Product Description

With shocking revelations that made headlines in papers across the country, Pulitzer-Prize-winner Tim Weiner gets at the truth behind the CIA and uncovers here why nearly every CIA Director has left the agency in worse shape than when he found it; and how these profound failures jeopardize our national security.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1947 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-20
• Released on: 2008-05-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 848 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 The Washington Post
Reviewed by David Wise

The CIA is a fat, easy target these days. Under George "slam dunk" Tenet, it failed (along with the FBI) to prevent 9/11, and then it famously and wrongly estimated that Iraq's Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Tenet's $4 million memoir to explain these failures merely subjected him to more slings and arrows, soothed only somewhat by all that moola.

Morale plunged under his successor, Porter Goss, who brought a clique of unpopular flunkies from Capitol Hill to Langley. The spies revolted, and Goss had to walk the plank. Now the agency is presided over by Michael Hayden, the same Air Force general who supinely created President Bush's warrantless wiretap program to eavesdrop on Americans despite the Constitution. Given the checkered history of the CIA, it is small wonder that Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes is a highly caustic, corrosive study of the beleaguered agency.

But Weiner, a New York Times correspondent who has covered intelligence for years, cannot be accused of kicking the agency when it is down. It is his thesis, amply documented, that the CIA was never up. He paints a devastating portrait of an agency run, during the height of its power in the Cold War years, by Ivy League incompetents, "old Grotonians" who lied to presidents -- an agency that, more often than not, failed to foresee major world events, violated human rights, spied on Americans, plotted assassinations of foreign leaders, and put so much of its energy and resources into bungled covert operations that it failed in its core mission of collecting and analyzing information.

To compare some of the agency's antics revealed in this book to the Keystone Kops is to do violence to the memory of Mack Sennett, who created the slapstick comedies. My personal favorite is an episode in Guatemala in 1994, when the CIA chief of station confronted the American ambassador, Marilyn McAfee, with intelligence, as she recalled, that "I was having an affair with my secretary, whose name was Carol Murphy." The CIA's friends in the Guatemalan military had bugged McAfee's bedroom, Weiner reports, and "recorded her cooing endearments to Murphy. They spread the word that the ambassador was a lesbian." The CIA's "Murphy memo" was widely distributed in Washington. There was only one problem: the ambassador was married, not gay and not sleeping with her secretary. " 'Murphy' was the name of her two-year-old black standard poodle. The bug in her bedroom had recorded her petting her dog."

Forty years earlier, the CIA had overthrown the legally elected government of Guatemala, a covert operation long touted as one of the intelligence agency's grand "successes." It was even called Operation Success. Guatemala was made safe for United Fruit -- talk about banana republics -- but not for democracy. A series of military dictators followed the CIA coup, with death squads and repression in which perhaps 200,000 Guatemalans perished.

Weiner's study is based on a prodigious amount of research into thousands of documents that have been declassified or otherwise uncovered, as well as oral histories and interviews. And one of the truly startling, eye-opening revelations in Legacy of Ashes is just how close even the agency's avowed triumphs came to disaster. As Weiner documents, both the Guatemalan operation and the overthrow of the government of Iran (Operation Ajax) in 1953 teetered on the edge of catastrophe. They were run by old boys whose management skills seemed to combine Skull and Bones with the Ringling Brothers.

And of course the "success" in Iran, restoring the Shah and his notorious secret police, the SAVAK, to power, was all about oil, grabbing it back from Mohammed Mossadeq, who had nationalized it. The coup, run by the CIA's Kim Roosevelt, Teddy's grandson, was followed in 1979 by the takeover of the ayatollahs, arguably a direct outcome of Islamic resentment of the agency's meddling in that country. Today, Iran, with its ominous nuclear weapons program and defiance of the West, looms as a much greater foreign policy challenge to the Bush administration, and to world peace, than Iraq ever was. Thanks a bunch, Langley.

Weiner carefully traces the agency's history from the start, when Harry Truman, realizing he had disbanded the wartime OSS too quickly, anointed Sidney Souers, a St. Louis businessman who had run the Piggly Wiggly supermarkets, as the first central intelligence chief. In a White House ceremony, Truman presented Souers and Admiral William Leahy, the White House staff chief, "with black cloaks, black hats, and wooden daggers." Weiner recounts a series of botched operations run by the likes of Tracy Barnes, Desmond FitzGerald and Richard Bissell, who were among the CIA's leading spooks in the agency's early years. But he reserves his greatest contempt for Frank Wisner, the agency's first covert operator, who sent dozens of agents to their deaths in the Ukraine and Albania and wasted the CIA's millions on a phantom army in Poland that was invented by Soviet and Polish intelligence to befuddle the agency.

As Weiner tells it, the arrogance of CIA Ivy Leaguers was matched only by sheer incompetence. From the start, the CIA hid its failures behind a Top Secret label and was useless in its ability to penetrate the Soviet Union or any other foe. In one year, he notes, the agency managed to miss the Soviet atom bomb, the Korean war and China's entry into that conflict. Weiner also finds little to admire in Allen Dulles, who presided over the agency in its heyday but had to depart after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. He portrays Dulles as a sort of duplicitous Santa Claus, over the hill by 1961, shuffling about in carpet slippers. But Dulles's OSS record in penetrating the Nazi high command from Switzerland had been impressive. And based on my personal observation and conversations with Dulles in the early 1960s he was not a doddering old man in carpet slippers but a shrewd professional spy.

Although most of Weiner's research is superb, he unfortunately perpetuates the legend that CIA director Richard Helms stood firm against Richard Nixon's Watergate cover-up. Not so. In an odd footnote, Weiner says Helms "complied with the president's order to go along with the cover-up for sixteen days at most." But the author, who quotes extensively from dozens of CIA documents, curiously makes no mention of the damning memo that Helms wrote to his deputy, Vernon Walters, on June 28, 1972, about the FBI investigation of the break-in: "We still adhere to the request that they confine themselves to the personalities already arrested or directly under suspicion and that they desist from expanding this investigation into other areas which may well, eventually, run afoul of our operations." It was a bald-faced lie, exactly what the White House was demanding that Helms tell the FBI.

If there is a flaw in Legacy of Ashes, it is that Weiner's scorn for the old boys who ran the place is so unrelenting and pervasive that it tends to detract from his overall argument. He is unwilling to concede that the agency's leaders may have acted from patriotic motives or that the CIA ever did anything right.

Nevertheless, Legacy of Ashes succeeds as both journalism and history, and it is must reading for anyone interested in the CIA or American intelligence since World War II. Weiner quotes Dean Acheson's prophecy about the CIA to good effect: "I had the gravest forebodings about this organization . . . and warned the President that as set up neither he, the National Security Council, nor anyone else would be in a position to know what it was doing or to control it."

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. 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.

Customer Reviews

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.

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.

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.