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Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
For the last sixty years, the CIA has managed to maintain a formidable reputation in spite of its terrible record, burying its blunders in top-secret archives. Its mission was to know the world. When it did not succeed, it set out to change the world. Its failures have handed us, in the words of President Eisenhower, “a legacy of ashes.”
Now Pulitzer Prize–winning author Tim Weiner offers the first definitive history of the CIA—and everything is on the record. LEGACY OF ASHES is based on more than 50,000 documents, primarily from the archives of the CIA itself, and hundreds of interviews with CIA veterans, including ten Directors of Central Intelligence. It takes the CIA from its creation after World War II, through its battles in the cold war and the war on terror, to its near-collapse after September 11th, 2001.
Tim Weiner’s past work on the CIA and American intelligence was hailed as “impressively reported” and “immensely entertaining” in The New York Times.
The Wall Street Journal called it “truly extraordinary . . . the best book ever written on a case of espionage.” Here is the hidden history of the CIA: why eleven presidents and three generations of CIA officers have been unable to understand the world; why nearly every CIA director has left the agency in worse shape than he found it; and how these failures have profoundly jeopardized our national security.
Now Pulitzer Prize–winning author Tim Weiner offers the first definitive history of the CIA—and everything is on the record. LEGACY OF ASHES is based on more than 50,000 documents, primarily from the archives of the CIA itself, and hundreds of interviews with CIA veterans, including ten Directors of Central Intelligence. It takes the CIA from its creation after World War II, through its battles in the cold war and the war on terror, to its near-collapse after September 11th, 2001.
Tim Weiner’s past work on the CIA and American intelligence was hailed as “impressively reported” and “immensely entertaining” in The New York Times.
The Wall Street Journal called it “truly extraordinary . . . the best book ever written on a case of espionage.” Here is the hidden history of the CIA: why eleven presidents and three generations of CIA officers have been unable to understand the world; why nearly every CIA director has left the agency in worse shape than he found it; and how these failures have profoundly jeopardized our national security.
514 pages, Hardcover
First published July 1, 2007
About the author
Tim Weiner
11 books455 followersTim Weiner reported for The New York Times for many years as a foreign correspondent and as a national security correspondent in Washington, DC. He has won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting and the National Book Award for LEGACY OF ASHES: The History of the CIA. His new book, out in July, is ONE MAN AGAINST THE WORLD: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,338 reviews
June 12, 2019
This is a superbly reseached work and tells the shadowy tale of American foreign policy from the late 40's to the present day. But it is really a 700 page indictment of how bad a government agency can be.
The one thing the CIA did well was give money away, BILLIONS of dollars spent with a slim margin of return at best, and at worse it became clear that the CIA had literally been conned out of hundreds of millions by other states and even individuals.
But any work of journalism, to be regarded as great, must be objective and here is the problem with this book: it is such a pervasivley negative account, it reports that the CIA is so off the charts bad, that a reader wonders if Weiner is just slamming them page after page. Surely in over 60 years of service the CIA has done something right. To his credit, he documents a rebuttal by a CIA director that says essentially that their greatest successes were secret while only their many failures were known publically. This could be true, but Weiner has created a work that dramatically documents an ascerbic, scathing history of the CIA, describing them as air conditioned, comfortable bureacrats in the suburbs of Virginia and Maryland, far from the image of worldly and competent super spy that the agency wishes to be portayed. The agents and analysists may see themselves as James Bond, but Weiner describes them more like the John Malkovitch character from the Coen Brothers film Burn After Reading: inept, arrogant, ineffective, detached from reality and drunk. Presidents have privately called the agents of the CIA clowns, jerks, idiots, drunks, thieves, and liars.
Allen Dulles, one the earlies and most influential directors, used to heft a report to determine how heavy it was, rather than actually reading it. He even did this in front of the author of the report, and may have blithley given it back with an instruction that it needed more, as if it were too light. Later in his career he may watch a Washington Senators baseball game, ignoring the agent who was trying to brief him on some issue.
Early on the CIA used the communists against the fascists, and later sided with fascists against the communists. The CIA's battle with communism was its early raison d'etre and the fall of the Soviet Union caused many lifelong agents to mourn the passing of its foe as a sign that their time too had come.
The CIA had stumbled across early terrorsist plots by the PLO and had indications that sub-state level terror may be the wave of the future but did little to prevent the rise of the terrorists, largely due to the fact that thier credibility at the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department had diminshed to the point where the CIA had become an almost ran in terms of US foreign policy.
Some of the notoriously bad predictions of the CIA:
The Soviet Union will not invade Afghanistan
The Shah of Iran is safe from revolution
There is no liklihood of Soviet missles in Cuba
China will not invade Korea.
We are absolutely winning the war in Vietnam.
Don't worry about an embassy attack in Iran.
Iraq will not invade Kuwait. (A senior CIA official learned of the invasion from his neighbor who had seen it on CNN)
And worst of all, a case of the boy who cries wolf in 2001, as CIA officials actually had some idea of plots in existence, but the seriousness of the reports were corrupted by decades of poor intelligence and the weakened esteem at the White House and so the reports went relatively unheeded by the Clinton and Bush administrations.
With the attacks of 9/11 in 2001, the CIA's worst nightmare had been realized as the CIA had failed to prevent a second Pearl Harbor. Later on, the politics and ineffectiveness of the the agency contributed to the poor intelligence that led to the US invasion of Iraq as the CIA produced reports based upon faulty intelligence gathering, hearsay, and was essentially aimed at delivering news that Bush wanted to hear rather than telling the truth that they just did not know for sure what Iraq had in terms of WMD.
Scary book if it's as accurate as it appears.
The one thing the CIA did well was give money away, BILLIONS of dollars spent with a slim margin of return at best, and at worse it became clear that the CIA had literally been conned out of hundreds of millions by other states and even individuals.
But any work of journalism, to be regarded as great, must be objective and here is the problem with this book: it is such a pervasivley negative account, it reports that the CIA is so off the charts bad, that a reader wonders if Weiner is just slamming them page after page. Surely in over 60 years of service the CIA has done something right. To his credit, he documents a rebuttal by a CIA director that says essentially that their greatest successes were secret while only their many failures were known publically. This could be true, but Weiner has created a work that dramatically documents an ascerbic, scathing history of the CIA, describing them as air conditioned, comfortable bureacrats in the suburbs of Virginia and Maryland, far from the image of worldly and competent super spy that the agency wishes to be portayed. The agents and analysists may see themselves as James Bond, but Weiner describes them more like the John Malkovitch character from the Coen Brothers film Burn After Reading: inept, arrogant, ineffective, detached from reality and drunk. Presidents have privately called the agents of the CIA clowns, jerks, idiots, drunks, thieves, and liars.
Allen Dulles, one the earlies and most influential directors, used to heft a report to determine how heavy it was, rather than actually reading it. He even did this in front of the author of the report, and may have blithley given it back with an instruction that it needed more, as if it were too light. Later in his career he may watch a Washington Senators baseball game, ignoring the agent who was trying to brief him on some issue.
Early on the CIA used the communists against the fascists, and later sided with fascists against the communists. The CIA's battle with communism was its early raison d'etre and the fall of the Soviet Union caused many lifelong agents to mourn the passing of its foe as a sign that their time too had come.
The CIA had stumbled across early terrorsist plots by the PLO and had indications that sub-state level terror may be the wave of the future but did little to prevent the rise of the terrorists, largely due to the fact that thier credibility at the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department had diminshed to the point where the CIA had become an almost ran in terms of US foreign policy.
Some of the notoriously bad predictions of the CIA:
The Soviet Union will not invade Afghanistan
The Shah of Iran is safe from revolution
There is no liklihood of Soviet missles in Cuba
China will not invade Korea.
We are absolutely winning the war in Vietnam.
Don't worry about an embassy attack in Iran.
