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Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA - Kindle edition by Weiner, Tim. Politics & Social Sciences Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA Kindle Edition

by Tim Weiner (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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All-powerful, brilliant, decisive, ruthlessly effective … this is the image of the CIA as portrayed in countless films and novels. It is wrong.

This shocking book, based on thousands of declassified documents and interviews with agents at all levels, shows the reality behind the glamorous myth: a blundering, chaotic and dangerously incompetent organization, so ineffective it was nicknamed ‘Can’t Identify Anything’ by Nato forces. In a story of botched coups, missed targets, lost operatives and fatal errors, Tim Weiner shows how the CIA now poses a threat not only to the security of the US, but the world.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Pulitzer Prize–winner Weiner combed through the history books and recently declassified records to offer up this fascinating, comprehensive and sometimes appalling history of the Central Intelligence Agency. Weiner documents everything from the agency's formation in the aftermath of WWII to its failure to prevent the events of September 11, 2001, and every misstep, blunder and international incident in between. For an important book like this one, it's important for an audiobook narrator to have a certain gravitas, and Rudnicki has plenty. His deep, resonant voice keeps the listener riveted and is ideally suited to the serious, historical—and often grim—subject matter. Rudnicki occasionally uses accents to add flavor to the text when reading quotations, but for the most part wisely eschews this practice and simply brings Weiner's words to life. Rudnicki is one of the best narrators in the business, and he's in top form here—Legacy of Ashes is one of the best audiobooks of the year.

From AudioFile

Jimmy Carter was appalled when he was told of some of the creepy heads of state that the CIA was paying to stay in power. Even more appalling actions and incompetence come to light in Weiners history of the agency. Narrator Stefan Rudnickis attention to the many quotes enhances the text. He has the judgment to leave his voice unchanged for a quote if the source is clear or to modify his speech in such a tiny way, maybe with a word or two of accent, as to micro-impersonate without converting himself into a character. The plethora of foreign words, places, and names gives Rudnicki no pause, and his comfort with many languages strengthens the continuity of the production. J.A.H. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to the audioCD edition.

About the Author

Tim Weiner has covered American intelligence for the Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Times and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 1988. He has traveled extensively to report first-hand on CIA covert operations and has lectured at the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency to audiences of senior officials.

Stefan Rudnicki first became involved with audiobooks in 1994. Now a Grammy-winning audiobook producer, he has worked on more than three thousand audiobooks as a narrator, writer, producer, or director. He has narrated more than three hundred audiobooks. A recipient of multiple AudioFile Earphones Awards, he was presented the coveted Audie Award for solo narration in 2005, 2007, and 2014 and was named one of AudioFile's Golden Voices in 2012.

--This text refers to the audioCD edition.

Review

"Absorbing...a credible and damning indictment of American intelligence policy." --Publishers Weekly (starred review) --This text refers to the audioCD edition.

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.

Review

"Must reading for anyone interested in the CIA or American intelligence since World War II." —The Washington Post“Legacy of Ashes is the best book I've yet read on the CIA's covert actions." —Edward Jay Epstein, The Wall Street Journal"Legacy of Ashes should be must-reading for every presidential candidate—and every American who wants to understand why the nation repeatedly stumbles into one disaster abroad after another.”—The Boston Globe “A timely and vital contribution . . . [that] glitters with relevance.”—Los Angeles Times“This is by far the scariest book of the year.”—The Christian Science Monitor --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From Booklist

National-security journalist Weiner supports an American clandestine espionage service but flays the one that has been in business for the past 60 years. His history of the CIA draws extensively from primary documentation, yielding lively episodes of agents and operations and the reactions to their results by CIA directors and presidents. The title quotes President Dwight Eisenhower's negative opinion of the intelligence organization, a recurrent executive complaint that prompts Weiner's analysis of the CIA's historical problems. He argues that covert action has deflected the CIA from espionage's classic function of ascertaining adversaries' secrets and intentions and, accordingly, populates these pages with covert-action fiascoes (the Bay of Pigs in 1961) and intelligence failures to avert another Pearl Harbor (one reason the CIA was created) such as 9/11. Although critical, Weiner expresses esteem for certain CIA directors, such as Richard Helms. These directors understood espionage basics, and Weiner concludes with the hope that the CIA will get back to them. Thousands of the CIA's annual applicants will seek out an institutional history, and Weiner's ably meets that need. Taylor, Gilbert --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by David Wise

The CIA is a fat, easy target these days. Under George "slam dunk" Tenet, it failed (along with the FBI) to prevent 9/11, and then it famously and wrongly estimated that Iraq's Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Tenet's $4 million memoir to explain these failures merely subjected him to more slings and arrows, soothed only somewhat by all that moola.

