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Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, by Tim Weiner
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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.
- Sales Rank: #74003 in Books
- Published on: 2007-06-28
- Released on: 2007-06-28
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.30" h x 1.75" w x 6.25" l, 1.10 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 702 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Is the Central Intelligence Agency a bulwark of freedom against dangerous foes, or a malevolent conspiracy to spread American imperialism? A little of both, according to this absorbing study, but, the author concludes, it is mainly a reservoir of incompetence and delusions that serves no one's interests well. Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times correspondent Weiner musters extensive archival research and interviews with top-ranking insiders, including former CIA chiefs Richard Helms and Stansfield Turner, to present the agency's saga as an exercise in trying to change the world without bothering to understand it. Hypnotized by covert action and pressured by presidents, the CIA, he claims, wasted its resources fomenting coups, assassinations and insurgencies, rigging foreign elections and bribing political leaders, while its rare successes inspired fiascoes like the Bay of Pigs and the Iran-Contra affair. Meanwhile, Weiner contends, its proper function of gathering accurate intelligence languished. With its operations easily penetrated by enemy spies, the CIA was blind to events in adversarial countries like Russia, Cuba and Iraq and tragically wrong about the crucial developments under its purview, from the Iranian revolution and the fall of communism to the absence of Iraqi WMDs. Many of the misadventures Weiner covers, at times sketchily, are familiar, but his comprehensive survey brings out the persistent problems that plague the agency. The result is a credible and damning indictment of American intelligence policy. (Aug. 7)
Copyright � Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Tim Weiner, multiple Pulitzer Prize winner, longtime New York Times reporter, and the author of Betrayal: The Story of Aldrich Ames, American Spy (1995) and Blank Check: The Pentagon's Black Budget (1991) hits his marks in Legacy of Ashes. Drawing on more than 50,000 documents and 300 on-the-record interviews with key players (10 of them former directors of the agency; all of the book's many notes and quotations are attributed), Weiner treats his subject with a ruthless, journalistic eye, skewering Republican and Democratic administrations alike for the CIA's slide into mediocrity. One critic finds a weakness in Weiner's exuberant dismantling of the old guard at the expense of more contemporary analysis. Still, this is an important book that will capture the attention of anyone interested in the CIA's checkered history.
Copyright � 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
From Booklist
National-security journalist Weiner supports an American clandestine espionage service but flays the one that has been in business for the past 60 years. His history of the CIA draws extensively from primary documentation, yielding lively episodes of agents and operations and the reactions to their results by CIA directors and presidents. The title quotes President Dwight Eisenhower's negative opinion of the intelligence organization, a recurrent executive complaint that prompts Weiner's analysis of the CIA's historical problems. He argues that covert action has deflected the CIA from espionage's classic function of ascertaining adversaries' secrets and intentions and, accordingly, populates these pages with covert-action fiascoes (the Bay of Pigs in 1961) and intelligence failures to avert another Pearl Harbor (one reason the CIA was created) such as 9/11. Although critical, Weiner expresses esteem for certain CIA directors, such as Richard Helms. These directors understood espionage basics, and Weiner concludes with the hope that the CIA will get back to them. Thousands of the CIA's annual applicants will seek out an institutional history, and Weiner's ably meets that need. Taylor, Gilbert
Most helpful customer reviews
251 of 267 people found the following review helpful.
A Degree of Truth
By Retired Reader
As Tim Weiner makes clear in the first pages of this book, the driving force for the creation of CIA was to establish a clearing house where all intelligence information available to the U.S. could collated, vetted, and organized into coherent knowledge. And as he also makes clear this mission was subverted and overshadowed from the start by the culture of the veterans of the WWII Office of Strategic Services (OSS) who dominated the early CIA. These veterans were far more comfortable with covert action and clandestine collection of intelligence than desk bound intelligence analysis. So from the time of its creation to the present, the Directorate of Intelligence (analytic shop) has existed in the shadow of the Directorate of Operations (DO). Virtually every CIA Director from the beginning has focused on one or all of the following: initiating DO operations; cleaning up messes left by DO operations; or reorganizing the DO to do a better job.
