Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA | Tim Weiner

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA | Tim Weiner | A Wealth of information

books:

Legacy of Ashes: T...

	Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA Tim Weiner Doubleday, 2007 - 702 pages average customer review:based on 132 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

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.?

Now Pulitzer Prize?winning author Tim Weiner offers the first definitive history of the CIA?and everything is on the record. LEGACY OF ASHES is based on more than 50,000 documents, primarily from the archives of the CIA itself, and hundreds of interviews with CIA veterans, including ten Directors of Central Intelligence. It takes the CIA from its creation after World War II, through its battles in the cold war and the war on terror, to its near-collapse after 9/ll.

Tim Weiner?s past work on the CIA and American intelligence was hailed as ?impressively reported? and ?immensely entertaining? in The New York Times.

The Wall Street Journal called it ?truly extraordinary . . . the best book ever written on a case of espionage.? Here is the hidden history of the CIA: why eleven presidents and three generations of CIA officers have been unable to understand the world; why nearly every CIA director has left the agency in worse shape than he found it; and how these failures have profoundly jeopardized our national security.

for more information click here

'Must Reading'

This book or tapes should be read by anyone who recognizes the critical importance of Intelligence to those who are responsible for leading our country in the perilous enviornment we must navigate in. Unhappily, on balance, we appear to have done a pretty inadequate job to date. This book uses no annonymous sources but only CIA documents to show how bad our history has been in serving all occupants of The White House. If ever accurate information and analysis is needed it is now. Read this incredible saga.

A Wealth of information

This book is extremely well-written and includes a wealth of previously unknown information. Basically it starts with the creation of the CIA and continues to the present. It provides details that pretty well shows how the leaders of the CIA operated mostly on what they believed was wanted of the CIA versus what was actually wanted. And, in many cases, the CIA operated on only what it's leaders wanted. I am completely amazed at the intricacy of operations between our Government and other countries.

for more information click here

Useful

Written by an experienced journalist, Legacy of Ashes is simultaneously a serious effort at a compreshensive narrative of the CIA's history and a scathing indictment of the agency's performance. Weiner's account is based on analysis of an extensive amount of documenation, including once classified CIA internal histories, and a large number of interviews of former CIA personnel, including several former Directors. Organized chronologically in a series of short chapters, Weiner traces the Agency's vissicitudes from its inception into the post 9/11 period.
Like many other National Security insitutions, the CIA was improvised at the onset of the Cold War. Its impetus came from Truman's need for reliable intelligence about the Soviets. What emerged, however, was qutie different from what Truman desired and contained systemic flaws that would haunt the CIA througout its history. While Truman wanted an intelligence service, the CIA rapidly became dominated by covert action operations. The emphasis on covert action not only came at the expense of intelligence gathering but often undercut the efforts of the State Dept. and other foreign policy actors. The agency was enmeshed in inter-departmental rivalries with the Pentagon, the FBI, and the State Department. A creature of the Preident, the CIA depended on Presidential support to maintain its bureaucratic position. This gave rise to a sometimes disastrous propensity to tell the President what he wanted to hear rather than the actual facts.
Weiner describes a remarkable number of often disastrous misadventures. Many of these are well known. The Bay of Pigs debacle, the consistent failure to assess Soviet capabilities accurately, the devastating effects of the paranoia of the long-time Counter-Intelligence Chief, James Angleton, the almost slapstick of the Iran-Contra scandel, the devastating failure to be honest in the leadup to the Iraq war, are all laid out well. What Weiner particularly well, however, is to show that this miserable performance was the agency's norm. Weiner describes a large number of horrifyingly incompetent covert operations and intelligence failures. Even apparent successes, like the overthrow of the Mossadegh regime in Iran, had adverse long-term consequences.
This book is very informative but is really high quality journalism as opposed to rigorous history. Legacy of Ashes is mainly a history of the agency's covert operations. There is little description and no analysis of the agency's intelligence analysis and no discussion of why this was such a failure. While this is a fairly long book, there is little effort to provide context. Many of the strategic failures of the CIA, particularly its role in supporting corrupt and authoritarian regimes in the developing world, were really the result of basic American policy failures during the Cold War.
Weiner makes the basic point that the CIA never fulfilled the basic purpose of an intelligence agency, to provide reliable information about the capabilities and intentions of America's foes. This lamentable fact remains true to this day.

for more information click here

History of a newspaper that kills

The author begins the book by saying that all Harry Truman wanted was a newspaper. If the author's history as outlined in this book is to be believed, what Truman and his predecessors eventually got was an organization that could be described as a superposition of incompetence and savagery. With each passing paragraph the reader is introduced to an organization that fancied itself above the law and indulged itself in every manner of vile actions, many of them going completely beyond the pale of acceptable moral conduct. But apparently the CIA believed that morality was impractical, and that for the United States to "survive in the real world" one must dispense with morality and act in a manner that is similar, if not identical, to the conduct of one's "enemies."