Morale plunged under his successor, Porter Goss, who brought a clique of unpopular flunkies from Capitol Hill to Langley. The spies revolted, and Goss had to walk the plank. Now the agency is presided over by Michael Hayden, the same Air Force general who supinely created President Bush's warrantless wiretap program to eavesdrop on Americans despite the Constitution. Given the checkered history of the CIA, it is small wonder that Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes is a highly caustic, corrosive study of the beleaguered agency.

But Weiner, a New York Times correspondent who has covered intelligence for years, cannot be accused of kicking the agency when it is down. It is his thesis, amply documented, that the CIA was never up. He paints a devastating portrait of an agency run, during the height of its power in the Cold War years, by Ivy League incompetents, "old Grotonians" who lied to presidents -- an agency that, more often than not, failed to foresee major world events, violated human rights, spied on Americans, plotted assassinations of foreign leaders, and put so much of its energy and resources into bungled covert operations that it failed in its core mission of collecting and analyzing information.

To compare some of the agency's antics revealed in this book to the Keystone Kops is to do violence to the memory of Mack Sennett, who created the slapstick comedies. My personal favorite is an episode in Guatemala in 1994, when the CIA chief of station confronted the American ambassador, Marilyn McAfee, with intelligence, as she recalled, that "I was having an affair with my secretary, whose name was Carol Murphy." The CIA's friends in the Guatemalan military had bugged McAfee's bedroom, Weiner reports, and "recorded her cooing endearments to Murphy. They spread the word that the ambassador was a lesbian." The CIA's "Murphy memo" was widely distributed in Washington. There was only one problem: the ambassador was married, not gay and not sleeping with her secretary. " 'Murphy' was the name of her two-year-old black standard poodle. The bug in her bedroom had recorded her petting her dog."

Forty years earlier, the CIA had overthrown the legally elected government of Guatemala, a covert operation long touted as one of the intelligence agency's grand "successes." It was even called Operation Success. Guatemala was made safe for United Fruit -- talk about banana republics -- but not for democracy. A series of military dictators followed the CIA coup, with death squads and repression in which perhaps 200,000 Guatemalans perished.

Weiner's study is based on a prodigious amount of research into thousands of documents that have been declassified or otherwise uncovered, as well as oral histories and interviews. And one of the truly startling, eye-opening revelations in Legacy of Ashes is just how close even the agency's avowed triumphs came to disaster. As Weiner documents, both the Guatemalan operation and the overthrow of the government of Iran (Operation Ajax) in 1953 teetered on the edge of catastrophe. They were run by old boys whose management skills seemed to combine Skull and Bones with the Ringling Brothers.

And of course the "success" in Iran, restoring the Shah and his notorious secret police, the SAVAK, to power, was all about oil, grabbing it back from Mohammed Mossadeq, who had nationalized it. The coup, run by the CIA's Kim Roosevelt, Teddy's grandson, was followed in 1979 by the takeover of the ayatollahs, arguably a direct outcome of Islamic resentment of the agency's meddling in that country. Today, Iran, with its ominous nuclear weapons program and defiance of the West, looms as a much greater foreign policy challenge to the Bush administration, and to world peace, than Iraq ever was. Thanks a bunch, Langley.

Weiner carefully traces the agency's history from the start, when Harry Truman, realizing he had disbanded the wartime OSS too quickly, anointed Sidney Souers, a St. Louis businessman who had run the Piggly Wiggly supermarkets, as the first central intelligence chief. In a White House ceremony, Truman presented Souers and Admiral William Leahy, the White House staff chief, "with black cloaks, black hats, and wooden daggers." Weiner recounts a series of botched operations run by the likes of Tracy Barnes, Desmond FitzGerald and Richard Bissell, who were among the CIA's leading spooks in the agency's early years. But he reserves his greatest contempt for Frank Wisner, the agency's first covert operator, who sent dozens of agents to their deaths in the Ukraine and Albania and wasted the CIA's millions on a phantom army in Poland that was invented by Soviet and Polish intelligence to befuddle the agency.