This book is a case in point. Although ostensibly about CIA as an institution, the book really focuses on DO and its alleged failures. This fascination with the DO by journalists, Presidents, and CIA Directors has allowed the analytic arm of CIA to atrophy from almost the very first. Yet the many failures and embarrassments that Weiner has chosen to chronicle in this book are as much the fault of DI as DO.
Now this book is essentially a massive and well written critique of CIA and especially the DO. For the most part it is pretty accurate, but as CIA has pointed out in a rather pitiful rebuttal of the book, it is not entirely fair and balanced. For example, in 1998 India exploded a nuclear weapon to the utter surprise and amazement of the entire U.S. Intelligence Community (IC). Weiner jumps on the CIA in particular for its failure to predict this event. What he did not mention was the fact that India used its considerable knowledge of the workings of the U.S. Intelligence System to develop and execute a masterful denial and deception program. Further, India has a world class counter-intelligence service that makes collection of secret intelligence in India a very dicey proposition in the best of circumstances. True CIA was guilty in this instance of mirror imaging and failed to creatively use a number of clues available from secret and open sources, but it also had a really tough nut to crack, As Weiner chronicles the many missteps that CIA has made, he would be more credible had he also gone into a bit more detail about the impressive obstacles faced by CIA operations officers. In the end this is a fascinating book that accurately chronicles a part, but not the entire CIA story.
116 of 137 people found the following review helpful.
A first- rate richly sourced thought- provoking study
By Shalom Freedman
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.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Surprisingly good....from a conservative reader's POV too!
By Bryn C. Dunham
As a conservative I picked this book up expecting another liberal hit piece against the people who keep us safe. Surprisingly enough I was impressed by the appearance of objectivity of the author. Using primary sources and countless interviews from former employees and CIA directors the author tells a story of the CIA that is quite alarming. As the title indicates this is about the failures of the CIA since its inception following WWII. What we learn is that right from the beginning the CIA deviated from its intended mission: collecting accurate intelligence to aid policy makers and the president. Instead the CIA began on a track of attempting to be a cloak and dagger agency; getting involved with political assassination, swinging foreign elections, aiding coups, and sabotage.
Though the original minds and spies at the CIA were bold and wanted to penetrate the USSR and subvert the global spread of communism, their track record of success is pitiful. In the business of national security good intentions can be deadly. Results preserve peace and the CIA did not deliver when it mattered.
The book is a chronology of its failed missions and almost criminal negligence in its expenditure of men and money. The CIA was created to stop another Pearl Harbor and 9/11 and it failed...miserably. This book explains how.
Sure there were some successes but they were few and far between and this book explains them well. Some of book beween Korea and Vietnam were a tad long winded but it's important for the book.
Some key points of interest were how the CIA interpreted the JFK assassination (not to spoil it) but it's obvious they weren't involved; they weren't that good! George H.W. Bush is still regarded as a CIA favorite director despite not really doing too much. The CIA kept Reagan in the dark about the Iran-Contra deals, and Clinton didn't give a crap about the CIA. When it comes to W the book gets interesting. I expected the author to ring Bush's neck but instead he points a very clear picture about why the administration decided to move forward with Iraq and why their assessments about WBDs were wrong. There is no evidence that Bush lied but in instead the CIA was downright wrong, irresponsible and incompetent. This book faults all the presidents to some degree but since I couldn't find clear bias though I was looking for it I am satisfied on this books objectivity. The future doesn't look too bright for the CIA and in fact their covert activity is clearly best left to the military. The image of Hollywood and popular fiction painting the CIA as an omnipotent agency capable of amazing James Bond-ish success is clearly a fantasy.
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