Iraq will not invade Kuwait. (A senior CIA official learned of the invasion from his neighbor who had seen it on CNN)
And worst of all, a case of the boy who cries wolf in 2001, as CIA officials actually had some idea of plots in existence, but the seriousness of the reports were corrupted by decades of poor intelligence and the weakened esteem at the White House and so the reports went relatively unheeded by the Clinton and Bush administrations.
With the attacks of 9/11 in 2001, the CIA's worst nightmare had been realized as the CIA had failed to prevent a second Pearl Harbor. Later on, the politics and ineffectiveness of the the agency contributed to the poor intelligence that led to the US invasion of Iraq as the CIA produced reports based upon faulty intelligence gathering, hearsay, and was essentially aimed at delivering news that Bush wanted to hear rather than telling the truth that they just did not know for sure what Iraq had in terms of WMD.
Scary book if it's as accurate as it appears.
June 29, 2016
Attention crazy people! If you are one of those poor souls who thinks that the Central Intelligence Agency is reading your thoughts and/or manipulating your brain waves I have good news for you. You can take off your aluminum foil hat and stop trying to pull out that tooth with the tracking device. Here it is:
The CIA is too incompetent to do any of the things you are worried about. Seriously.
After reading Legacy of Ashes, I’m amazed that we weren’t taken down by the Soviets during the Cold War or that China hasn’t invaded and turned the US into a giant sweatshop that sews cheap clothing for its citizens or that some terrorists haven’t reduced the country to pile of radioactive rubble.*
*Kind of odd timing to read a book that bashes the CIA this much shortly after Osama got his much deserved bullet to the brain, but this book outlined how the CIA muffed multiple opportunities to kill him before 9/11 during the Clinton and W. Bush years. After repeated stories of just how incredibly bad the CIA is at actually collecting human intelligence it’s really not that surprising that bin Ladin had been living in a posh neighborhood for years while American forces searched caves in Afghanistan.
If you read something like a Tom Clancy novel, you’ll get the idea that the CIA is really good at its job and that the occasional snafu like the Bay of Pigs or claiming that Iraq had WMD are just aberrations. Per Tim Weiner, the real story is that the for the CIA the Bay of Pigs and Iraq WMDs are the typical performance levels, we just only hear about the really big screw-ups.
After World War II and with the Cold War ramping up, America needed an intelligence service, but all Harry Truman really wanted was an agency to boil down all the information that the military and state department collected and summarize it for him daily. However, when a bunch of former OSS guys were put in charge, their brilliant idea of an intelligence service was parachuting half-trained dissidents behind the Iron Curtain to lead resistance groups and perform sabotage missions. Unfortunately, the people were so poorly prepared and the Soviets had already so thoroughly penetrated the Agency that they were almost all captured and/or killed. Oh, and they completely missed the Soviets developing their own atomic bomb thanks to stolen intelligence.
From the Korean War through Vietnam to missing the economic decay of the Soviet Union that caused it’s ultimate collapse, the CIA was so consistently bad at their supposed main job of gathering intelligence that it boggles the mind. Weathermen are jealous at how these guys were able to be so repeatedly and completely wrong yet somehow none of them lost their jobs over it.
The only thing that CIA seems to have been really good at was backing the most evil fucks around as long as they claimed to be anti-communist. If there was a strong arm dictator or leader of a military coup waiting to take over from a government with the slightest bit of left leanings the CIA was there with bags of cash and support for assholes to take over countries like Iran and Guatemala, and the result has been countless deaths of innocent people and the trashing of goodwill towards America in many parts of the world.
To be fair, there’s a few parts of the book where it seems that Weiner doesn’t give them credit for the few things they did right. Accurately predicating the outbreak of violence in Rwanda or running a successful operation to help convince Libya to ditch it’s WMD programs are barely mentioned. And despite documenting how the CIA has bowed to political pressure and repeatedly told several presidents exactly what they wanted to hear the Iraqi WMD claims are portrayed almost exclusively as an intelligence failure with little mention of poltical pressure from the Bush administration which is hard to believe.
Overall, Weiner used recently declassified internal CIA reports and histories to document a long history of spectacular failure. The book explores how a combination of politics and a bureaucratic nightmare has left America deaf and blind at the times it could least afford to be so even as the myth of an all-knowing intelligence agency has been perpetuated. Billions upon billions of dollars have been spent trying to keep tabs on America’s enemies. Frankly, we all would have been better off if the US would have used that cash to buy everyone in the world some cake and ice cream every now and then. At least maybe so many people wouldn’t hate us because how could you be mad at someone who gives you free cake and ice cream?
The CIA is too incompetent to do any of the things you are worried about. Seriously.
After reading Legacy of Ashes, I’m amazed that we weren’t taken down by the Soviets during the Cold War or that China hasn’t invaded and turned the US into a giant sweatshop that sews cheap clothing for its citizens or that some terrorists haven’t reduced the country to pile of radioactive rubble.*
*Kind of odd timing to read a book that bashes the CIA this much shortly after Osama got his much deserved bullet to the brain, but this book outlined how the CIA muffed multiple opportunities to kill him before 9/11 during the Clinton and W. Bush years. After repeated stories of just how incredibly bad the CIA is at actually collecting human intelligence it’s really not that surprising that bin Ladin had been living in a posh neighborhood for years while American forces searched caves in Afghanistan.
If you read something like a Tom Clancy novel, you’ll get the idea that the CIA is really good at its job and that the occasional snafu like the Bay of Pigs or claiming that Iraq had WMD are just aberrations. Per Tim Weiner, the real story is that the for the CIA the Bay of Pigs and Iraq WMDs are the typical performance levels, we just only hear about the really big screw-ups.
After World War II and with the Cold War ramping up, America needed an intelligence service, but all Harry Truman really wanted was an agency to boil down all the information that the military and state department collected and summarize it for him daily. However, when a bunch of former OSS guys were put in charge, their brilliant idea of an intelligence service was parachuting half-trained dissidents behind the Iron Curtain to lead resistance groups and perform sabotage missions. Unfortunately, the people were so poorly prepared and the Soviets had already so thoroughly penetrated the Agency that they were almost all captured and/or killed. Oh, and they completely missed the Soviets developing their own atomic bomb thanks to stolen intelligence.
From the Korean War through Vietnam to missing the economic decay of the Soviet Union that caused it’s ultimate collapse, the CIA was so consistently bad at their supposed main job of gathering intelligence that it boggles the mind. Weathermen are jealous at how these guys were able to be so repeatedly and completely wrong yet somehow none of them lost their jobs over it.
The only thing that CIA seems to have been really good at was backing the most evil fucks around as long as they claimed to be anti-communist. If there was a strong arm dictator or leader of a military coup waiting to take over from a government with the slightest bit of left leanings the CIA was there with bags of cash and support for assholes to take over countries like Iran and Guatemala, and the result has been countless deaths of innocent people and the trashing of goodwill towards America in many parts of the world.
To be fair, there’s a few parts of the book where it seems that Weiner doesn’t give them credit for the few things they did right. Accurately predicating the outbreak of violence in Rwanda or running a successful operation to help convince Libya to ditch it’s WMD programs are barely mentioned. And despite documenting how the CIA has bowed to political pressure and repeatedly told several presidents exactly what they wanted to hear the Iraqi WMD claims are portrayed almost exclusively as an intelligence failure with little mention of poltical pressure from the Bush administration which is hard to believe.
Overall, Weiner used recently declassified internal CIA reports and histories to document a long history of spectacular failure. The book explores how a combination of politics and a bureaucratic nightmare has left America deaf and blind at the times it could least afford to be so even as the myth of an all-knowing intelligence agency has been perpetuated. Billions upon billions of dollars have been spent trying to keep tabs on America’s enemies. Frankly, we all would have been better off if the US would have used that cash to buy everyone in the world some cake and ice cream every now and then. At least maybe so many people wouldn’t hate us because how could you be mad at someone who gives you free cake and ice cream?
June 13, 2017
I enjoyed Legacy of Ashes a little less than Enemies by the same author. Not that it is not fascinating and horrifying, just that perhaps it painted such an abysmal picture of the agency - probably deserved, I know - but did not really point to things they do right or should do better.