As Weiner tells it, the arrogance of CIA Ivy Leaguers was matched only by sheer incompetence. From the start, the CIA hid its failures behind a Top Secret label and was useless in its ability to penetrate the Soviet Union or any other foe. In one year, he notes, the agency managed to miss the Soviet atom bomb, the Korean war and China's entry into that conflict. Weiner also finds little to admire in Allen Dulles, who presided over the agency in its heyday but had to depart after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. He portrays Dulles as a sort of duplicitous Santa Claus, over the hill by 1961, shuffling about in carpet slippers. But Dulles's OSS record in penetrating the Nazi high command from Switzerland had been impressive. And based on my personal observation and conversations with Dulles in the early 1960s he was not a doddering old man in carpet slippers but a shrewd professional spy.

Although most of Weiner's research is superb, he unfortunately perpetuates the legend that CIA director Richard Helms stood firm against Richard Nixon's Watergate cover-up. Not so. In an odd footnote, Weiner says Helms "complied with the president's order to go along with the cover-up for sixteen days at most." But the author, who quotes extensively from dozens of CIA documents, curiously makes no mention of the damning memo that Helms wrote to his deputy, Vernon Walters, on June 28, 1972, about the FBI investigation of the break-in: "We still adhere to the request that they confine themselves to the personalities already arrested or directly under suspicion and that they desist from expanding this investigation into other areas which may well, eventually, run afoul of our operations." It was a bald-faced lie, exactly what the White House was demanding that Helms tell the FBI.

If there is a flaw in Legacy of Ashes, it is that Weiner's scorn for the old boys who ran the place is so unrelenting and pervasive that it tends to detract from his overall argument. He is unwilling to concede that the agency's leaders may have acted from patriotic motives or that the CIA ever did anything right.

Nevertheless, Legacy of Ashes succeeds as both journalism and history, and it is must reading for anyone interested in the CIA or American intelligence since World War II. Weiner quotes Dean Acheson's prophecy about the CIA to good effect: "I had the gravest forebodings about this organization . . . and warned the President that as set up neither he, the National Security Council, nor anyone else would be in a position to know what it was doing or to control it."

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Legacy of Ashes is the record of the first sixty years of the Central Intelligence Agency. It 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. Intelligence is secret action aimed at understanding or changing what goes on abroad. President Dwight D. Eisenhower called it “a distasteful but vital necessity.” A nation that wants to project its power beyond its borders needs to see over the horizon, to know what is coming, to prevent attacks against its people. It must anticipate surprise. Without a strong, smart, sharp intelligence service, presidents and generals alike can become blind and crippled. But throughout its history as a superpower, the United States has not had such a service.

History, Edward Gibbon wrote in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is “little more than the register of crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” The annals of the Central Intelligence Agency are filled with folly and misfortune, along with acts of bravery and cunning. They are replete with fleeting successes and long–lasting failures abroad. They are marked by political battles and power struggles at home. The agency’s triumphs have saved some blood and treasure. Its mistakes have squandered both. They have proved fatal for legions of American soldiers and foreign agents; some three thousand Americans who died in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001; and three thousand more who have died since then in Iraq and Afghanistan. The one crime of lasting consequence has been the CIA’s inability to carry out its central mission: informing the president of what is happening in the world.

The United States had no intelligence to speak of when World War II began, and next to none a few weeks after the war ended. A mad rush to demobilize left behind a few hundred men who had a few years’ experience in the world of secrets and the will to go on fighting a new enemy. “All major powers except the United States have had for a long time past permanent worldwide intelligence services, reporting directly to the highest echelons of their Government,” General William J. Donovan, the commander of the wartime Office of Strategic Services, warned President Truman in August 1945. “Prior to the present war, the United States had no foreign secret intelligence service. It never has had and does not now have a coordinated intelligence system.” Tragically, it still does not have one.

The CIA was supposed to become that system. But the blueprint for the agency was a hasty sketch. It was no cure for a chronic American weakness: secrecy and deception were not our strengths. The collapse of the British Empire left the United States as the sole force able to oppose Soviet communism, and America desperately needed to know those enemies, to provide foresight to presidents, and to fight fire with fire when called upon to light the fuse. The mission of the CIA, above all, was to keep the president forewarned against surprise attack, a second Pearl Harbor.

