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Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
 
 
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Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA [Kindle Edition]

Tim Weiner (Author)
3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (209 customer reviews) |
Print List Price: $16.95
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Editorial Reviews

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.
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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
152 of 163 people found the following review helpful
A Degree of Truth August 10, 2007
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
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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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
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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79 of 97 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
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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Most Recent Customer Reviews
What I can personally fact check, checks out.
I am not a historian, and I don't have the stomach to read 50,000 pages of released documents, but I am the son of a father who worked for British Intelligence and later the CIA in... Read more
Published 9 days ago by KTS
legacy of ashes
This is an excellent and informative book for anyone who is interested in the history and misadventures of the CIA.
Published 12 days ago by bomzhe
Good Criticism That Sometimes Strays Into the Realm of a Hatchet Job
Weiner has written an interesting and compelling polemic against the CIA. He maintains that the CIA is an incompetent organization that has never fulfilled its mission of... Read more
Published 23 days ago by CJA
Depressing but real?
Did we know it all or is there lots of news here? I remember WWII, Korea, the '56 war, Guatemala, The Wall, Cuba, Lumumba, Lebanon, The DR, Vietnam, Iran, Iran #2, the Mayaguez,... Read more
Published 2 months ago by Charles S. Fisher
Surprisingly good....from a conservative readers POV too!
As a conservative I picked this book up expecting another liberal hit piece against the people who keep us safe. Read more
Published 2 months ago by Bryn C. Dunham
Legacy of Ashes
This fascinating, provocative and relevant book is a history of the first sixty years of the CIA compiled solely from first hand reporting and primary documents. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Paul J. Markowitz
A thorough survey of a secret institution
Tim Weiner skillfully surveys the Central Intelligence Agency in a chronological format, using each Director as a focus. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Max Ellithorpe
Deeply biased; lacking in depth - a disappointing attempt at telling...
The topic probably cannot be covered in the six hundred pages that the author attempts to do it in. The history of the CIA - decades - long, completely and literally global in its... Read more
Published 4 months ago by Gord Tulk
Sorry I read this book, but seriously . . .
I am sort of serious. Would I have been happier not knowing the 60-year history (up unitl 2007) of the CIA as outlined by Tim Weiner? Read more
Published 5 months ago by Carl E. Johnson Jr.
Depressing, but Necessary
After getting halfway through this book (and I do intend to finish it), what comes through most clearly is that the CIA higher-ups behaved like self-deluded cowboys, ones with... Read more
Published 6 months ago by Marianne
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More About the Author

› Visit Amazon's Tim Weiner Page
Tim Weiner
From the Random House Speakers Bureau profile:

Tim Weiner has won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his writing on vital issues of American national security. As a correspondent for The New York Times, he covered the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon in Washington, and reported on war and terrorism from Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Sudan, and many other nations over the course of 15 years.

His new book, Enemies: A History of the FBI, has been acclaimed as "fascinating" by The Wall Street Journal. Legacy of Ashes, his chronicle of the CIA, was a bestseller across the United States and around the world. His fields of expertise include espionage, foreign affairs, intelligence, and Presidential power politics. He has lectured at the CIA, universities, political think tanks, and at Presidential libraries.

Tim Weiner's trademark use of intelligence research and unique sources compose compelling narratives that are as riveting as they are important to understanding the world we live in. Weiner is currently at work on a history of the American Military.

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Any attack launched by an American enemy in any nation of the world was an attack on the United States. This was the Truman Doctrine. &quote;
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