Customer Reviews

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

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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.

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.

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.

While Legacy of Ashes provides interesting bits of information regarding the CIA's distant and recent past, it is not good history because it provides almost no context for the events that it describes. It leaves one with the impression of a CIA populated by comic book bad guys, lunatics and clowns.

In the Second World War and the period immediately thereafter, having been forced out of a self-imposed hiatus from dealing with the rest of the world, the United States had come face-to-face with totalitarianisms and the unparalleled carnage they had wrought. We learned of the Nazi death camps, the victims of communism in countries that were grist for the Soviet mill and, as time went on, untold millions who died for Mao's Marxist experiments in China. It should be no surprise that those who witnessed the slaughter and destruction that followed what appeared to be a triumphant march of ideology would be able to justify extreme measures to slow it down. This central reality gave rise to dramatic changes in the U.S. military including the build-up of a nuclear arsenal, the Marshall plan, communist "witch hunts", the space program, and the CIA. In short, the world was a very different and much more dangerous place than we had imagined, the U.S. was the only major western nation left intact, and we were struggling to find effective ways to deal with existential threats.

Unfortunately, very little of this context is provided in Legacy of Ashes. Too often we are left with nothing but the operational details of failed efforts to accomplish - what? The CIA and/or the White House wanted to overthrow Guatemala and Iran or assassinate Castro because personalities were enamored of covert operations?

That so many efforts were poorly thought out or poorly executed can be instructive, but, again, not without more context. Although rarely mentioned, the Soviets were engaged in covert operations around the world, including assassinations, coups and the arming and training of some stunningly unsavory characters. Were the Soviets more successful? If so, why? Is there something about our national character or form of governance that makes us preternaturally unable to succeed in the arena of covert operations and intelligence? In recent years the United States appears to have reached a consensus view that many of the types of efforts to which the early CIA devoted enormous energy should not be a part of our arsenal. Is this view correct in light of the very different types of threats we now face? Unfortunately, these important topics are not considered in any depth in this book.

Finally, I was left to wonder whether the author's reliance on primary and secondary documents and interviews with former CIA staff led him to accept their biases even as he criticized the agency. In particular his treatment of Vietnam seems insufficiently critical of conclusions reached by CIA analysis. For example, his treatments of Diem and the role of the Buddhist monks are facile and superficial. And I was surprised by his apparent acceptance of the notion that the war was not winnable because of the size and strength of the Viet Cong and that the Tet offensive provided evidence of this. In fact, the Tet offensive was a catastrophic military defeat for the Viet Cong which left it routed. It never again played any significant role in the war which became increasingly conventional, right through the Easter offensive in 1972, which the ARVN with U.S. air power defeated, and the final invasion in 1975 which saw Soviet tanks rolling through Saigon. But the author appears to accept the CIA's contemporaneous assessments over those of subsequent history.

While the author has clearly put a great deal of work into this volume, it is more of a greatly expanded news article - heavy on details while short on context - than the history of the CIA that the nation needs, and may have to wait many years to get.

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.

This is a book well worth reading, the product of a professional reporter who has covered intelligence issues for twenty years. Some critics of the work complain that Weiner's story is unrelentingly negative, and it is not an upbeat story. But the critics rarely call into question what he does say rather they want to point the light in a different corner and highlight some successes.
This country paid twice for never having formed a national intelligence service - we paid at Pearl Harbor and we paid when we formed the CIA with no idea of how to do it right.
Weiner is somewhat weak at tying his narrative events to a background worldview that might explain some of the CIA's thinking for younger readers but that doesn't really excuse the naivete and ineptitude of the organization.
Had the CIA been formed in a quieter more stable time it might have grown slowly into what it should have become. But the CIA was created after one world cataclysm, the second World War, and in the midst of a nascent apocalyptic era, the Cold War and the Nuclear Age. And the company was founded by Ivy League buccaneers who, like adolescent boys, were seduced by the James Bond school of espionage.
It is a sad, cautionary tale about the American tendency to address problems too late, throw money at them, then not pay attention to what ensues.
The book will easily explain why the US is so despised in a wide swath around the world where the CIA created an inflamed resentment of the US that we are still dealing with today.

