Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

Editorial Reviews. From Publishers Weekly. Starred Review. Is the Central Intelligence Agency a bulwark of freedom against dangerous foes, or a malevolent.
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The joke of the film, of which Lang must have been aware, was that Cooper could never have been mistaken for anything other than an American. The same point is implicit in Weiner's highly critical account of the CIA: Failure to assimilate leaves them reliant on bought loyalties and purchased intelligence, both easily turned, and therein lies the weakness of the CIA. The organisation was founded in in response to the threat of communism, but was compromised from the start by competing methodologies: Although accountable to government, the CIA was extra-legal.

It operated on money skimmed from the Marshall Plan, which offered billions to the free world to repair damage done by the second world war and to create an American economic and political barrier against the Soviets. Allen Dulles, a future head of the CIA, acted as a consultant to the plan and was party to a secret deal that set aside unaccountable cash for political warfare.

This led to covert operations becoming the driving force of the agency. A string of unsavoury alliances started with Nazis and fascists hired as "freedom fighters"; a history of disastrous, hushed-up operations followed. Nearly all the agency's cold war and Korean war agents were captured and turned or executed. Of agents dropped into Manchuria in , the Chinese killed and captured As Weiner drily notes in this combative and entertaining demolition job, the one weapon the CIA used with surpassing skill was cold cash.

The Japanese described the political system created with CIA support as "structural corruption". In enough CIA money was laundered in Italy to ensure that the elections did not go to the Communists; "spreading democracy by deceit" in Weiner's assessment. Despite misreading nearly every global crisis, the agency acquired a shining reputation, thanks both to the public relations efforts of Dulles and its own "cold warrior" mystique of mission and crusade.

But in Weiner's account the CIA emerges as a tawdry creation: When the USSR collapsed, the agency stood exposed. Everything intelligence is called upon to do is inherently, inescapably difficult: These are not trifling challenges. Consider further that these difficult tasks are being attempted by mortal men and women, all of whom by virtue of the human condition are fallible and imperfect: The logic is inexorable: This suggests that a fair treatment of intelligence and a realistic assessment of its history, if not tending toward a sense of forgiveness, would at least attempt to understand the very human context of what must be a record that will include failures.


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  2. The Forced Bride (Mills & Boon comics).
  3. Five Days to Foundation Grants.
  4. Memory and Forgetting (Routledge Modular Psychology)?
  5. A Day of Forgiveness?

This context is especially necessary in appraising the early years of CIA, when enormous challenges were faced by a new generation for whom intelligence was something learned through often-bitter experience. A fair treatment of intelligence and a realistic assessment of its history would at least attempt to understand the very human context of what must be a record that will include failures. This was not a unique occasion of truthfulness, and it does not sound like an Agency trying to hide its shortcomings.

Secondary Navigation

Weiner even manages to portray genuine CIA successes as failures. He portrays the development of the U-2 spyplane—a stunning technological achievement—as a failure because, he says, CIA should have had better human sources inside the USSR. Never mind that the Soviets had built and would continue to build a formidable and genuinely threatening military machine for decades to come. If CIA had had no other success in its history, the Agency deserves more credit than Weiner allows for keeping the Cold War from becoming a hot war, presumably a nuclear war.

In the book, Weiner gives the Agency no credit on this point. Other successes Weiner obscures or otherwise marginalizes.

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

Throughout his book, Weiner has a distressing tendency to make compelling, usually damning statements about CIA—its leaders, operations, and programs—and about US presidents that are untrue. Many of these assertions he even undermines in his subsequent narrative.

A prominent early example, in which Weiner sets the stage for his view that CIA overstepped its boundaries from the beginning, is the first sentence of chapter 1: A few pages later, however, Weiner tells how Truman gave the first director of central intelligence a black hat, a cloak, and a wooden dagger—which make for a pointless joke if all Truman wanted was a classified version of the New York Times.

Weiner is forced by his own premise to then assert the incredible: In Michael Warner, ed. Frank Wisner, a passionate and driven man who led covert operations for many years, comes in for especially rough treatment.

See a Problem?

Weiner portrays him as absolutely autonomous, out of control, accountable to no one: Reading on, one finds that both State and Defense were pressing Wisner to expand covert action programs in , that the Joint Chiefs of Staff ordered him to undertake covert operations against the USSR, and that all such operations were authorized by George Kennan at State. Wisner is lambasted for doing too much—except during the East German riots, when Weiner chastizes him for doing nothing. Weiner asserts that Agency officers consistently misunderstood the world and communicated that misunderstanding to US presidents, who then reacted by ordering the CIA to conduct covert actions in order to change the world to their liking.

