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133 of 144 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Degree of Truth, August 10, 2007
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.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Missing Relevance & Misguided Purpose, December 7, 2010
Has there ever been more scrutiny and criticism of an organization that is suppose to operate in secret? At its formation from the remnants of the OSS, the CIA was always playing "catch-up" with other nation's counterparts who were more practiced at the 'great game'. Then in short order, its many missteps brought about distrust from its own government and people. Despite this, the CIA managed to maintain a formidable reputation in spite of its truly awful record.
Its purpose or mission was to know the world. Soon that came to entail exporting and cementing democracy. The result, in the words of President Eisenhower, is "a legacy of ashes." Weiner's book delivers on two levels. First, it offers up a definitive history of the CIA activities (much you may have read before but the whole effort is more comprehensive). But more importantly, he provides an analysis of why the organization has been such a debated failure giving credence to the theory that its brand is more valuable than its substance.
History will show that the US missed a critical opportunity to totally revamp its entire intelligence apparatus in the wake of 9/11 rather than simply applying bandaids and creating an umbrella structure for competing organizations.
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68 of 86 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A first- rate richly sourced thought- provoking study, July 11, 2007
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.
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