The author's narrative is informal and sometimes reads as an action story, and those readers who need more details, even after reading such a sizable book, are given 170 pages of notes and references at the end of the book. It is readily apparent that governmental hierarchies do not intimidate the author, as some authors might be if they took on such a damming account of an organization that is sometimes venerated beyond rational measure. The author completely demolishes the Hollywood paradigm of intelligence agencies, with its glorification of violence by spies and other intelligence agents. Indeed, in many parts of the book the agents and support personnel of the CIA are made out to be inept, bumbling fools.

The threat of world domination by "Communism" is given as the CIA's primary excuse for acting as it did, with the overthrow of the governments of Iran, Guatemala, and Brazil being good examples, and the list goes on. The author does not elaborate in too much detail on the real reasons behind these overthrows, such as that of satisfying economic interests. But his account of the history of the CIA appears believable, and like any other historical document it contents would have to be crosschecked, this of course taking many years of effort. And in this regard, a nagging irony surrounds the reading of this book, and indeed of any study of the institutions of the American government: one finds oneself in the peculiar situation of needing to gather intelligence on the CIA and these other institutions, so as to make sure they do not encroach on fundamental rights of individuals, both living in the United States and elsewhere. An organization that was invented to gather intelligence is now the target of intelligence gathering by the very citizens it was designed to protect. This is indeed an irony, and a very sad one.

But those readers who want the bare, naked truth about the CIA will find this book to be a good start, and reading about its dastardly actions is good discipline for anger management. The author apparently got his information from personal interviews with many of the leaders of the CIA, and from intelligence documents that are now available in the public domain. Credibility of these documents of course is always an issue, but even if say 95% of the content of this book is misleading or even completely false, the other 5% is enough to make the CIA an illegitimate organization, and one that should be dissolved entirely. The victims of the CIA are many, whether they were Iranian citizens during the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadeq, or those of Chile in the overthrow of Salvador Allende, and they should not be forgotten. Perhaps a monument should be built with their names inscribed on it, and this monument placed in the location that the CIA building now occupies. Beside their names will be those of the presidents and CIA directors who ordered their slaughter, whether directly or indirectly.

for more information click here

The Unofficial Version of Official CIA History, told Unofficially

For those of us who have followed the 60 years of CIA missteps, errors and failures, serially, this heavy-handed tome of a book offered up unofficially as "official CIA defense of its failures" has to be a big disappointment. For although it admits to failures at every turn, it does so in a clinically neat and minimalist way that glosses over every single caper, and in a way that guarantees that this, the details of the CIA's official admissions of guilt, have already been uncovered and better told elsewhere. In short, this is not the "Come to Jesus" version of CIA history that we were all looking for but the "forced admission" version that has actually come about only after everyone of the Agency failed capers have consistently been exposed elsewhere.

This is the sanctioned, authorized and official version of guilt, "told minimally and unofficially."

In this sense, it is more akin to the reporting of football scores when the visitors have beaten the home team by a very wide margin: The winner is given credit for being the better team; the reasons for losing are glossed over; and the overall implications of the lost to the team's future mission and to the morale of the fans are either ignored completely, or, are just buried deeply on the inside pages of the report. In other words, this is the "officially sanctioned propaganda," "hangout defense" version of the CIA'S sordid history.

That it took so many pages to give this minimalist rendition is very unfortunate indeed since the "cat has long since been out of the bag." To admit guilt without showing the taxpayers where the skeletons are buried is not contrition, but hope that the rules of the game will still be altered in ones favor so that the game can continue at a later time under more favorable conditions. And equally important, it also means that evidence uncovered elsewhere, by other more novel means, will continue unchallenged by the official version and will thus remain the standard of reliability and proof about what actually goes on inside the agency's walls.

Wisner's Story

The agency came into being as a political fluke at the prodding and instigation of a handful of Eastern establishment elitist cowboys and ex-soldiers of fortune. It began several steps behind the best intelligence agencies in the world and had to rely on two of them: the British, and by default of circumstances, the German Abwehr (through Reinhart Gelen) to get fully into the post WW-II game. Because it was forced to evolve through trial and error, the CIA was destined to never quite catch up to its competition. This was true in part because it was poorly served by all of its directors, and because it never completely embraced what was its only important mission: to be able to see over the horizon and give the President information on what was happening in the World. On this most important of missions the agency failed miserably and repeatedly throughout its history: It missed all of the seminal events of our era: Castro's take over of Cuba, the fall of Communism, the 911 terror threat, and Saddam's WMD, just to name the most spectacular of a very long list. Somehow, the CIA maintained a great reputation even though it continued to have a terrible record of repeated failures.

But it was also true because, even in the face of its repeated failures, in order to close the "appearance gap," the agency had learned to promote itself: Early on it had learned how to be a "political player" before it had learned how to become a "spy agency." "Kow-towing" to its political authorities by giving them "shaded intelligence" because that was what they wanted to hear, rather than what was true, became a part of the agency's professional signature. In addition to "kow-towing," it also learned a slew of other bad habits: such as how to cover-up its shortcomings through lies and exaggeration, how to play by its own rules, and most importantly, how to remain accountable to no one.

The Agency was eventually saved from itself by the advent of electronic and technological intelligence, which have made the old spy games anarchic if not completely obsolete. Sixty years on, and when we needed a finally airing of the CIA dirty laundry, all we get here are carefully "vetted" cover stories. I am very disappointed.

Three Stars.

for more information click here