The United States had emerged, as Mr. Buckley puts it, from "the hang-it-all-out

delirium of the mid Seventies, when it became chic to reveal national secrets and criminal to conceal them," and the CIA was attempting to put itself back together. This rich discussion ranges from the state of British democracy to the attempted assassination of Fidel Castro, from Salvador Allende to Adolf Hitler. Here is Mr. Powers, on Richard Helms's testimony in Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on his appointment as Ambassador to Iran: "Mr. Helms ... was asked if the CIA had been involved in attempting to prevent Salvador Allende from coming to power. He said, 'No.' The answer is 'Yes.' Having said that, you've only just begun to open up the question, really." WFB: ".. . As a matter of fact, I wrote a novel in which I face the same kind of situation in the last chapter, in which my particular guy cops out, so to speak, by simply declining to answer. I assume you'd have preferred if he had done that." TMP: "Well, there were a number of ways that he could have declined to answer or avoided an answer or given not quite such an absolute and clear and wrong answer; and I think he chose not

to do any of those things because the net effect... would have let the cat out of the bag, and his whole purpose was not to let the cat out of the bag."