The Central Intelligence Group (the predecessor to the CIA) was created in the wake of the end of WWII by President Harry Truman in order to focus the FBI on internal surveillance and investigation and have an intelligence gathering organization focused on outside sources. The first director of national intelligence was wealthy Rear Admiral Sidney W Souers (who also happened to make his fortune with the first self-service supermarket chain the US - Piggly Wiggly (and FUN FACT: I worked for a Piggly Wiggly when I was 13-15 and have fond memories of slicing the meat of my thumb open when cutting some OJ cartons and tipping over a 6-tier wine rack with the floor wax machine)). But Souers quickly found that there was no mandate and was not long in this position for this organization which itself had a very short shelf life. The CIA was created in the wake of the dissolution of the CIG and continued with a poorly defined mission and with directors that were more obsessed with black ops (reversal of regimes "hostile to the US" and cloak and dagger stuff) than the actual intelligence they gathered. Due to this, it took decades to have reliable information from the Soviet Union and yet the CIA prided itself in overturning regimes in Iraq and Guatemala (the true facts of these operations were far more sordid as documented by Tim Weiner). I was appalled at many of the details, not the least of which was the use of Jew-baiting as propaganda to try and raise a crowd to support the US-backed coups. Particularly enlightening was the description in chapter 14 of the attempted coup in Syria in '57 which has such painful and dramatic resonance now, 60 years later.
Of course, the Korean War (also a CIA screwup by underestimating the Chinese strength amassed at the NK-China border) and the Vietnam War (replete with senseless murders of civilians in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam including torture and napalm bombings). Someone, despite all these catastrophes, the CIA was able to paint a nice picture to VP Nixon and later President Johnson. From Weiner's notes, we can see that there is a great deal of evidence behind the theories that the Cubans with some aid from the KGB had the best reason for Kennedy's assassination in retaliation for the Bay of Pigs disaster and that the Cuban Missile crisis was not the story of Kennedy bravely staring down the nuclear barrel but rather Kruschev offering an exchange of US removal of arms in Turkey for USSR removal of arms in Cuba. A majority of the document sources Weiner is using are declassified dossiers from 2002-2004, so the research is relatively recent and contains many facts previously hidden to the public. In fact, there had been multiple illegal attempts on Castro's life by the CIA of which Bobby Kennedy as Attorney General was well aware, and it is highly likely that the use of deranged USSR-citizen-wannabe Oswald was acting on the orders of the Cubans with aid from the USSR.
Moving on towards the late 60s early 70s, the catastrophe in Indonesia was also largely the CIA's fault costing literally hundreds of thousands of lives. The issue is that the massive amounts of dark money that could be coerced out of Congress to fund these operations regardless of their income were so appetizing to the folks running the CIA and they had no qualms about lying about their intentions (spies being good at lying, right?) This lead to incredible abuses of power and the law and a shocking number of lost lives - both enemy and friendly, both military/CIA and civilian.
I am unable to continue detailing each of the many disasters that the CIA ham-handed, but I will mention the two that were most influential on my personal opinion of the CIA - the false information on "weapons of mass destruction" that Saddam Hussain (who the CIA put into power and armed) that the CIA gave knowingly to Colin Powell who then knowingly lied about it in front of the UN justifying a useless invasion of Iraq under Dubya, and then the supreme crime of the CIA - their complete lack of any warning whatsoever in the 9/11 bombings in NYC. Due to these failures, there was a bit of a come to Jesus moment back in 2005-2006 at which time the CIA was nearly disbanded. Unfortunately, the book was written in 2007, so I do not have any information on what happened in the 10 years lapse. I suppose it does not look like Carrie, Saul and Quinn going after the bad guys, but something far different.
Highly readable and well-researched, Legacy of Ashes is an important book right now was some fundamentals of democracy are being called to attention and in some cases destroyed by Drumpf's government. The question of collective national security vs individual freedom is one in which the latter has most often lost the battle (and seems to be losing again in terms of Drumpf Internet Policy). I think that this book makes the argument that hiding things from citizens nearly always leads to catastrophe and that when the government steamrolls individual rights, it almost always comes back to haunt them one way or another.
The Central Intelligence Group (the predecessor to the CIA) was created in the wake of the end of WWII by President Harry Truman in order to focus the FBI on internal surveillance and investigation and have an intelligence gathering organization focused on outside sources. The first director of national intelligence was wealthy Rear Admiral Sidney W Souers (who also happened to make his fortune with the first self-service supermarket chain the US - Piggly Wiggly (and FUN FACT: I worked for a Piggly Wiggly when I was 13-15 and have fond memories of slicing the meat of my thumb open when cutting some OJ cartons and tipping over a 6-tier wine rack with the floor wax machine)). But Souers quickly found that there was no mandate and was not long in this position for this organization which itself had a very short shelf life. The CIA was created in the wake of the dissolution of the CIG and continued with a poorly defined mission and with directors that were more obsessed with black ops (reversal of regimes "hostile to the US" and cloak and dagger stuff) than the actual intelligence they gathered. Due to this, it took decades to have reliable information from the Soviet Union and yet the CIA prided itself in overturning regimes in Iraq and Guatemala (the true facts of these operations were far more sordid as documented by Tim Weiner). I was appalled at many of the details, not the least of which was the use of Jew-baiting as propaganda to try and raise a crowd to support the US-backed coups. Particularly enlightening was the description in chapter 14 of the attempted coup in Syria in '57 which has such painful and dramatic resonance now, 60 years later.
Of course, the Korean War (also a CIA screwup by underestimating the Chinese strength amassed at the NK-China border) and the Vietnam War (replete with senseless murders of civilians in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam including torture and napalm bombings). Someone, despite all these catastrophes, the CIA was able to paint a nice picture to VP Nixon and later President Johnson. From Weiner's notes, we can see that there is a great deal of evidence behind the theories that the Cubans with some aid from the KGB had the best reason for Kennedy's assassination in retaliation for the Bay of Pigs disaster and that the Cuban Missile crisis was not the story of Kennedy bravely staring down the nuclear barrel but rather Kruschev offering an exchange of US removal of arms in Turkey for USSR removal of arms in Cuba. A majority of the document sources Weiner is using are declassified dossiers from 2002-2004, so the research is relatively recent and contains many facts previously hidden to the public. In fact, there had been multiple illegal attempts on Castro's life by the CIA of which Bobby Kennedy as Attorney General was well aware, and it is highly likely that the use of deranged USSR-citizen-wannabe Oswald was acting on the orders of the Cubans with aid from the USSR.
Moving on towards the late 60s early 70s, the catastrophe in Indonesia was also largely the CIA's fault costing literally hundreds of thousands of lives. The issue is that the massive amounts of dark money that could be coerced out of Congress to fund these operations regardless of their income were so appetizing to the folks running the CIA and they had no qualms about lying about their intentions (spies being good at lying, right?) This lead to incredible abuses of power and the law and a shocking number of lost lives - both enemy and friendly, both military/CIA and civilian.
I am unable to continue detailing each of the many disasters that the CIA ham-handed, but I will mention the two that were most influential on my personal opinion of the CIA - the false information on "weapons of mass destruction" that Saddam Hussain (who the CIA put into power and armed) that the CIA gave knowingly to Colin Powell who then knowingly lied about it in front of the UN justifying a useless invasion of Iraq under Dubya, and then the supreme crime of the CIA - their complete lack of any warning whatsoever in the 9/11 bombings in NYC. Due to these failures, there was a bit of a come to Jesus moment back in 2005-2006 at which time the CIA was nearly disbanded. Unfortunately, the book was written in 2007, so I do not have any information on what happened in the 10 years lapse. I suppose it does not look like Carrie, Saul and Quinn going after the bad guys, but something far different.