This is a well researched and well written book. It takes you from one misadventure to the next. I had a hard time putting it down. (I am glad I finished it before the last Harry Potter book arrived.)
The author shows that it is well nigh impossible to have a clandestine service doing covert operations that do not go out of control. In an open society can you have an institution which has to have deniability but when called to account, lies to cover up its misdeeds? How do you prevent operatives in the field from defining the "national interest" in their own way, especially if the internal controls are weak?

Tim Weiner has shown that in the CIA, it could not be done. Almost from the beginning of the agency, the covert operations had long range consequences that were calamitous for the national interest.
Examples abound: bringing down the government of Iran and installing the Shah, being blind to the excesses of his brutal regime; our whole involvement in Central America, incl. installling and backing ruthless anti-democratic dictators, earning us the hatred of millions of people; encouraging the overthrow of President Diem in Vietnam, and Salvador Allende in Chile; and of course, relying on very shaky evidence that became the "slam-dunk" intelligence on WMDs in Iraq that justified our "removal" of Saddam Hussein. Each episode is well told.

Just as egregious were the intelligence failures: the unrealistic estimates of success of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba; the wildly over estimated missile strength of the Soviet Union; the continued belief in the monolithic Communist threat, long after the Soviet-Chinese rift; the total failure to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union or the falll of the Berlin wall; the support of the Afghan resistance with weapons and money without realizing that these could and would be turned against us; the failure to adequately see the rising threat of Islamic extremists and the terrorism coming out of that; and of course, the hand ringing and failure to uncover the 9/11 plot.

The structural problems are massive, and the internal culture of the CIA so ingrained, there is no way to change the agency by tinkering or adjusting things here and there. That's all been tried by various previous directors. Realizing that the agency for all practical purposes is no longer functioning, most of the top analysts have abandoned ship for the private sector, leaving behind an even more inexperienced crop of young agents with low morale, and devoid of critical foreign language skills. The agency is floundering, overshadowed by the military intelligence agenies which get about 80% of the funds spent on intelligence. I agree with Tim Weiner: the CIA has no credibility left, so let's abolish it, and start all over again.

It is a good read, for those who care about America, it is a must read if you are interested in what was done in our name by an agency that had no effective internal or external controls, and which at times was either ignored or flagrantly misused by various presidents.

This is a very thoroughly-researched and well-documented history of the CIA, from its inception in 1947 to the present day. The author, Tim Weiner, is a New York Times reporter who has covered the agency for many years. His book is based on more than 50,000 documents from the CIA archives, many of them recently declassified. It is stronger on events that happened more than, say, twenty years ago, since documents on the last two decades still remain classified.

This is primarily a history of the CIA's failures, and the list of failures is very long. Even some of the agency's rare successes ultimately end up as unintended consequences. The outright failures were failures of intelligence, events that the agency was unable to foresee such as the Soviet explosion of the atomic bomb, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and, more recently, the 9/11 attacks. Failures to predict the future are somewhat forgivable since they are crimes of omission or just plain incompetence.

The author tells us that the CIA's mission from the beginning was problematic. It has the duel task of collecting intelligence and conducting covert operations. This combination is a dangerous mix in that it will end up corrupting the integrity of both. Many of the covert operations such as the Bay of Pigs were undeniable failures. But many of the so-called successes such as aiding Islamic warriors against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan or installing the Shah in Iran turned out to be very short-lived. The unintended consequences or "blowback" have come back to haunt in a very big way. This is not to say that the CIA is responsible for the current state of Iran or Afghanistan, that would be giving them too much credit. The emphasis of this book is about the CIA's ineffectiveness.