This thesis is unsupportable from the historical record. Other commentators Walter Laqueur, Angelo Codevilla, e. For example, the analysts were completely cut out of deliberations before the Bay of Pigs, and they could have told the operators that there was no potential for an anti-Castro uprising that the operation was intended to foment.

That judgment would come as a surprise to several generations of analysts in the Directorate of Intelligence, especially those who delivered unexpected or unwelcome assessments to various administrations on China, Soviet strategic intentions and capabilities, Vietnam, the Balkans, and more recently on terrorism and Iraq. Labelling him as an ineffectual leader, Weiner gives him no credit for trying, as a lowly rear admiral in Washington, to lead this new venture called Central Intelligence.

In an apparent rush to condemn Agency covert action, Weiner curiously fails to give Hillenkoetter credit for trying to keep the Agency out of it. He ignores several important sources that have refuted this claim: This is a wrong-headed view of a president who in had served on the Rockefeller Commission investigating intelligence activities and who had drafted for his own delivery, from to , radio addresses on national security matters that included cogent discussions about CIA and intelligence issues.

Weiner, like a prosecutor in a trial, pulls from his source material only that which supports his perspective.

History of the CIA

Just as he fails to provide context or alternative plausible explanations, Weiner, like a prosecutor in a trial, pulls from his source material only that which supports his perspective. We had constructed for ourselves a picture of the USSR, and whatever happened had to be made to fit into that picture.

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

Intelligence estimators can hardly commit a more abominable sin. Abbott balanced his critique by noting that many of the main points of political analysis of the USSR had turned out to be valid: The one Korean War internal history that has been released and available to Weiner speaks of many successful missions into North Korean territory, mostly to gather intelligence but also to destroy infrastructure and to kill enemy combatants. With respect to analysis during the Korean War, Weiner is not completely up front either.

Chinese Communist propaganda has portrayed the US as an aggressor…. Thus, the stage has been set for some form of Chinese Communist intervention or participation in the Korean War…. In any case, some form of armed assistance to the North Koreans appears imminent. Weiner also points to an RFE broadcast that predicted the United States would come to the aid of Hungarian freedom fighters, without acknowledging that the broadcaster was doing a press review after the Soviet invasion and was quoting—by name—a London Observer editorial, and that even so this was a violation of RFE policy, or that this was the sole example of an implicit hint of assistance in two weeks of continuous broadcasting to Hungary.

How could we get it so wrong, especially after years of U-2 coverage? The errors of fact in Legacy of Ashes are numerous and of the kind that a half-way diligent graduate student would spot. The problem is that Weiner got the year wrong: Weiner failed both to correctly read his secondary source and to check primary sources.

This should be considered a success, but Weiner uses it as an occasion to ridicule the Agency. CIA, in fact, did not support that statement. Weiner gets better during the period when he started covering intelligence as a reporter.

The secret policemen's fall

Following is a short list:. For all of its profound flaws bits of Legacy of Ashes are not bad though Weiner has not earned the trust of the careful scholar regarding his sources, so best to check. I actually agree with Weiner that at some point, though I am not certain where that point is, the dispatch of ethnic agent teams into denied areas was unconscionable, based on the fact—observable to CIA at the time—that so few about 25 percent were ever heard from again.

At the same time, no one put a gun to the heads of these ethnic agents; they were nationalists, willing to risk their lives many fought, unheralded, for years as guerillas against the Soviets in their homeland without US help , and we were willing to take the chance that sending them might yield good intelligence or otherwise harm our adversaries. In the high pressure of the early Cold War—when everyone was concerned about communist expansion and no one knew how the struggle would come out—these operations, ill-advised though they may have been, were far more understandable, if not forgivable, than Weiner allows.

Weiner gets better during the period when he started covering intelligence as a reporter Part Six. But these few plusses do not overcome the essential fact that Legacy of Ashes is a narrowly-focused and biased account. In his preface, Weiner claims to believe that the intelligence profession is critical to national security, but he is likely to have done considerable damage, as the people who take up the profession will, I fear, have to deal with his inaccuracies and skewed perspectives for years to come.

Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment Touchstone, , — Haines and Robert E. Naval Institute Press, , — All these reports were declassified during — The actual estimates have long been available for serious researchers in Donald Steury, ed. CIA History Staff, An examination of his notes, however, suggest that he made relatively little use of the fruits of such labors, which seldom produce the biting lines and colorful turns of phrase found in interviews and oral histories, which he most relies on.

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