Highly readable and well-researched, Legacy of Ashes is an important book right now was some fundamentals of democracy are being called to attention and in some cases destroyed by Drumpf's government. The question of collective national security vs individual freedom is one in which the latter has most often lost the battle (and seems to be losing again in terms of Drumpf Internet Policy). I think that this book makes the argument that hiding things from citizens nearly always leads to catastrophe and that when the government steamrolls individual rights, it almost always comes back to haunt them one way or another.
July 18, 2023
مزقت خسارة السوفيات قلب السي آي ايه. فكيف يمكن للوكالة ان تحيا بدون عدوها؟؟
- "إرث من الرماد"، بحث جبّار قام به كاتبه تيم واينر (وساعده فريق كما ذكر في ختام الكتاب) بإستعراض قصة السي آي أيه منذ اواخر الأربعينات حتى العام 2007 (تاريخ نشر الكتاب) وذلك بعد إطلاعه على ما يزيد غن خمسين الف وثيقة لوكالات الإستخبارات الأمريكية واجراءه للعديد من المقابلات. وهو كتاب بعكس الأفلام الهوليوودية والمسلسلات الأمريكية (مثل 24) يظهر الوكالة على حقيقتها، تاريخ من الفشل والتحريض والتزوير والرشاوي والإنقلابات والسجون والإجرام (الداخلي والخارجي)، وهو، حسبما لاحظت، مكتوب للتركيز على هذا الجانب المظلم من الوكالة لا لتحطيمها ولكن لإعادة بناءها بشكل اقوى وأمتن وتجنّب اخطاء الماضي (سأعود لهذا في ختام المراجعة)، فلذلك فإن إنجازات السي آيه إي شبه غائبة في هذا الكتاب. تجدر الإشارة ايضاً الى ان الهوامش والمراجع تحتل 150 صفحة من الكتاب
ص23
هذا الكتاب موضوع بما هو للنشر: لا مصادر مجهولة، ولا استشهادات غامضة، ولا اقاويل، انه اول تأريخ ل "السي. ٱي. أيه" مجموع كليا من إفادات من المصدر ومن وثائق أصلية. وهو من حيث طبيعته، غير تام: فما من رئيس او مدير للوكالة، وبالتأكيد ما من دخيل، تمكنه من معرفة كل شيء عن الوكالة. ما كتبته هنا ليس الحقيقة كاملة، لكنه، بالحد الذي امكنني فيه، ليس إلا الحقيقة.
- تبدأ الرحلة منذ انتهاء الحرب العالمية الثانية تقريباً، حيث كان الشيوعيون حلفاء للوكالة في مواجهة الفاشية، ولاحقاً اصبح الفاشييون حلفاء في مواجهة شيوعية الإتحاد السوفياتي. يلاحظ القارئ طوال الكتاب ان الوكالة لم تكن تعرف شيئاً عما يجري داخل الإتحاد السوفياتي ومعظم معلوماتها من الصحف التي تصل متأخرة، كما انها صوّرت الإتحاد السوفياتي كبعبع كبير ينتظر اللحظة المناسبة للقضاء على امريكا، بينما كانوا في روسيا يحسبون الخطوات جيداً للإبتعاد عن استفزاز اميركا. نتابع لاحقاً مع اخفاقاتها في كوبا، والخسارة في فييتنام ولاوس وكوريا، ومن ثم في مصر والعراق وايران ولاحقاً في لبنان وافغانستان والصومال وصولاً الى اا ايلول وضرب الداخل الأميركي.
- بعض تنبؤات الوكالة الفاشلة (والتي تشبه تنبؤات المشعوذبن الذين يظهرهم كثيراً إعلامنا الراقي)..ء
1- السوفيات لن يغزو افغانستان!
2- العراق لن يغزو الكويت
3- الشاه لن يسقط!
4- كوبا لا تحتوي على صواريخ سوفياتية!
5- الحرب في فييتنام ستميل لصالح أمريكا!
6- الصين لن تغزو كوريا!
7- السوفيات لن يمتلكوا صواريخ بالستية قبل 13 عاماً!
8- خورتشييف سيسقط بعد شهرين
9- حرب ال 1973 لن تحصل
في التفصيل:
1- الإتحاد السوفياتي:
ص39
حدد هيلمس لاحقاَ ان نصف المعلومات على الأقل حول الاتحاد السوفياتي وشرق اوروبا، في ملفات الي ٱي أيه كانت كذباً محضاً.... بعد اكثر من نصف قرن على ذلك واجهت السي ٱي أيه النوع ذاته من الفبركة بينما هي تسعى الى الكشف عن اسلحة الدمار الشامل العراقية.
- في العمل الأمني، سقطتت السي آي أيه في المواجهة مع الكي جي بي السوفياتية:
ص76
ارسلت الCIA عشرات العملاء الاوكرانيين جوا وبراً. وقد تم اعتقال كل واحد منهم تقريباً. اسستخدمت الاستخبارات السوفياتية السجناء لإرسال معلومات مضللة: كل شيء يسير حسنا، ارسلوا المزيد من البنادق، الرجال، المال.. ثم قتلتهم. بعد خمس سنين من المهمان المجهضة، يفيد تاريخ الوكالة ان السي اٱي أيه اوقفت العمل بهذه المقاربة
ص79
في المجمل، فإن مئات عملاء السي ٱي ايه الخارجيين أرسلوا في الخمسينيات، الى حتفهم في روسيا وبولندا ورومانيا واوكرانيا ودول البلطيق. لم يسجل مصيرهم. لم تحفظ اي سجلات، ولم توقّع اي عقوبات على الفشل.
- في التحليل، أخطأت الوكالة في كل تحليلاتها تقريباً:
ص111
قال إيزنهاور غاضباً انه "منذ1946 ينبح من يسمون بالخبراء بما سيحدث عندما يموت ستالين، وماذا سيكون علينا، كأمة، ان نفعل حيال ذلك. حسنا، ها انه قد مات، ويمكنكم ان تقلبوا ملفات حكومتنا رأساً على عقب - بدون جدوى- بحثاً عن اي مخططات موضوعة. بل اننا لسنا متأكدين مما هو الفارق الذي تحدثه وفاته"
ص113
وقد غامرت السي ٱي إيه بعد ذلك ببضعة اشهر، بتخمين ان السوفيات لن يتمكنوا، قبل 1969، من اطلاق صاروخ باليستي عابر للقارات على الولايات المتحدة. وتبيّن ان التقدير أخطأ ب ١٢ سنة.
ص183
حاول ألن دالاس، في داخل البيت الأبيض، إطلاع الرئيس على مغزى الإنتفاضة المجرية. وقال "من المؤكد ان أيام خورشتشيف باتت معدودة"... لكنه أخطأ ذلك بسبع سنين 😂
2- الحرب الكورية:
ص85
اصر مقر قيادة السي ٱي ايه للمرة الاخيرة، على ان الصين لن تجتاح بالقوة (الحديث عن الحرب الكورية) الا انه بعد يومبن فقط شن 300 الف جندي صيني هجوماً عنيفاً الى درجة انه كاد يدفع بالامريكيين الى البحر.
بهت بيدل سميث. فهو اعتقد ان عمل الوكالة هو حماية الدولة من مفاجأة عسكرية الا ان الوكالة اخطأت في قراءة كل ازمة عالمية: القنبلة النووية السوفياتية، الحرب الكورية، الاجتياح الصيني.
3- مصر وسوري�� والعراق
ص180
زار السير باتريك واشنطن واتفق الرجلان (هو وفرانك ويسنر) على ان اهدافهما تقتضي، بطريقة او بأخرى، إزاحة عبد الناصر من السلطة.
اقترح البريطانيون اغتيال عبد الناصر، ودرسوا تحويل نهر النيل لتدمير محاولة مصر الوصول الى الإدارة الذاتية والاقتصادية. قال ايزنهاور انه سيكون من الخطأ الصارخ استخدام القوة القاتلة. وأيدت السي ٱي إيه حملة طويلة وبطيئة من الإفساد ضد مصر.
