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Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA | 
 enlarge | Author: Tim Weiner
Publisher: Anchor
Category: Book
List Price: $16.95
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Rating:  138 reviews
Sales Rank: 846
Media: Paperback
Pages: 848
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.7
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.2 x 1.7
ISBN: 0307389006
Dewey Decimal Number: 327.1273009
EAN: 9780307389008
ASIN: 0307389006
Publication Date: May 20, 2008
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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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 133 more reviews...
 Should Be a Four, But Overly Harsh Review Calls for Balance July 22, 2007
Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States)
209 out of 301 found this review helpful
While I would normally take away one star for a failure to provide useful policy context (the Presidents and their staffs were as much to blame for all these fiascos, and in his eagerness to do primary research, he appears to have completely missed some very important facts as stated in the varied memoires), on balance this is a tour d'force. See my lists for a diversity of other recommended reading.
In two specific instances, the lack of context casts the CIA more negatively than it merits. The Indian nuclear test was missed in large part because the Pentagon was controlling the satellites and focusing them almost full time on Iraq. In Afghanistan, CIA not only performed heroically in establishing the geospatial foundation for precision air strikes, but it also had eyes on Bin Laden for four days, with Rumsfeld in one instance allowing the Pakistanis to evacuate 3000 Taliban and Al Qaeda, and General Franks in another refusing to put Rangers around Bin Laden, claiming it would take weeks. With such idiocy (or deliberate support for Al Qaeda) at the policy level, CIA can hardly be blamed for everything.
The author makes no mention of the reality that CIA was Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC, nor does he review, as I do in The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political--Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption, both the long history of presidential and congressional commission dismay over CIA's lack of language skills and open source access and collegial relations with the Pentagon, and the fact that policy is always, invariably, responsible for as many high crimes, misdemeanors, and errors and omissions that comprise the massive betrayal of the public trust that the federal government has come to represent these past fifty years. See The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World and The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
On Dick Cheney, who escapes notice in this book, but whose disdain for the CIA is now somewhat more understandable to me, see my review and explicit list of 23 impeachable offenses that the book documents, offenses that should have seen Cheney removed from office two years ago. I refer to Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency.
While Eisenhower's condemning "legacy of ashes" is in the title, the better bottom line comes in the body of the book: "A harvest of lies and a complete lack of intelligence." Elsewhere the book abounds with hubris and arrogance, blindness, a propensity to slander and assassinate (ineptly). The CIA was "ham-handed and free-wheeling."
The author draws on varied sources to characterize the clandestine service as skilled at "gross overstatement joined with grotesque incompetence." The essence of the book and CIA's continuous record of bluster and failure is ably captured on page 126, "Cloaked yet flamboyant--that was the CIA under Allen Dulles. It was a place 'where truly clandestine practices were compromised" while 'analysis was clothed in an atmosphere of secrecy that was unnecessary, frequently counterproductive, and in the long run damaging,' Cline thought."
A few gems:
* Truman wanted a global newspaper, not a cloak & dagger
* Truman was trumped by his own Pentagon, which wanted a spy service
* CIA directors routinely lied to presidents
* Most DCI's left CIA worse off than before
* FBI has more agents in NYC than CIA has case officers around the world
* From the beginning CIA repressed democracy, loved dictators and corruption
* Russians and Cubans have consistly broken all CIA efforts to penetrate (indeed, when all Cubans were doubled, two of my clandestine classmates had the pleasure of appearing on Cuban TV after being covertly filmed "in the act")
* Thousands (sic) I believe hundreds of thousands, have died because of CIA complicity, errors, incompetence, or plain amorality.
* CIA brought into the USA 100 Nazis every year, the maximum allowed them
* CIA delusional, failed mission after failed mission (but all got promoted)
* P 53: "At CIA, an order is a departure point for a discussion."
* CIA funded hundreds of "morally reprehensible suicide missions."
* CIA constantly fell for fabricators, con men, and double agents
* CIA's scorecard in penetrating Manchuria: 101 killed, 111 captured. ALL.
* CIA has had clandestine prisions in Germany, Japan, and Panama, "like Guantanamo only worse." Now they have others elsewhere.
* CIA all too quickly adopted the tactics of its enemies.
* Never, ever, has CIA had a sufficiency of linguists.
* When Iran took the Embassy, the CIA Station consisted of four officers, not one of whom spoke Farsi. The Iranians were offended.
* It was CIA that put the Bathists and ultimately Saddam Hussein in power.
* CIA's support for "strongmen" inspired populist insurrections.
* CIA suffered from cultural myopia, complete lack of languages, and antiquated information technology
This book destroys Allen Dulles for all time.
There is more but I recommend buying and purchasing this book, because as I write this America is in the midst of what may be the gavest Constitutional crisis of our time--an impotent Congress is allowing Dick Cheney to operate "without limits" in ways that are absolutely and unquestionably in clear violation of the Constitution in multiple ways.
As I put the book down, ignoring some of my notes for lack of word count, I saw two with which to end this review.
Robert Gates: "Adjust or die." This book puts the final nail in the CIA coffin.
The author did not say, but my reading of the book creates the following note:
US Government a Ship of Fools, with immoral Presidents asking incompetent spies to be equally immoral, while pathetically inept Members of Congress stood idly by, the occasional commission notwithstanding.
Good people trapped in a very bad system where the pathologies of power nurture ideological fantasy and treason against the Republic.
Five other books (see lists also):
None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam
Who the Hell Are We Fighting?: The Story of Sam Adams and the Vietnam Intelligence Wars
On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World
Of Spies and Lies: A CIA Lie Detector Remembers Vietnam
Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
 Too Reliant on 'Company History' July 17, 2007
Boyce Hart (nyc)
154 out of 232 found this review helpful
Tim Weiner's new book provides some succinct summaries of key moments in CIA history. The style is light, very readable and often amusing. For people unfamiliar with CIA history there is much to learn here.