The agency’s ranks were filled with thousands of patriotic Americans in the 1950s. Many were brave and battle–hardened. Some had wisdom. Few really knew the enemy. Where understanding failed, presidents ordered the CIA to change the course of history through covert action. “The conduct of political and psychological warfare in peacetime was a new art,” wrote Gerald Miller, then the CIA’s covert–operations chief for Western Europe. “Some of the techniques were known but doctrine and experience were lacking.” The CIA’s covert operations were by and large blind stabs in the dark. The agency’s only course was to learn by doing—by making mistakes in battle. The CIA then concealed its failures abroad, lying to Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. It told those lies to preserve its standing in Washington. The truth, said Don Gregg, a skilled cold-war station chief, was that the agency at the height of its powers had a great reputation and a terrible record.

Like the American public, the agency dissented at its peril during the Vietnam War. Like the American press, it discovered that its reporting was rejected if it did not fit the preconceptions of presidents. The CIA was rebuked and scorned by Presidents Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter. None of them understood how the agency worked. They took office “with the expectation that intelligence could solve every problem, or that it could not do anything right, and then moved to the opposite view,” notes a former deputy director of central intelligence, Richard J. Kerr. “Then they settled down and vacillated from one extreme to the other.”

To survive as an institution in Washington, the agency above all had to have the president’s ear. But it soon learned that it was dangerous to tell him what he did not want to hear. The CIA’s analysts learned to march in lockstep, conforming to conventional wisdom. They misapprehended the intentions and capabilities of our enemies, miscalculated the strength of communism, and misjudged the threat of terrorism.

The supreme goal of the CIA during the cold war was to steal Soviet secrets by recruiting spies, but the CIA never possessed a single one who had deep insight into the workings of the Kremlin. The number of Soviet spies with important information to reveal–all of them volunteers, not recruits—could be counted on the fingers of two hands. And all of them died, captured and executed by Moscow. Almost all had been betrayed by officers of the CIA’s Soviet division who were spying for the other side, under Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush. Under Reagan, the CIA set off on misconceived third–world missions, selling arms to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards to finance a war in Central America, breaking the law and squandering what trust remained reposed in it. More grievously, it missed the fatal weakness of its main enemy.

It fell to machines, not men, to understand the other side. As the technology of espionage expanded its horizons, the CIA’s vision grew more and more myopic. Spy satellites enabled it to count Soviet weapons. They did not deliver the crucial information that communism was crumbling. The CIA’s foremost experts never saw the enemy until after the cold war was over. The agency had bled the Soviets by pouring billions of dollars of weapons into Afghanistan to help fight the Red Army’s occupying forces. That was an epic success. But it failed to see that the Islamic warriors it supported would soon take aim at the United States, and when that understanding came, the agency failed to act. That was an epochal failure.

The unity of purpose that held the CIA together during the cold war came undone in the 1990s, under President Clinton. The agency still had people who strove to understand the world, but their ranks were far too thin. There were still talented officers who dedicated themselves to serving the United States abroad, but their numbers were far too few. The FBI had more agents in New York than the CIA had officers abroad. By the end of the century, the agency was no longer a fully functioning and independent intelligence service. It was becoming a second–echelon field office for the Pentagon, weighing tactics for battles that never came, not strategies for the struggle ahead. It was powerless to prevent the second Pearl Harbor.

After the attacks on New York and Washington, the agency sent a small skilled cadre of covert operators into Afghanistan and Pakistan to hunt down the leaders of al Qaeda. It then forfeited its role as a reliable source of secret information when it handed the White House false reports on the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It had delivered a ton of reportage based on an ounce of intelligence. President George W. Bush and his administration in turn misused the agency once proudly run by his father, turning it into a paramilitary police force abroad and a paralyzed bureaucracy at headquarters. Bush casually pronounced a political death sentence upon the CIA in 2004 when he said that the agency was “just guessing” about the course of the war in Iraq. No president had ever publicly dismissed the CIA that way.

Its centrality in the American government ended with the dissolution of the office of director of central intelligence in 2005. Now the CIA must be rebuilt if it is to survive. That task will take years. The challenge of understanding the world as it is has overwhelmed three generations of CIA officers. Few among the new generation have mastered the intricacies of foreign lands, much less the political culture of Washington. In turn, almost every president, almost every Congress, and almost every director of central intelligence since the 1960s has proved incapable of grasping the mechanics of the CIA. Most have left the agency in worse shape than they found it. Their failures have handed future generations, in the words of President Eisenhower, “a legacy of ashes.” We are back where we began sixty years ago, in a state of disarray.