ص195
تشرح وثيقة اكتشفت في 2003، بين الأوراق الخاصة بدنكان سانديز، وزير الدفاع في حكومة رئيس الوزراء هارولد مكاميلان،.. وقد جاء فيها "جعل سوريا تبدو كأنها راعية المؤامرات والتخريب والعنف الموجه ضد الحكومات المجاورة". وعلى السي آيه إي والاستخبارات البريطانية، ان تختلق مؤامرات وطنية ونشاطات متشدد مختلفة في العراق ولبنان والأردن ووضع اللوم فيها على سوريا
ص196
حدد روزفلت الرئيس الطويل العهد لجهاز الإستخبارات السورية، غبد الحميد السراج، بوصفه الرجل الأكثر قوة في دمشق. وقرر انه يجب ان يتم اغتياله الى جانب رئيس الأركان العامة السورية ورئيس الحزب الشيوعي... أوفدت السي آي إيه روكي ستون... بوصفه سكرتيراً ثانياً في السفارة الأمريكية... استغرق الأمر اسابيع ليكشف السرّاج ستون... طرد ستون.. ادى هذا الإضطراب الى نشوء التحالف السوري - المصري.. تصاعد النفوذ السياسي والعسكري الروسيان
ص198
اعطيت الأوامر لضباط السي آيه إي بالعمل مع زعماء سياسين وقادة عسكريين ووزراء امنيين واصحاب نفوذ عارضين المال والسلاح في مقابل تحالفات مناهضة للشيوعيين. إلا ان محطة بغداد كانت تغط في نوم عميق عندما قامت عصبة من ضباط الجيش، في 14 تموز 1958 بقلب نظام نوري السعيد الملكي الموالي للأمريكيين. "أخذنا على حين غرّة" قال السفير الأمريكي روبرت غوردون، وكان يومها المسؤول السياسي في السفارة.
ص442
في 1973، شنت مصر الحرب على اسرائيل، وتوغلت عميقاً داخل الأراضي التي تحتلها اسرائيل. وفي تناقض صارخ مع التوقعات المتينة لحرب الأيام الستة عام 1967، أخطأت السي آي إيه في قراءة العاصفة المتجمعة. "لم نكلل أنفسنا بالمجد" قال كولبي. "فقد توقعنا، في اليوم الذي سبق اندلاع الحرب انها لن تندلع"
لقد اكدت الوكالة للبيت الأبيض، قبل ساعات قليلة على بدء الحرب" المناورات اكثر واقعية من العادة، لكن الحرب لن تندلع"
ص569
لم يصدق الرئيس بوش السي ٱي أيه التابعة له. اتصل سريعاً برئيس مصر والسعودية والكويت وقالوا له جميعاً ان صدام لن يقوم بالغزو (مثلما ابلغته الوكالة). وأبلغ الملك الأردني الرئيس، ان "الجانب العراقي يرسل افضل تحياته وارفع تقديره اليك يا سيدي". مضى بوش الى النوم وقد عاد اليه الإطمئنان. وبعد ذلك بساعات تدفقت موجة اولى من ١٤٠ الف جندي عراقي عبر الحدود لإحتلال الكويت
ص656
توصلت الوكالة الى استنتاجاتها في شأن الأسلحة الكيميائية العراقية فقط على اساس صور اسيء تفسيرها لشاحنات صهاريج عراقية. وارتكزت الوكالة في استنتاجاتها على مصدر وحيد، هو كورفبول (منشق عراقي يعيش في اوروبا)، كما استندت في تحليلها حول وجود الاسلحة النووية العراقية، في شكل شيه كامل، الى استيراد انابيب من الالمونيوم مناسبة، او مصممة للأسلحة النووية
4- لبنان، في هذا البلد الصغير تم تفجير السفارة الأمريكية وثكنة للمارينز واختطاف عشرات الأمريكيين الذين تمت مقايضة بعضهم بصواريخ أعطيت لإيران من الموساد والسي آي إيه. (حسب الكتاب)
ص525
دمر محو محطة بيروت من الوجود، وموت روبرت إيمس، قدرة الوكالة على جمع المعلومات في لبنان وفي معظم الشرق الأوسط "ما تركنا مع القليل من المعلومات الاستخبارتية لوقت طويل بعد ذلك" قال سام لويس، السفير الأميركي في إسرائيل في ذلك الوقت
5- كوبا
ص 244
عند الثانية من بعد ظهر 19 نيسان، لعن سان رومان السي آي إيه. اقفل جهازه اللاسلكي، وتخلى عن القتال. وفي خلال ستين ساعة اعتقل 1189 عنصراً من اللواء الكوبي، وقتل 114 ( عملية خليج الخنازير، والإتجام الفاشل لكوبا كاسترو)
ص255
قال هيملس ان البنتاغون والبيت الأبيض اقترحا بعض "المخططات الجنونية" ضد كاسترو. وقد تضمنت نسف سفينة امريكية في ميناء غونتانامو وافتعال هجوم إرهابي ضد ظائرة اميريكية لتبرير اجتياح جديد
ص268
قدّرت السي اي ايه وجود 10 الاف جندي سوفياتي في كوبا، بينما كان يوجد 43 الفاً. وقدّرت الوكالة ان قوة الجيش الكوبي تقف عند حدود المئة الف. والعدد الحقيقي 275 الف
ص273
خدعت السي آي ايه نفسها في الإعتقاد ان السوفيات لن يرسلوا ابداً اسلحة نووية الى كوبا. وهي الآن، وقد شاهدت الصواريخ، تبقى عاجزة عن إدراك الذهن السوفياتي. وقد اشتكى الرئيس كنيدي في 16 اكتوبر من "انني لا استطيع فهم وجهة نظرهم. الأمر لغز لعين بالنسبة لي. فأنا لا اعرف ما يكفي بالنسبة الى التحاد السوفياتي"
ص461
والقى هيلمس بواحدة منها (اي القطط النافقة = الأسرار القذرة للوكالة) من فوق سياج البيت الأبيض، بإبلاغه كيسنجر ان بوبي كنيدي أدار شخصياً المؤامرات لإغتيال فيدال كاسترو.
- حل أزمة الصواريخ:
ص282
غادر بوبي كنيدي البيت الأبيض والتقى السفير السوفياتي اناتولي دوبرينين في مكتبه في رزارة العدل. أبلغ دوبرينين ان ال��لايات المتحدة توافق على التعامل بالمثل بشأن الصواريخ.... قال جون ماكون بعد نصف قرن: "اصر الرئيس كندي وبوبي كنيديعلى انهما لم يناقشا في وقت من الاوقات الصواريخ في تركيا مع اي ممثلين عن السوفيات".
وأعتقد العالم لسنوات طويلة تلت ان تصميم كنيدي الهادئ والتزام شقيقه الحديدي بالحل المسالم وحدهما قد انقذا الامة.
6- فييتنام:
ص325
حرب فيتنام بدأت بكذبة سياسية تستند الى استخبارات مزيفة. ولو ان السي آي ايه عملت بموجب ما نص عليه ميثاقها، ولو ان ماكون قام بواجباته بحسب ما يرى ان القانون يحددها، لما عاشت التقارير المزيفة لأكثر من ساعات قليلة. إلا ان الحقيقة كاملة لم تظهر إلا في تشرين الثاني 2005 في اعتراف مفصل جداً نشرته وكالة الأمن القومي
ص330
تناسبت الاستخبارات المزيفة تماماً مع السياسة ااموضوعة سلفاً. وفي 7 اغسطس سمح الكونغرس بالحرب على فيتنام. جاء تصويت مجلس النواب 416 مقابل صفر ومجلس الشيوخ 88 مقابل صوتين. وقال كلاين ان الأمر اشبه بمأساة إغريقية، مشهد مسرح سياسي استعيد بعد ذلك بأربعة عقود عندما أدت استخبارات زائفة حول الترسانة العراقية، الى مساندة السند العقلي للحرب لدى رئيس آخر
ص334
اخذ رجال السي آي أيه في سايغون علماً بأن الأخبار السيئة غير مرحب بها. واستمر تحريف الاستخبارات على ايدي الجنرالات السياسيين، والقادة المدنيين، والوكالة ذاتها. ولن يكون ثمة تقرير ذو تأثير فعلي من السي آي أيه للرئيس في موضوع الحرب قبل ثلاث سنوات أخرى.
