Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

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The idea of a Central Intelligence Agency is quite a good one and I do understand why the US might want such an organisation. There are lots of nations in the world and some of them have very good reason to dislike the United States (they hate your freedom, your freedom to bomb them into the dark ages) and so it is a pretty good idea for the US to have some idea what these nations are up to. Are they building weapons of mass destruction, for example, and if they are what for? Not everyone that builds a bomb necessarily wants to drop it on an American. So, finding out the motivation of your potential enemies sounds like a reasonable thing to do. The CIA has been quite good at times of taking photos of places other countries might not want them to take photos of - but incredibly hopeless at working out why. Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes recounts the first six decades of the Central Intelligence Agency's existence. Weiner's account, presented in a terse, staccato prose style, is unquestionably damning: from its earliest days in the post-WWII era, the CIA struggled both to articulate a clear mission and to carry out its ostensible function of providing intelligence on America's enemies. Early leaders of the Agency, many veterans of the wartime OSS, were obsessed with daring behind-the-lines missions that proved worse than useless in penetrating the Iron Curtain; it took years before the CIA successfully managed to plant spies within the USSR, and never succeeded in North Korea. Unsurprisingly, its predictive powers were marginal at best, with crises from the Korean War to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the fall of the Soviet Union and 9/11 missed or downplayed by the Agency. If the purpose of the CIA is to protect the United States and identify its enemies, Weiner argues, its history has been one of repeated failure. WEINER: Allen Dulles really didn't want to have a secret intelligence agency. He believed in dignified publicity because he wanted to create and burnish a public image for the CIA so that it could survive its infancy and its youth and grow up to be a permanent, powerful part of the American government. WEINER: And instead they took thousands of recruited foreign agents, Koreans, Chinese, other Asians, and hundreds of recruited foreign agents from Eastern and Central Europe and Russia. And they put them into planes and they strapped on parachutes and they flung them out into the darkness. And they died.

an utterly fascinating critical history of the CIA ... of particular interest to me and my in-process novel were Weiner's reporting of the Nixon years and the CIA/China interactions ... my guess is that some will object to Weiner's conclusions, which are quite damning, but what he wrote seemed credible to me Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2021-10-27 04:09:58 Bookplateleaf 0002 Boxid IA40274214 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier

Reviews

To be fair, there’s a few parts of the book where it seems that Weiner doesn’t give them credit for the few things they did right. Accurately predicating the outbreak of violence in Rwanda or running a successful operation to help convince Libya to ditch it’s WMD programs are barely mentioned. And despite documenting how the CIA has bowed to political pressure and repeatedly told several presidents exactly what they wanted to hear the Iraqi WMD claims are portrayed almost exclusively as an intelligence failure with little mention of poltical pressure from the Bush administration which is hard to believe. Our intelligence apparatus, just like our military, seems completely incapable of learning from their mistakes. Or better yet, they seem incapable of even recognizing their horrible failures as mistakes. Do they teach military officers that Viet Nam was a complete and utter failure or do they teach the Rambo ideology that we could have won but the politicians screwed it for us? The CIA basically has been running wild for 60 years with little civilian oversight. They have treated our elected leaders with contempt and kept secret some pretty horrible facts of how they do business. The research is extensive but seems to support one biase- CIA leadership is flawed, and lies were invented to cover up for the failed missions or high fatality. And worst of all, a case of the boy who cries wolf in 2001, as CIA officials actually had some idea of plots in existence, but the seriousness of the reports were corrupted by decades of poor intelligence and the weakened esteem at the White House and so the reports went relatively unheeded by the Clinton and Bush administrations.

For the last sixty years, the CIA has managed to maintain a formidable reputation in spite of its terrible record, burying its blunders in top-secret archives. Its mission was to know the world. When it did not succeed, it set out to change the world. Its failures have handed us, in the words of President Eisenhower, “a legacy of ashes.”The book is amazingly well researched. The detail is overwhelming. The research had to have been exhausting. But the basic issue I have is can it be true that the CIA has been as consistently screwed up as depicted?..that the author couldn't come up with one or two situations where the CIA had a successful outcome? Life tells you that just by chance you succeed at something just because things go your way and you fall into a bed of roses. It's the antithesis to the overachiever that stumbles once in awhile. To hear one shortcoming after another for an agency of the government that has generally been viewed as the leader of the free world over the past 80 years starts to sound a little unbelievable. In my opinion the balance just wasn't there. If no balance, or attempt at balance, it doesn't ring true. EVERY CANDIDATE FOR THE PRESIDENCY, AS WELL AS AMERICANS CONCERNED ABOUT OUR GOVERNMENT'S UNDERSTANDING OF THE WORLD, SHOULD READ THIS BOOK." The Dallas Morning News