Legacy of Ashes sets out to show how it has come to pass that the United States now lacks the intelligence it will need in the years ahead. It is drawn from the words, the ideas, and the deeds set forth in the files of the American national-security establishment. They record what our leaders really said, really wanted, and really did when they projected power abroad. This book is based on my reading of more than fifty thousand documents, primarily from the archives of the CIA, the White House, and the State Department; more than two thousand oral histories of American intelligence officers, soldiers, and diplomats; and more than three hundred interviews conducted since 1987 with CIA officers and veterans, including ten directors of central intelligence. Extensive endnotes amplify the text.

This book is on the record—no anonymous sources, no blind quotations, no hearsay. It is the first history of the CIA compiled entirely from firsthand reporting and primary documents. It is, by its nature, incomplete: no president, no director of central intelligence, and certainly no outsider can know everything about the agency. What I have written here is not the whole truth, but to the best of my ability, it is nothing but the truth.

I hope it may serve as a warning. No republic in history has lasted longer than three hundred years, and this nation may not long endure as a great power unless it finds the eyes to see things as they are in the world. That once was the mission of the Central Intelligence Agency. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

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Product details

ASIN : B002TJLFB8

Publisher : Penguin (June 5, 2008)

Publication date : June 5, 2008

Language : English

File size : 4001 KB

Text-to-Speech : Enabled

Enhanced typesetting : Enabled

X-Ray : Not Enabled

Word Wise : Enabled

Print length : 850 pages

Lending : Not Enabled

Best Sellers Rank: #427,988 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)

#442 in Intelligence & Espionage (Kindle Store)

#1,242 in Political Intelligence

#7,049 in History of the U.S.

Customer Reviews: 4.5 out of 5 stars 906 ratings

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Tim Weiner

Biography

Tim Weiner has won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his reporting and writing on 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, ONE MAN AGAINST THE WORLD: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon, was hailed as "[an] eye-opening study of Richard Nixon's booze-soaked, paranoid White House years and the endless tragedies they wrought" by Kirkus Reviews prior to publication. "It speaks volumes about Nixon that there is still more to learn about him, 40-plus years after Watergate. It speaks further volumes that what we are learning is even worse than what we knew."

Publisher's Weekly said ONE MAN AGAINST THE WORLD is a "devastating account of Nixon's presidency, drawing on documents declassified in the last seven years.... Chilling excerpts from tape recordings that have only recently been made accessible include cold-blooded exchanges between Nixon and [Henry] Kissinger in which the two debate the merits of committing war crimes in order to win in Vietnam. This is powerful raw material, but Weiner's brilliant turns of phrase transform it into something extraordinary."

His previous books include ENEMIES, a history of the FBI acclaimed as "fascinating" by The Wall Street Journal. LEGACY OF ASHES, his chronicle of the CIA, won the 2007 National Book Award; it was a bestseller across the United States and around the world. He has lectured at the CIA, universities, political think tanks, and Presidential libraries. He directs the Carey Institute's nonfiction residency program in upstate New York and teaches as the 2015 Anschutz Distinguished Fellow in American Studies at Princeton.

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Jeff Marzano

5.0 out of 5 stars Comprehensive History Of The CIA

Reviewed in the United States on October 6, 2018

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I read this book as part of my ongoing research into the assassination of President Kennedy. People who are viewed as experts on the JFK mystery say all roads lead back to the CIA. The assassination came through them.

The great Fletcher Prouty worked with Allen Dulles at the Agency up until the time JFK was killed. There's probably two main points in Fletcher's books:

1. The CIA mutated into something Harry Truman never intended when he set up the Agency after World War II.

2. After World War II the United States stopped respecting the sovereignty of other countries.

I would say Mr. Weiner's book is consistent with what Fletcher said. I don't think Mr. Weiner is a JFK conspiracy guy. Rather he relies on official sources such as declassified CIA documents and statements made by various people over the years. Mr. Weiner himself has conducted interviews with many famous people such as former CIA directors and even World War II general Douglas MacArthur.

Once someone believes that President Kennedy was murdered by a domestic conspiracy this belief changes their perspective about anything people like Richard Helms or Lyndon Johnson said.

For example:

Public Record: The Gary Powers U2 spy plane was shot down by the Soviets.