ص380
عرف باتل ما يستلزمه عمل السي آيه إي في مصر. فقد تولى منصب السفير الامريكي في مصر عندما قام ضابط محرك اوكل اموره للتقارير بعدم تبصّر بفضح علاقة الوكالة مع محرر صحيفة بارز في مصر يدعى مصطفى أمين. كان امين مقرباً من عبد الناصر، ودفعت له الوكالة لقاء معلومات ومقابل نشره تقارير اخبارية مؤيدة للأمريكيين. وضع على جدول معاشات الولايات المتحدة.
ص466
- ليلة الإنسحاب من فيتنام:
أحرق بولغار في ذلك المساء جميع ملفات الوكالة والبرقيات وكتب الرموز. كتب رسالته الوداعية:"ستكون هذه آخر رسالة من محطة سايغون... كان قتالاً طويلاً وقد خسرنا... الذين يخفقون في التعلّم من التاريخ يضطرون الى تكراره، فلنأمل ألا نخوض مرة اخرى تجربة فييتنام، واننا تعلمنا درسنا. سايغون توقف عملها" ثم فجّر الآلة التي ارسلت الرسالة
7- حول العالم:
البوسنة، ص606
في ١٣ تموز ١٩٩٥،في البوسنة، افادت الصحافه العالمية عن عمليات قتل جماعية للمسلمين على أيدي الصرب، ارسل قمر تجسس صور سجناء يحرسهم مسلحون في حقول خارج سربرينيتشا. لم ينظر احد في الوكالة الى تلك الصورى على مدى ٣ اسابيع... لم يتوقعوا حصول مجزرة. لم يبال احد بمجموعات حقوق الانسان... بعد اسبوعين ارسلت الوكالة طائرة تجسس. سجلت صورا لقبور جماعية... وصلت الصور ببريد عسكري عادي بعد ٣ ايام. مات ٨الاف شخص وفات الامر السي اي ايه!
صربيا، ص627
شن حلف شمال الأطلسي حملة قصف على صربيا بهدف إجبار سلوبودان ميلوسوفيتش على سحب قواته من كوسوفو. دعيت السي آي ايه الى اختيار الأهداف... حدد المحللون افضل هدف بوصفه المديرية الفدرالية اليوغوسلافية للتموين والمشتريات... دمّر الهدف. إلا ان السي اي ايه اخطأت قراءة خرا ئطها. لم يكن الهدف مستودعاً لجيش ميلوسوفيتش بل كان السفارة الصينية
الهند، ص620
لم يكن يجب بالتفجير النووي الذي قامت به أكبر ديمقراطية في العالم من حيث عدد السكان (الهند 1998) ان يشكّل مفاجأة، إلا انه فاجأ. فالإفادة من محطة السي آي ايه في نيودلهي كانت كسولة. والتحليلات في مقر القيادة غير واضحة. لم يقرع جرس الإنذار وكشفت التجربة عن اخفاق في التجسس واخفاق في قراءة الصور واخفاق في استيعاب التقارير واخفاق في التفكير واخفاق في الرؤية
الصين:ص94
واستنتج "كو" ان الوطنيين باعوا السي آي ايه بضائع وهمية، بأن ثمة قوة مقاومة هائلة داخل الصين. كنا ننبح عند الشجرة الخاطئة، وشكلت العملية برمتها مضيعة للوقت.
11 ايلول:
شكل 11 ايلول الإخفاق الإستخباراتي الذي تنبأ به "تينيت" قبل ذلك يثلاثة أعوام. انه فشل للحكومة الأميركية، البيت الأبيض/ مجلس الأمن القومي، الأف بي آي، إدارة الطيران الفدرالي، جهاز الهجرة والتجنيس، ولجنتي استخبارات في الكونغرس. انه اخفاق في السياسة والدبلوماسية.... الا انه كان فوق ذلك كله اخفاق في معرفة العدو. انها بيرل هاربور التي انشئت السي أي أيه لتفاديها
- أهم إنجازات السي آي إيه:
ص376
في زمن ليندون جونسون، فإن مهمات مكافحة التمرد التي بدأها آل كنيدي تجذرت في الأماكن التي ازدهرت فيها برامج أيك للأمن الداخلي، وحيث وضعت السي آيه إيه في السلطة حلفاء عسكريين وسياسين. وفي 1967، ومن خلال رعاية معتنى بها لديكتاتوري دولتين، حققت السي آيه إي واحدة من اعظم انتصاراتها في الحرب الباردة: اصطياد تشي غيفارا.
ص497
منذ ان ضمنت السي آي أيه عرشه في 1953، وشاه ايران محط انظار السياسة الخارجية الأميركية في الشرق الأوسط. وقال الرئيس نيكسون، مستفكراً، في نيسان 1971 :"اتمنى وحسب لو انه يوجد بضعة زعماء إضافيين حول العالم يمتلكون بعد نظره، وقدرته على ممارسة ديكتاتورية حقيقية بطريقة حميدة"
ص678
على مدى ستين عاماً ��م يفلح الآلاف من ضباط الجهاز الخفي في جمع إلا أقل خيوط الإستخبارات المهمة عن حق، هذا أكبر أسرار "السي.آي.أيه"
ختاماً، هناك الكثير من المعلومات التي لا مجال لذكرها في هذه المراجعة لأسباب عديدة، لكني انصح بالكتاب خصوصاً لأولئك المصابين بالأميركا-فوبيا او عقدة التفوق الإستخباراتي الأمريكي. وأنهي مراجعتي بما قاله غيفارا لجلاديه
"تذكروا انكم تقتلون رجلاً".
November 9, 2010
The idea of a Central Intelligence Agency is quite a good one and I do understand why the US might want such an organisation. There are lots of nations in the world and some of them have very good reason to dislike the United States (they hate your freedom, your freedom to bomb them into the dark ages) and so it is a pretty good idea for the US to have some idea what these nations are up to. Are they building weapons of mass destruction, for example, and if they are what for? Not everyone that builds a bomb necessarily wants to drop it on an American. So, finding out the motivation of your potential enemies sounds like a reasonable thing to do. The CIA has been quite good at times of taking photos of places other countries might not want them to take photos of - but incredibly hopeless at working out why.
The US is famously described as a melting pot – that is, out of many, one has been made (if you wrote that in Latin it could almost be a motto). Anyway, you would think that a nation that has been made up out of people from every other nation in the world it wouldn’t really have all that much trouble in putting together a spy network. But that hasn’t really been the experience of the US over the years.
There are parts of this book that read like Greek tragedy. My favourite is the telling of the story of the death of Kennedy. For three years the CIA had been trying to kill Castro and suddenly they thought that Castro had gotten in first. What to do? The problem was that if it came out that the CIA had been trying to kill Castro then people might think Castro was within his rights to strike first. So the CIA tried to cover up what it had been planning which meant having to lie to the Warren Commission. Conspiracy theories are all very well, but you don't need a conspiracy when straight history is this bizarre.
The image that you get of the CIA from this book is mostly one of complete incompetence. Essentially it is an organisation that knew virtually nothing about what was going on in the Soviet Union, nothing at all about North Korea, nothing about Iran and certainly less than nothing about Iraq. I was really surprised at how many Presidents simply didn’t pay any attention to the advice the CIA gave. In fact, I was surprised to learn that most Republican Presidents felt the CIA was part of a leftwing conspiracy against them. That is pretty much the exact opposite of what I would have thought, myself.
There is instance after instance of quotes of advice given by the CIA to Presidents saying, for example, that there will be no war in Korea in the week the war started, or Iran will be much as it is for 20 years as the Iranian revolution was starting or that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the US launched one of the most expensive wars in history.
