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). He was also the recipient of the Olive Branch award in 1984 for a cover story on the

Cold War The Cold War is a term commonly used to refer to a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc. The term '' cold war'' is used because the ...

that appeared in '' The Atlantic'', a 2007 Berlin Prize, and for his 2010 book on

Crazy Horse Crazy Horse ( lkt, Tȟašúŋke Witkó, italic=no, , ; 1840 – September 5, 1877) was a Lakota war leader of the Oglala band in the 19th century. He took up arms against the United States federal government to fight against encroachment by wh ...

the

Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History The ''Los Angeles Times'' Book Prize for History, established in 1980, is a category of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Works are eligible during the year of their first US publication in English, though they may be written originally in languag ...

Life and works

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.Powers, ''Heisenberg's War'' (Penguin 1993) at ii, "About the Author". Powers is the author of six works of non-fiction and one novel. His ''The Man who Kept Secrets: Richard Helms and the

CIA The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian intelligence agency, foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gat ...

'' (1979) is "widely regarded as one of the best books ever written on the subject of intelligence." 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

(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".

Powers has been a contributor to '' The New York Review of Books'', '' The Atlantic'', '' The Los Angeles Times'', '' The New York Times Book Review'', '' Harper's'', '' The Nation'', ''

Commonweal Commonweal or common weal may refer to: * Common good, what is shared and beneficial for members of a given community * Common Weal, a Scottish think tank and advocacy group * Commonweal (magazine), ''Commonweal'' (magazine), an American lay-Cath ...

'', 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. 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. In 1979 he was living with his wife and three daughters in New York City.Back flap of ''The Man who Kept the Secrets'' (Knopf 1979). "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."

Bibliography

* ''Diana: The Making of a Terrorist'', Houghton Mifflin, 1971, * ‘’The War at Home’’, Grossman, 1973 * ''The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA'', Knopf, 1979, * ''Thinking About the Next War'', Knopf, 1982, * * ''The Confirmation'', Knopf, 2000, , a novel * **revised and expanded edition, 2004. * *

References

External links

Powers archive
from '' The New York Review of Books''
Friends of the Little Bighorn Battlefield review ''The Killing of Crazy Horse''American Academy per Thomas Powers
(no longer current) {{DEFAULTSORT:Powers, Thomas 1940 births Living people American reporters and correspondents The Atlantic (magazine) people Berlin Prize recipients Espionage writers Historians of the Central Intelligence Agency Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting winners Tabor Academy (Massachusetts) alumni Yale University alumni Fellows of the American Physical Society