Conspiracy Theory: The CIA sabotaged the U2 to derail President Eisenhower's peace summit with Nikita Khrushchev.

Public Record: Lyndon Johnson was tormented and conflicted about the situation in Vietnam.

Conspiracy Theory: U.S. military intelligence was feeding President Kennedy and Secretary Of Defense Robert McNamara all lies about Vietnam. But they were telling Vice President Lyndon Johnson the truth about what a quagmire Vietnam had become. Johnson already knew what the end result would be in Vietnam while he was still the Vice President.

Public Record: Lyndon Johnson said JFK's assassination was 'divine retribution' because of JFK's role in the death of President Diem in Vietnam and the Kennedy brothers' plots to assassinate Fidel Castro in Cuba.

Conspiracy Theory: Lyndon Johnson and his Texas billionaire pals were part of the domestic conspiracy to assassinate JFK as was FBI director J. Edgar Hoover also.

Public Record: I don't know what the CIA has said they were trying to do in Vietnam. I guess they claimed they were trying to save the entire world from global communism.

Conspiracy Theory: There never was any real military objective in Vietnam. The goal in Vietnam was to create a bottomless money pit of military spending even if this meant putting American military service personnel into harm's way.

Public Record: CIA spooks Richard Helms and James Angleton were convinced that Lee Oswald acted on behalf of the Soviets when he assassinated President Kennedy.

Conspiracy Theory: Angleton was the only individual within the CIA who had the knowledge, authority, and diabolical mind required to be the mastermind of the JFK assassination and to place the blame on Oswald. When JFK got killed the Agency raised the ominous (although completely false) specter that the Soviets and Fidel Castro were behind the assassination.

As I said author Tim Weiner doesn't cross the line into the conspiracy realm in this book. But even so just what he says about the CIA based on the public record isn't very flattering for the Agency.

Even though Mr. Weiner doesn't say the CIA was involved with JFK's murder, he does say they did things like that and much, much worse in other countries.

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Tom H.

5.0 out of 5 stars Very interesting well worth a read especially in light of 2017/2018 politics

Reviewed in the United States on February 18, 2018

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Very interesting book. About 3/4 of the way through I was wondering what the CIA thought of the book and low and behold they have a review of it posted on their web site - not fans! I think the author did a very credible job of digging through stacks of information. The CIA denials seemed to be mostly nitpicking versus refuting the main points of our countries disastrous spying attempts. I am surprised at how poorly they have done and how much men with big egos were able to circumvent common sense. Disastrous look at how the US Governments interfered with other countries elections to the point of assassinations yet how much every is howling in 2017/2018 about Russians interfering with US elections.

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Richard

3.0 out of 5 stars Incompetence

Reviewed in the United States on July 6, 2019

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A better title for the book might have been the CIA a History of Incompetence. The author does a good job of detailing how the CIA has never really been right about much. Over the decades they missed the calls on countless invasions during the cold war, the tet offensive, all the way to 9/11 yet the people responsible kept getting promoted.

The book also details how the CIA throughout its history have been little more than yes men for the President. To the point where the CIA reports were changed to fit the narrative the president wanted them to fit.

The reason I gave the book 3 stars was the author barely touches on some of the dark areas of the agency. Almost nothing is mentioned about the extraordinary rendition program, their supporting of some the greatest human right's violators this world has known, domestic spying, and their ventures into the world of narcotics

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Gregory A. Bonadies

4.0 out of 5 stars Eye-opening, thought-provoking, inconclusive - just what you'd expect from spy business exposition.

Reviewed in the United States on December 30, 2018

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Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA is a somewhat loose, roughly chronological compendium of events, activities, and leaders associated with the US Central Intelligence Agency from its inception in 1945 through 2007. Information for the work appears to have been gathered from numerous primary and secondary sources, including conversations with former members of the CIA, politicians, and a number of unclassified documents with some declassified just prior to the first publication of the book in 2007. Taken at face value, this New York Times reporter’s work shocks the reader in two ways.

First, we are given to believe that the bulk of the efforts of the CIA from 1945 to 2007 were failed operations resulting from incompetent and bungling leadership within the agency. One comes away thinking the entire enterprise of U.S. intelligence gathering and covert operations is a series of one mis-guided, unmitigated disaster after another. The reader is treated to a litany of stories about ineffective and/or ignorant leadership, politically-motivated subterfuge, in-fighting, and downright deliberate deception and deceit on the part of the CIA with, and between and among others in the executive branch (presidents, vice presidents, and cabinet members), members of the military establishment, congress, and the state department.