There are however serious problems. The book masquarades as a muckraking attack on the Agency, but, IMO, this is deceptive. Yes the book is critical of the Agency, but mostly about cats long out of the bag. The effect is to lend creedence to the authors version of some much more contested events. Because the author relies so heavily on information from CIA sources and CIA historians, this creedence is unwarranted.
Notable examples include anything to do with the Kennedy Administration. Weiner's verison of the Bay of Pigs, somehow manages to blame everything on Bissell, and omits massive amounts of detail suggesting there was an attempt by the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to force Kennedy's hand and order a full scale invasion in 1961.
David Talbot, in his excellent book Brothers, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years, points out that many Kennedy bashers have one thing in common: they rely heavily on the buck passing and outright lying of Richard Helms and his media-friendly minion Sam Halpern. Weiner's book is a new case in point.
Some have commented on how well document they think this book is. I find the opposite is true. Compare the documentation that Larry Hancock presents in support of Someone Would Have TalkedSomeone Would Have Talked: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the Conspiracy to Mislead History. These standards are miles appart, perhaps quite litterally were we to compare odometers!
In other areas, Weiner seems too intent on puting a bungeling, keystone cop type of interpretation on the wacky antics of the Agency. Other authors might justifiably use the word terrorism, when applied to CIA interventions in places like Guatemala and Indonesia. Weiner is too quick to leave thes hell-holes once the new dictatorship is established. The result is that the reader never fully grasps the amount of deaths the US is directly responsible for. In many of these countries, the CIA's invovlvement only began with the coups. They created paramilitary networks in Guatemala and El Salvador that were centralized under the presidents. This centralization of violence was the work of the efficient CIA, not a bunch of bungeling keystone cops. In Indonesia, the CIA direcly aided in the killing of between 750,000 and 1.25 million people. If there is a more censored history of genocide, its doing great work! Weiner's book downplays these numbers, and completely avoids the issue of CIA involvement in the bloodbath.
Most historians agree that John McCone was something of a figurehead at the agency, while the real power was exerted by the the Helms-Shackley faction, without the shipbuilder knowing what was going on. Certainly there was much ado about Cuba that McCone was unaware of. None of that is in Weiners book. McCone comes accross as perhaps the most able leader in agency history. Trouble is he was in fact its most powerless, with possible competition form Stansfield Turner. This gets really bizarre when Weiner turns McCone into the hero of the Cuban Missile Crisis and makes the Kennedys seem more akin to Curtis Lemay.
Kennedy insiders like Ted Sorenson would certainly disagree:
I believe that CIA director John McCone preferred the air strike
Invasion option to the blockade/quarantine option. And it was
those two choices that we finally came down to. But he was
careful to offer policy recommendations only when requested by
the president and to keep the CIA's role primarily as one of
gathering the facts.(CNN interview, 1998)
Weiner's view of McCone as diametrically opposed to Sorenson's: McCone is presented as the savior during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Sure he is entitled to disagree with most historians, but he better offer more sources than the self-serving CIA documents he uses. He is on equally shaky Langley ground when he asserts that JFK directly ordered the assassination of Castro. This question is subject to intense debate in 2007, with so much new material recently being analyzed. If Weiner wants to assert that JFK directly ordered the Castro hit, he needs a lot more backup. He also completely ignores the pressure that Kennedy was under from the JCS, and much of the corporate media, which was directly trying to undermine his Cuba policy. He does not mention Kennedy's history of using a two-track policy, of exploring military options with the CIA and JCS, while simultaneously exploring peaceful solutions via backchannels to Laos, Vietnam, and Cuba. Weiner's account of Kennedy and the CIA is vacuum packed, straight from Langley.
This brings us to another point. Weiner does very little to help us understand how the CIA works with other political and economic forces to shape our foreign policy. Close relations with defense contractors are never mentioned. Close ties with companies favoring direct intervention by the US to keep wages at starvation level are also barely metioned if at all (What no United Fruit?) What about ties to newspapers like Mr. Weiner's own New York Times. To his credit, Weiner does acknowledge these ties-- in just one paragraph! He fails to even begin to explore how these very direct ties actually affected policy. Perhaps it would be a bad career move.
Weiner's book masquerades as muckraking. It isn't. Its primary problem is that it relies far too much an Agency sources, particularly those associated with the mendacious Mr. Helms. These sources are used in precisely the most damning moment in the history of the Agency. At this point it might serve the reader to look up the meaning of the intelligence term "limited hangout".
It is worth noting that this book is so anti-Kenndey as to make even Seymour Hersh blush. Just what one would expect from his Weiner's Langley sources. ( Seriously, look at the mans notes and note just how much is from CIA papers. This does not mean that all CIA reords are false. Of course not. I am simply stating that there is a very severe imbalance here. The strategy seems to be, if the Warren Commissin no longer holds watter-- and it certaily doesn't as Columbia University history professor Alan Brinley points out in a recent review of Talbot's book-- lets switch to making it look like Kennedy deserved what's coming. One is free to argue this, but again, the sourcing has to be much more convincing; there needs to be much less reliance on an agency with a majic bullet to grind.
A Degree of Truth August 10, 2007
Retired Reader (Maryland)
62 out of 70 found this review helpful
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.
A first- rate richly sourced thought- provoking study July 12, 2007
Shalom Freedman (Jerusalem,Israel)
45 out of 55 found this review helpful
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.
Well Sourced And Insightful History July 6, 2007
Burkins
44 out of 57 found this review helpful
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.
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