Weiner seems more concerned about the incompetence of the agency than their immorality. Unlike the post-Watergate screeds against the CIA calling for its termination, this author wants to build a better agency. This is laudable. Anyone who thinks the United States does not need an intelligence agency is living in a dream world. Whether we need covert operations is still an open question. The morality of these operations need to be discussed before they can be conducted.

Weiner's first step in building a better agency would be hiring competent personnel who speak the language and know the history and culture of the country where they are stationed. (Read Amazon reviewer and former spy Robert D Steele, who has written at great length on this subject.) The current practise of hiring political cronies to foreign stations would be laughable if it weren't so tragic. Weiner's account of the student takeover of the US Embassy in Tehran in 1979 is a good example. They captured William Daugherty, head of CIA station. They accused him of masterminding a vast spy network in the Middle East. In reality Daugherty had only worked for the agency nine months and didn't speak the language. No intelligence there.

In the back of my mind I can't help thinking that the agency must have gotten some things right, and that Weiner is only giving half of the balance sheet. It must be noted that failures make good reading, and that the prevention of a disaster or a terrorist act does not. In any event, this book is a good read and hopefully it will make the agency more circumspect about its future operations.

After eight years as President, Dwight Eisenhower was frustrated with the CIA. He concluded that it was not working right. He observed to CIA Director Allen Dulles that (page 167) "I have suffered an eight-year defeat on this." He went on to note that he feared that he would (page 167) ". . .leave a legacy of ashes" to his successor.

This is a book about the CIA, from its beginning to its sad failures in Iraq. It depicts an organization that had some very talented and some very poor people in charge. According to the author, Tim Weiner, it seemed to make no difference what the quality of the leadership was; the CIA continued to struggle and would often "get it wrong." His basic contention and the thesis of the book (page xiii): "It [the book] describes how the most powerful country in the history of Western civilization has failed to create a first-rate spy service. That failure constitutes a danger to the national security of the United States." A primary example is 9/11. The latter chapters of the book describe how more and more information began developing suggesting a dramatic event to be orchestrated by Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda. But the CIA did not have the ability to turn this mounting evidence of an action by Al Qaeda into something concrete enough to try to prevent the event beforehand. The book described near desperation by the CIA as it became increasingly convinced that something was going to happen--but having no clue when or where.

One issue--the perpetual struggle between two different charges given the agency: covert operations and gathering of intelligence. The two often ended up in conflict. Much of the time, failures in intelligence doomed covert operations. E.g., lack of knowledge of the situation on the ground in Cuba doomed the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Another issue. The poor track record in intelligence. The CIA tried to inject spies into other countries. However, the intelligence agencies of other countries often infiltrated cells developed by the CIA and either destroyed them (if the book is right, hundreds of willing allies of the United States were killed as a result) or fed back misinformation or "turned them" to serve as double agents. Examples mentioned include efforts in Poland and the old Soviet Union.

Any book as grim as this sends off some warning bells as I read it, making me wonder if the person is bending over backwards to do a "hatchet job." However, Weiner's uses of sources (including internal reports) and interviews with many former CIA directors provide some pretty convincing basis to his arguments.

The book, though, also notes that President after President misused the CIA for political purposes, pressured the CIA to tell them what they wanted to hear. The value of "speaking truth to power" has not characterized many American Presidents--whether Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, or George W. Bush.

Clearly, there have been successes--think of the CIA's role in Afghanistan as the Northern Alliance was able to defeat the Taliban (at least on the short run), a tale given rather short shrift by Weiner. He spends more time on other failures in Afghanistan.

But even some of the instances that many trumpet as successes, the overthrow of governments in Iran and Guatemala, did not make things any better in those regions in the long run. Indeed, the CIA interventions (which appear to have succeeded only by good luck rather than great planning) put dictators in place, who were pretty rough on their own people. Is that a good measure of success?