Second, this reader was appalled at the extent of CIA-sponsored “interventions” which are redolent of the highest degree of hypocrisy and duplicity in the violations of norms national sovereignty. Contemporary allegations of Russian interference in the United States election process through social media tampering seem quaint compared with the dozens or hundreds of episodes of interfering with foreign governments and societies; directly and indirectly destroying and/or supporting (sometimes both at the same time!) political actors and systems of governance in countries around the world. Dispensing propaganda and operating Radio-Free Europe pale against charges of assassination, coups, and para-military incursions, and full-blown (or at least partial) direct, but unacknowledged, military invasions.

Justification for this no-holds-barred approach to intelligence gathering, counter-intelligence, espionage, and counter-espionage (and apparent counter-counter espionage, etc.), was the mission to combat, conquer, or at least contain the largely Soviet-engineered spread of communism. The net result of most of the work of the CIA seems to amount to an abhorrent waste of money, thousands of lives (CIA and surrogate foreign agents), layered on top of a litany of characters – at the highest level of government – engaging in all manner of excess, self-dealing, over-wrought ambition, and hubris with extremely little of benefit to the national security of the United States. The recurring themes of excesses, poor stewardship, lives lost needlessly, and infighting, bureaucratic incompetence, and weak, or at best ignorant, leadership throughout the CIA’s history is disheartening.

Regarding the work itself, I must acknowledge and applaud Weiner’s effort to tackle such a difficult subject, especially one in a domain in which obscuring and obfuscating information is the modus operandi and where a good bit of the evidence is based on declassified information (at least those fragments of the total store of data the government has allowed to be declassified), together with conversations and dialogs with many who may have an ax to grind, a legacy to protect or promote, along with a fair amount of unsubstantiated stories, opinions, and conjectures. The reader must accept at the outset that only a partial story can be viewed and that much more (some at least as horrific as was exposed in the book itself), lies beneath the surface and veil of necessary, or at least claimed necessity for, secrecy to protect national security interests.

The author pulls no punches in indicting the rank and file of politicians, military personnel, and civilian actors, showing culpability on both sides of the aisle of American politics. However, his wagging finger displays a hint of partisan slant at times. The journalistic reporting work of “facts,” to the extent the information reported can be considered as such, is punctuated with normative interjections, assessments, conclusions, and declarations that are mostly facile and unwarranted, or at least unproven. Clearly short on analysis, the work fulfils its ostensibly expository purpose, shedding light on the darker side of U.S. national security efforts.

Legacy of Ashes points to the many challenges and obstacles facing those tasked with ensuring national security at all costs, including recruiting, training, and deploying spies and covert operations personnel (while keeping “moles” or foreign spies out of the ranks). Weiner points out the inherent paradox of the intelligence business that relies on methods, techniques, and programs of deception, disinformation, and mis-direction that run counter to principles underlying the U.S. Constitution, U.S. law, and likely that offend the moral and ethical sensibilities of a large part of the American electorate.

The CIA Director role has shown to be a revolving door counting more than 30 different individuals (counting interim or acting directors) in its 73 year existence. Weiner notes this in his book and describes the challenges that such churn in leadership cause. By my count, the CIA director role has been filled by 12 or 13 career military officers, 7 academics, 5 lawyer/diplomats, 1 senator, and 2 business people (industrialist McCone, and oil man George H.W. Bush), with the remaining dozen or so individuals being career civil servants. One could argue that the bias towards military and civil service backgrounds is less suited and ill-matched to the requirements of leadership in such an organization as the CIA with such a mission as the CIA’s than that of an experienced and successful business person who knows how to set up and operate a sustainable operation. Granted the spy business is categorically different than making steel and setting up telecom infrastructure (McCone), and pumping oil (Bush), but sound command, control, and communication organization principles still apply.

My opinion aside, it is clear from the book that the CIA has been in a constant state of identity crisis: Who are we? What is our mission? How should we organize and operate? What should we do/not do? How are we positioned vis-à-vis the Pentagon, the state department, the executive branch, the judiciary, Congress, etc. Has anything changed at the CIA in the decade since the Legacy of Ashes was published? I would like to see a follow-on work that scrapes together enough scraps about the CIA’s most recent decade to get some insight. I may have to wait another few years or longer before more documents are declassified to learn more.