The failures are epic and breathtaking. What is even more breathtaking is how no one ever seems to take responsibility for any failure. You would think that someone would get a kick in the bum for the error over WMD in Iraq, say – but in fact, the person who you would think was most responsible for it, George Tennent, was granted the Presidential Medal of Freedom – the country’ greatest honour. You can only say that the people in power in the US have no respect for their citizens - otherwise giving Tennent such an award would be impossible. Being a spy not only means never having to say you are sorry, but also being congratulated for your mistakes.
The most disturbing thing is the most obvious thing - that the CIA prefers dictatorships to democracy - as is confirmed time and time again. It wants the world to be predictable and democracy doesn't really do predictable.
This is a story that proves truth is stranger than fiction. Throughout its history the CIA those in charge have constantly said that it is five years away from being able to fulfil its mission. It is time to admit that tomorrow never comes and perhaps it would be better to just close the whole thing down.
The US is famously described as a melting pot – that is, out of many, one has been made (if you wrote that in Latin it could almost be a motto). Anyway, you would think that a nation that has been made up out of people from every other nation in the world it wouldn’t really have all that much trouble in putting together a spy network. But that hasn’t really been the experience of the US over the years.
There are parts of this book that read like Greek tragedy. My favourite is the telling of the story of the death of Kennedy. For three years the CIA had been trying to kill Castro and suddenly they thought that Castro had gotten in first. What to do? The problem was that if it came out that the CIA had been trying to kill Castro then people might think Castro was within his rights to strike first. So the CIA tried to cover up what it had been planning which meant having to lie to the Warren Commission. Conspiracy theories are all very well, but you don't need a conspiracy when straight history is this bizarre.
The image that you get of the CIA from this book is mostly one of complete incompetence. Essentially it is an organisation that knew virtually nothing about what was going on in the Soviet Union, nothing at all about North Korea, nothing about Iran and certainly less than nothing about Iraq. I was really surprised at how many Presidents simply didn’t pay any attention to the advice the CIA gave. In fact, I was surprised to learn that most Republican Presidents felt the CIA was part of a leftwing conspiracy against them. That is pretty much the exact opposite of what I would have thought, myself.
There is instance after instance of quotes of advice given by the CIA to Presidents saying, for example, that there will be no war in Korea in the week the war started, or Iran will be much as it is for 20 years as the Iranian revolution was starting or that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the US launched one of the most expensive wars in history.
The failures are epic and breathtaking. What is even more breathtaking is how no one ever seems to take responsibility for any failure. You would think that someone would get a kick in the bum for the error over WMD in Iraq, say – but in fact, the person who you would think was most responsible for it, George Tennent, was granted the Presidential Medal of Freedom – the country’ greatest honour. You can only say that the people in power in the US have no respect for their citizens - otherwise giving Tennent such an award would be impossible. Being a spy not only means never having to say you are sorry, but also being congratulated for your mistakes.
The most disturbing thing is the most obvious thing - that the CIA prefers dictatorships to democracy - as is confirmed time and time again. It wants the world to be predictable and democracy doesn't really do predictable.
This is a story that proves truth is stranger than fiction. Throughout its history the CIA those in charge have constantly said that it is five years away from being able to fulfil its mission. It is time to admit that tomorrow never comes and perhaps it would be better to just close the whole thing down.
April 27, 2016
Sometimes I think the CIA is kept around just so all those old movies and Tom Clancy books will make sense. Because really, from start to finish, the Agency has proven a monumental failure.
The title Legacy of Ashes comes from President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who hopelessly battled the Agency throughout his eight years in office. Undoubtedly, his inability to change the CIA was partially responsible for his famous parting shot: the military-industrial complex speech.
Author Tim Weiner agrees with Eisenhower's assessment, and his book is a lengthy catalogue of failure. It's a one-stop reference for every foolish, idiotic, murderous, illegal, and incomprehensible thing the CIA has ever done, or failed to do. It starts at the beginning, with Wild Bill Donovan and the Office of Strategic Services, an inauspicious bunch that managed to kill a lot of their own men by parachuting them behind enemy lines on Quixotic missions. The OSS later transforms into the CIA, but the name change doesn't help their abilities. What follows, in quick succession, is a parade of nadirs: the failure to predict the North Korean invasion; promoting and then abandoning the Hungarian revolution; promoting and then abandoning the failed invasion at the Bay of Pigs; failing to catch Bin Laden in Afghanistan; and most recently, falsely selling the world the idea that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. An entire book could be devoted solely to abuses in Central and South America. The list, at times, feels endless. It left me feeling exhausted and disheartened and wondering what the hell Lee Greenwood was singing about.
In Weiner's telling, the CIA is composed of a bunch of babies who spend as much time whining about personal slights as they do at their jobs. Considering the CIA's success rate, this actually might be a good thing.
The CIA isn't a spy agency; it's a secretive DMV, a stagnated bureaucracy filled with political hacks and pensioners. In a place like that, the best, smartest, and most able operatives stick out, and are more likely to be fired than promoted (just ask Porter Goss, the poster child of politically vindictive mediocrity).
Even when the CIA succeeds at something, it's usually ends badly, because of the Agency's short-sighted refusal to ever map out an endgame (you'd think that someone, eventually, would introduce them to the law of unintended consequences). For instance, in Operation Success in Guatemala, they led a coup to get rid of the left-leaning Jacobo Arbenz. They succeeded in doing so, and Castillo Armas took over, ushering in 40 years of death squads and murder. Then there's the coup in Iran, with its eventual blowback. And, of course, Afghanistan, where the CIA armed the warlords to fight the Soviets, and then sat on its hands while it devolved into a stateless, terrorist breeding ground (In its one-dimensional, undefined struggle against the Soviet Union, no one in CIA ever seemed to consider the benefit of stability the USSR provided in the world).
The problem I had with Legacy of Ashes is that it did too much and not enough. It was long and shallow, like an all-day marathon of The Hills on MTV. By deciding to encompass the whole history of failure, Weiner doesn't have any space to dedicate to things like context, detail, or character.
The book jumps from one event to another at a frantic pace (normally, I'm a fairly slow reader, but I finished these 600 pages in two days). One moment, you're in Guatemala, the next you're in Hungary, the next you're in Vietnam. What's worse is that you never know why. There is no explanation, no background.
Further, there is no narrative verve, which one might expect in a book full of spycraft. I'm not asking for a techno-thriller, but a little blood and thunder wouldn't hurt. I mean, with some of these stories, you actually have to try to make things uninteresting. Unfortunately, Weiner does. This is perhaps owing to his writing style, which consist mostly in gluing together quotes with lifeless, mechanical prose.
The only characters in this book are the guys at the top, mostly the directors. Since they're all white, old, and incompetent, they tend to blend into each other, with a few standouts (Helms, Gates, Deutch, Tenet). Little space is devoted to the gruntwork, or the actual mechanics of CIA clandestine activity.
This leads to a second complaint, that of a certain bias against the CIA that doesn't allow proper exploration of their successes. Weiner notes, for example, that the CIA scored a coup by correctly forecasting the Six Day War. However, that story is told in all of one sentence. Seriously. One sentence. Also, the heroics of individual agents is mostly ignored. Mike Scheuer, the hard-charging chief of Alec Station, gets only one mention.
In general, the CIA, as an institution, has failed, and repeatedly. However, the book does little or nothing to highlight the individual courage and successes, especially in the paramilitary realm. For instance, the operatives in Afghanistan during the early days of the war, on an individual level, did a remarkable job making up for a lot of lost time. (Another criticism: Weiner leaves it up to the reader to figure out the different between the CIA's clandestine services, and its analytical side; thus, I never got a sense of its actual workings).
As it is, the achievement of Legacy of Ashes is as an historical artifact. Weiner has interviewed hundreds of people and combed through the latest declassified records. His sources are awesome and I appreciated his expansive endnotes. This is a great book to have if you get into an argument about the CIA at a holiday party, which God knows will probably happen after I get a little champagne in me.
