Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

National security bureaucracies seem like they are never able to escape the personalities and characteristics of their founding elders. For the FBI, that is J Edgar Hoover and his disdain for spooks and spycraft. The CIA has Allen Dulles, and his penchant for covert operations and indifference to intelligence. Weiner documents Dulles watching baseball on TV while not even pretending to listen to an intelligence briefing being given. Out of this grew an agency that meddles in the affairs in nation after nation, without understanding the people, language, culture, history and politics of their targets. Even low level intelligence to support operational details for covert operations was often overlooked. Never mind the big picture, the Soviet Union, where the CIA was almost completely blind and easily duped by their counterparts. Tim Weiner has written a devastating history of the CIA which shatters the glossed over myths of an omnipotent agency that won the cold war by valiantly spreading democracy and freedom for the oppressed peoples of the world. Quite the opposite is true. The CIA allowed the covert operation tail to wag the intelligence gathering dog, resulting in colossal failures that lead to many deaths. Even the "successes" later turned around to produce serious blowback for the U.S. The 1953 coup installing the Shah of Iran ultimately led to resentment in Iran, the Iranian revolution and the hostage crisis. The success in Afghanistan against the Soviets and the failure to see the growing fundamentalist threat fertilized the ground there for Al Qaeda. Indonesia and Bay of Pigs are among the examples Weiner gives of outright failures due to poor intelligence. Along with a recent work by John Prados, Safe for Democracy, Legacy of Ashes is ground-breaking in showing the poor relationship between the CIA and the White House, the conflict between intelligence gathering and covert operations, and the resulting failures abroad. Throughout the agency's history there are examples of feeding the President with what they want to hear, and the President ignoring intelligence which does not support their world view or a covert op in the works. When intelligence is not shared, politicized, or ignored, the White House and CIA inevitably produce foreign policy disasters. The cowboys always win, and inevitably screw things up. And neither Democrat nor Republican presidents score any better than the other in really getting a good grip on covert ops. The pattern becomes clear when these examples are documented in a single volume. To the CIA's credit, it was not the driving force behind many operations. It was the White House that pushed for plots against Castro and overthrowing Allende in Chile. Richard Helms comes across as cautious in recommending covert ops, yet buckles to pressure from Nixon and Kissinger. Surprisingly Carter and Kennedy were hawks when it came to using covert operations, each starting more operations than their pr

While I would normally take away one star for a failure to provide useful policy context (the Presidents and their staffs were as much to blame for all these fiascos, and in his eagerness to do primary research, he appears to have completely missed some very important facts as stated in the varied memoires), on balance this is a tour d'force. See my lists for a diversity of other recommended reading. In two specific instances, the lack of context casts the CIA more negatively than it merits. The Indian nuclear test was missed in large part because the Pentagon was controlling the satellites and focusing them almost full time on Iraq. In Afghanistan, CIA not only performed heroically in establishing the geospatial foundation for precision air strikes, but it also had eyes on Bin Laden for four days, with Rumsfeld in one instance allowing the Pakistanis to evacuate 3000 Taliban and Al Qaeda, and General Franks in another refusing to put Rangers around Bin Laden, claiming it would take weeks. With such idiocy (or deliberate support for Al Qaeda) at the policy level, CIA can hardly be blamed for everything. The author makes no mention of the reality that CIA was Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC, nor does he review, as I do in The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political--Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption, both the long history of presidential and congressional commission dismay over CIA's lack of language skills and open source access and collegial relations with the Pentagon, and the fact that policy is always, invariably, responsible for as many high crimes, misdemeanors, and errors and omissions that comprise the massive betrayal of the public trust that the federal government has come to represent these past fifty years. See The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World and The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project) On Dick Cheney, who escapes notice in this book, but whose disdain for the CIA is now somewhat more understandable to me, see my review and explicit list of 23 impeachable offenses that the book documents, offenses that should have seen Cheney removed from office two years ago. I refer to Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency. While Eisenhower's condemning "legacy of ashes" is in the title, the better bottom line comes in the body of the book: "A harvest of lies and a complete lack of intelligence." Elsewhere the book abounds with hubris and arrogance, blindness, a propensity to slander and assassinate (ineptly). The CIA was "ham-handed and free-wheeling." The author draws on varied sources to characterize the clandestine service as skilled at "gross overstatement joined with grotesque incompetence." The essence of the book and CIA's continuous record of bluster and failure is ably captured on page 126, "Clo

The incident which gives this book its title reveals something essential about its tone and direction. At the end of his two - terms of office President Eisenhower called into his office, the former legendary OSS officer and director of the CIA Allen Dulles, and said to him point- blank. " After eight years you have left me , a "legacy of ashes." In other words the institution whose task it was to provide vital intelligence to the U.S. Executive on world - affairs had not done its job. Eisenhower was concerned about what legacy would be handed on to his successor, President Kennedy. And surely enough some months later 'The Bay of Pigs' fiasco occurred in great part because of the faulty plan and information provided by the CIA's Richard Bissell. Bissell believed an infiltrating semi- Army of 1600 would easily defeat Castro's sixty- thousand troops. The result was the Kennedy Administration's first major disaster. The two - sides of Intelligence work, the gathering of information, and the undertaking of covert operations are generously surveyed in this work. Weiner a long- time reporter for the NY Times devoted twenty- years to this book, and in the course of it read through fifty- thousand declassified CIA Intelligence documents. He also interviewed ten former directors of the CIA. He points out errors made all along the way. Frank Wisner at the beginning ignored 'intelligence gathering' and sent during the Korean War thousands of hired agents to suicidal behind- the- enemy- lines operations. In the Bay of Pigs fiasco and in numerous other operations the CIA instead of providing hard, truthful contradictory analysis essentially worked to politically support a prior decision of the Executive branch. Speaking 'truth to power' has not been its essential strong point. Weiner understands the difficulty of having a spy agency in a democracy where there is always a certain discomfort regarding covert operations. His argument is nonetheless not about the wrongness of having such an Agency in a Democracy, but rather about the too frequent failures of judgment and action. This book is extremely rich , providing new insight into a great share of American post- war history. It touches upon almost all the major conflicts. It also chronicles CIA successes wherever they have occurred, It is not in other words a one- sided politically motivated bashing of the Agency but rather a thoughtful, informative, challenging study that may provide valuable guidance as to how the Agency should be reformed to better confront the many security challenges the U.S. is facing today.

Just got finished reading LOA and was immediately impressed with the scholarship of Tim Weiner's account of the CIA. Weiner provides extensive support for his sources and paints a picture of the CIA as an agency that cannot come to grips with its mandates and constantly justifying its existence through questionable tactics. This book shines in its vivid accounts of the agency from 1950-1970, covering its inception after Truman, its founding under Ike and bumbling under Kennedy/LBJ and Nixon. The reader leaves with an understanding of the CIA central role in American Foreign Policy during the time and its subsequent downfall. Would have liked more information from the Clinton and Bush 43 administations. Doesn't really get in depth with the CIA's role in picking up on the growing omen of terrorism. (The book briefly mentions Oklahoma City and the 1993 WTC bombing). I assume this may be because documents from these incidents have not yet been declassified. All in all this book gives a great snapshot at how the CIA came to be and where its future lies.