One could conclude from reading this work, assuming what is written accurately reflects the apparent doings, mis-doings, and state of disarray of the CIA, that the U.S. cannot possibly do the kinds of clandestine work, espionage, covert operations, etc. required to ensure the national security of our country given the values and structure of the our culture and system of governance. Perhaps the failures and shortcomings of the CIA imply reversion to old-fashioned, “hard-power” methods of geopolitical influence to avoid fighting an enemy with one hand tied behind our back. Exercising more severe “soft-power” methods for example economic sanctions may not be a substitute for hard power, but can certainly augment an arsenal of military and clandestine efforts. The rules of engagement for applying hard-power have historically been clearer when America’s leaders and people appeared to have the “stomach for war.” There is much complexity, guesswork, and difficulty in attempting to discern intentions when using military power, but the world of clandestine work is perhaps more-so burdened with these same challenges and is thus more prone to mis-calculation.

Arguably, the focus of CIA efforts since the turn of the century is on non-state actors, i.e., terrorist groups and less on the designs of imperialist nations (Russia, China). Also, maybe Jimmy Carter was onto something in his efforts during his administration to direct at least some of the CIA’s resources towards addressing humanitarian crises around the world (as Weiner describes Carter’s direction to CIA leadership to sabotage apartheid in South Africa). Who knows if our CIA resources could have intervened in the Rwanda crisis of 1994 – perhaps half a million lives could have been saved. Is North Korea on the CIA’s radar? How about the dire situation in Syria and the Kurds in northern Iraq abandoned by the U.S. after deposing Saddam Hussein? Food for thought.

Definitely worth a read. But you may end up hearing a little inner voice whisper outlandish speculations: “Is the author of Legacy of Ashes secretly on the CIA payroll?” or “Does he have a secret bank account in Switzerland being filled with Russian rubles for every word he writes that disparages the CIA?” Or maybe the KGB just wants me to believe the former and the CIA the latter, or vice versa. Hmmm…

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Kevin

5.0 out of 5 stars A Very Good Read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 23, 2017

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This is a review for a book that really has a specialist interest audience. You must really want to read this book. The information contained within will have you questioning everything you thought you knew about recent history concerning clandestine operations and government intervention in foreign countries. The information provided will have you researching what it reveals. You will be continually asking yourself if that could really happen. I guarantee you will be stunned if you were previously unaware of the actual level of intervention of the USA on other countries affairs and more importantly their drastic failures. If you have a genuine interest in Cloak And Dagger factual events this is a required read. This book is an event. Stick with it and you will get into the mind-set of the writer. I have been used to reading detailed reports all my adult life so I found the book very enjoyable and in a format that was familiar to me. It is not a book I will be lending out. The book costs very little for the information it contains. A very good buy, in my opinion of course.

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Mr. C. Shevlin

5.0 out of 5 stars Readable, interesting, worrying

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 20, 2019

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The CIA in fiction is usually portrayed as very powerful – knowing almost everything, able to manipulate almost anyone. This book completely changes that perspective. Everything in it is on the record, and many of the most scathing criticisms come from its own leaders. I was amazed at how few successes the agency's had (and how many of those were at odds with America's foreign policy). I also didn't realise how few agents the CIA ever had in the Soviet Union, for example, nor how many Soviet moles worked for the agency. Eye-opening.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Everyone needs to read this

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 27, 2020

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An absolute revelation. Every page reveals another level of intrigue and deception - but all too often the recipient of the lies are not those one would have expected!! It has re-written my view of post WW2 history. And I'm pretty well-read. Read this book for yourself!! And tell everyone you know to do the same.

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D. W. Kessler

5.0 out of 5 stars This will make your blood boil and jaw drop

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 9, 2018

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Everyone knew about the venality of the CIO's legacy of covert operations.

But I had no idea of the sheer incompetence and negligence that characterise the entire history of the CIA.

From leader to leader, administration to administration, the CIA was a vector for gross malpractice in statesmanship and appalling lack of consideration for allies as well as so-called enemies.

Required reading.

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JimmyT

5.0 out of 5 stars The truth about America’s so called Super Agency

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 25, 2021

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Fantastic book full of great revelations on American politics at its most inept Thank god the myth is broken. Scary stuff revealed

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2021-05-13

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA - Kindle edition by Weiner, Tim. Politics & Social Sciences Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

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