Horse (died Nebraska 1877). Evan Thomas in The New York Times , while reviewing this book, also commented broadly on Powers as an author and a previous work on Richard Helms:
Powers is "a great journalistic anthropologist. In possibly the best book ever written about the C.I.A, The Man Who Kept the Secrets, Powers took the reader on a fascinating journey into the world of secret intelligence gathering and covert action. The C.I.A. was, at least in the early years of the cold war, a tribe as mysterious and exotic as the Great Plains Sioux of the 1870s. And Powers tells us much that is revealing and often moving about the Sioux in their last days as free warriors". [3]
Powers has been a contributor to The New York Review of Books , [4] The Atlantic , [5] The Los Angeles Times , The New York Times Book Review , [6] Harper's , The Nation , Commonweal , and Rolling Stone .
Besides writing, Powers joined a partnership to found in 1993 a publishing company, Steerforth Press. Originally located in South Royalton, Vermont, it is now located in Hanover, New Hampshire. [7] Its website self describes as a "small independent house" with a "range of titles on a variety of topics".
Powers and his wife Candace live in Vermont. [8] In 1979 he was living with his wife and three daughters in New York City. [9] "He is currently writing a memoir of his father, who once told him that the last time he met Clare Boothe Luce was in the office of Allen Dulles." [4]
Project MKUltra was an illegal human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), intended to develop procedures and identify drugs that could be used during interrogations to weaken people and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture. It began in 1953 and was halted in 1973. MKUltra used numerous methods to manipulate its subjects' mental states and brain functions, such as the covert administration of high doses of psychoactive drugs and other chemicals without the subjects' consent, electroshocks, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, and other forms of torture.
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John Joseph Loftus, is an American author, former high level U.S. government prosecutor and former Army intelligence officer. He is the president of The Intelligence Summit and of the Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg.
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Evan Welling Thomas III is an American journalist, historian, and author. He is the author of nine books, including two New York Times bestsellers.
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Annie Jacobsen is an American investigative journalist, author, and a 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist. She writes and produces television including Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan for Amazon Studios, and Clarice for CBS. She was a contributing editor to the Los Angeles Times Magazine from 2009 until 2012. Jacobsen writes about war, weapons, security, and secrets. Jacobsen is best known as the author of the 2011 non-fiction book, Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base, which The New York Times called "cauldron-stirring." She is an internationally acclaimed and sometimes controversial author who, according to one critic, writes sensational books by addressing popular conspiracies.
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