There are some strained arguments here and there. At one point (as other reviewers have noted), her bemoans those times when there is a mass exodus of experienced agents. However, if the agency's track record were so miserable, so what? At another point, he accuses the CIA of not having the guts to go after bin Laden in Afghanistan, even though taking him out may have led to the deaths of many civilians (e.g., pages 472-473). Such deaths have made the American efforts in Afghanistan more difficult, alienating the people. And if the intel were not good in the first place (and it often was not good, according to Weiner), the deaths would not have been compensated for by killing bin Laden himself.

But this is a powerful book. While his approach is quite negative, the documentation is pretty solid and it is striking how many former Directors of the CIA have a critical take on the agency that they once headed. Worth looking at and thought-provoking.

In the James Bond movies, James Bond saves the world virtually single-handedly. He often gets high-tech gear from Q and military backup coordinated by the CIA after the agents follow him until Bond locates the bad guys. Based on Legacy of Ashes, those movies are closer to the truth than I had thought.

In Mr. Weiner's extensive look at recently declassified documents, the CIA has always been the gang that couldn't shoot straight when it came to covert operations. To make up for that, the agency has apparently been quite good at keeping secret its bungles and shameful episodes . . . and proclaiming victory in public. The main problem has been that this gang has usually been pursuing its own agendas, disconnected from American policy and political oversight. And the agency liked covert operations so much that it rarely took intelligence gathering seriously.

The blame isn't only the agency's; there's plenty of blame to go around. Presidents in particular were addicted to the idea of quickly supplying covert efforts when something was happening that they didn't like. When that urge came over them, the CIA was called in.

You probably know some of the story, just from reading the newspapers and watching television (such as when Aldrich Ames was arrested, the missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and the lack of coordination over paying attention to evidence of the impending 9/11 attack).

What shocked me (and I don't shock easily) was how many thousands of people were sacrificed or harmed in programs that never worked. For instance, the CIA believed for decades that it could send dissidents back to their home countries and set up resistance efforts (as the OSS had done in France during World War II). Essentially everyone who was sent back for this purpose to many countries was quickly found and executed. While there is a wall at CIA headquarters for those who died in the line of duty, these sacrificed agents were largely ignored so that someone could have the stupid idea to do it all over again.

So where are we now in gathering intelligence? We don't have much of an idea of what's going on anywhere except where we buy information from other intelligence services or after we invade the country. That's not good enough in a world where nuclear proliferation is real and loose nukes are a real risk.

And where are we in covert action? We are probably still bribing any politician or military leader who wants our money. We coordinate and run lots of offshore prisons where we and those we hire can torture people who might be terrorists to their heart's content.

It's a discouraging picture. And one that's not likely to be changed any time soon.

I didn't grade the book higher because Mr. Weiner seemed to be skimming the surface in many cases, failing to get into the nuances of why things happened. I compared, for example, his account of Jack and Bobby Kennedy in working with the CIA to what is described in the book, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years by David Talbot. Legacy of Ashes comes across as oversimplified and incomplete by comparison to the Brothers book. For instance, there's no hint of the CIA's possible involvement in the two Kennedy assassinations in Legacy of Ashes.

The book would also have been improved by exploring the organizational theory reasons why the CIA has had problems. You can't change an organization's leadership and charter as often as has happened with the CIA and not make a mess. Combine that with the need to hold many secrets and it's likely that institutional reform will lag behind the rate by which new problems can develop.

I also think this would have been a better book if it had contained the context of how well those who have had good intelligence (such as the old Soviet Union) used what they knew. In the case of Stalin, the intelligence coups didn't do much good because he didn't trust the information or want to act on it . . . except for stealing technological secrets.

What should the United States do now?

It may be a good idea to continue with the current administration's preference for private contractors to gather and interpret intelligence. Then, the role of the CIA could become evaluating the effectiveness of such contractors and foreign intelligence service offerings. That's probably a role it could do reasonably well . . . at least until we have a new president who will inevitably go off in a whole new direction.