I'd like to think this mercilessly critically, impeccably sourced book might foment some change. But alas, it appears as though the bumbling anti-Bond bureaucrats are well entrenched, and we are left with the illusion that we are being guarded by Jason Bourne, rather than a government lifer waiting for his pension to kick in.
The title Legacy of Ashes comes from President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who hopelessly battled the Agency throughout his eight years in office. Undoubtedly, his inability to change the CIA was partially responsible for his famous parting shot: the military-industrial complex speech.
Author Tim Weiner agrees with Eisenhower's assessment, and his book is a lengthy catalogue of failure. It's a one-stop reference for every foolish, idiotic, murderous, illegal, and incomprehensible thing the CIA has ever done, or failed to do. It starts at the beginning, with Wild Bill Donovan and the Office of Strategic Services, an inauspicious bunch that managed to kill a lot of their own men by parachuting them behind enemy lines on Quixotic missions. The OSS later transforms into the CIA, but the name change doesn't help their abilities. What follows, in quick succession, is a parade of nadirs: the failure to predict the North Korean invasion; promoting and then abandoning the Hungarian revolution; promoting and then abandoning the failed invasion at the Bay of Pigs; failing to catch Bin Laden in Afghanistan; and most recently, falsely selling the world the idea that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. An entire book could be devoted solely to abuses in Central and South America. The list, at times, feels endless. It left me feeling exhausted and disheartened and wondering what the hell Lee Greenwood was singing about.
In Weiner's telling, the CIA is composed of a bunch of babies who spend as much time whining about personal slights as they do at their jobs. Considering the CIA's success rate, this actually might be a good thing.
The CIA isn't a spy agency; it's a secretive DMV, a stagnated bureaucracy filled with political hacks and pensioners. In a place like that, the best, smartest, and most able operatives stick out, and are more likely to be fired than promoted (just ask Porter Goss, the poster child of politically vindictive mediocrity).
Even when the CIA succeeds at something, it's usually ends badly, because of the Agency's short-sighted refusal to ever map out an endgame (you'd think that someone, eventually, would introduce them to the law of unintended consequences). For instance, in Operation Success in Guatemala, they led a coup to get rid of the left-leaning Jacobo Arbenz. They succeeded in doing so, and Castillo Armas took over, ushering in 40 years of death squads and murder. Then there's the coup in Iran, with its eventual blowback. And, of course, Afghanistan, where the CIA armed the warlords to fight the Soviets, and then sat on its hands while it devolved into a stateless, terrorist breeding ground (In its one-dimensional, undefined struggle against the Soviet Union, no one in CIA ever seemed to consider the benefit of stability the USSR provided in the world).
The problem I had with Legacy of Ashes is that it did too much and not enough. It was long and shallow, like an all-day marathon of The Hills on MTV. By deciding to encompass the whole history of failure, Weiner doesn't have any space to dedicate to things like context, detail, or character.
The book jumps from one event to another at a frantic pace (normally, I'm a fairly slow reader, but I finished these 600 pages in two days). One moment, you're in Guatemala, the next you're in Hungary, the next you're in Vietnam. What's worse is that you never know why. There is no explanation, no background.
Further, there is no narrative verve, which one might expect in a book full of spycraft. I'm not asking for a techno-thriller, but a little blood and thunder wouldn't hurt. I mean, with some of these stories, you actually have to try to make things uninteresting. Unfortunately, Weiner does. This is perhaps owing to his writing style, which consist mostly in gluing together quotes with lifeless, mechanical prose.
The only characters in this book are the guys at the top, mostly the directors. Since they're all white, old, and incompetent, they tend to blend into each other, with a few standouts (Helms, Gates, Deutch, Tenet). Little space is devoted to the gruntwork, or the actual mechanics of CIA clandestine activity.
This leads to a second complaint, that of a certain bias against the CIA that doesn't allow proper exploration of their successes. Weiner notes, for example, that the CIA scored a coup by correctly forecasting the Six Day War. However, that story is told in all of one sentence. Seriously. One sentence. Also, the heroics of individual agents is mostly ignored. Mike Scheuer, the hard-charging chief of Alec Station, gets only one mention.
In general, the CIA, as an institution, has failed, and repeatedly. However, the book does little or nothing to highlight the individual courage and successes, especially in the paramilitary realm. For instance, the operatives in Afghanistan during the early days of the war, on an individual level, did a remarkable job making up for a lot of lost time. (Another criticism: Weiner leaves it up to the reader to figure out the different between the CIA's clandestine services, and its analytical side; thus, I never got a sense of its actual workings).
As it is, the achievement of Legacy of Ashes is as an historical artifact. Weiner has interviewed hundreds of people and combed through the latest declassified records. His sources are awesome and I appreciated his expansive endnotes. This is a great book to have if you get into an argument about the CIA at a holiday party, which God knows will probably happen after I get a little champagne in me.
I'd like to think this mercilessly critically, impeccably sourced book might foment some change. But alas, it appears as though the bumbling anti-Bond bureaucrats are well entrenched, and we are left with the illusion that we are being guarded by Jason Bourne, rather than a government lifer waiting for his pension to kick in.
April 10, 2016
Tim Weiner deserves enormous credit for amassing such a huge and detailed body of information for us to look at and judge the CIA. He writes history the way I prefer to read it: chronologically. When characters appear before or after their moment in the limelight, Weiner tries to keep them in context of events happening contemporaneously. This is a huge aid to both our understanding and to our judgment. That having been said, this was a difficult book to read/listen to because of the poor assessment of the Agency, because of the accretion of evidence of mistakes and incompetence, because of the massive amount of information readers get about how the Agency operated at different times under different leaders with different mandates.
The easy solutions to repairing or overhauling the Agency when they have done something spectacularly inept--or not done something, like prepare us for 9/11--have all been tried, each unsuccessful in its own way. Weiner has given us the material with which to begin to understand what we as citizens have tasked (and funded) the Agency to do and to ask ourselves if this is still a valid and do-able goal.
Soliciting secrets held by foreign governments can be very difficult work. Most of the time those secrets are revealed because individuals have a reason for wanting to impart the information, a reason that may have little to do with money, though money often does grease the wheels. The information could be disinformation. It takes an unusual person who is willing to use their language skills and familiarity with other countries to live overseas undercover, to deceive, steal, and manipulate their way to secrets. “It’s a dirty business.” [Richard Helms] It would seem the very nature of the work would predicate a small clandestine field arm, therefore limiting the size of the analyst arm.
Weiner starts with the genesis of the Agency, an outgrowth of the Office of Strategic Services which parachuted agents behind enemy lines in WWII Europe to sabotage the enemy and influence the course of the war. While it was put about when speaking with the American public that an Agency that could understand the intent of hostile nations would be better prepared against attack by those nations, really its model was not merely listening, but acting. Immediately upon its conception, a result of the predilection of Agency leaders and because powerful men, including presidents, found the secrecy aspect of the Agency irresistible, the Agency became an instrument, not simply of “intelligence” but of covert action. And every president sought to change (even wanted to abolish) the Agency when its failures became politically unbearable.
The truth is that a spy agency that operates in secret has also often withheld their secrets from the president and his council of advisors. Worse than that, sometimes they tailored the information they gave to the president to suit his predilections.
Weiner gives examples of successes amidst the roster of failures of intelligence. The CIA muscled the Taiwan government into abandoning its plan to develop a nuclear weapon; they managed to cripple the Abu Nidal organization through disinformation; the CIA stymied Soviet attempts to steal corporate software by implanting bugs into targeted software. And Weiner seems to admire, or at least not coruscate, certain CIA officers like Robert Ames, the Arabist scholar-spy memorialized by Kai Bird in The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames and who was killed in the Beirut embassy bombing in 1984. Weiner also gives a pass to Robert Gates, former CIA director and Secretary of Defense under two presidents. Weiner acknowledges the extraordinary patriotism and selflessness of certain agents in the field, who tried to accomplish their missions despite the dysfunction at home.
It is easy for us to forget that the Agency was only started after WWII, in 1947. Before that, we used to get intelligence through journalists, businesspeople, and embassies. We did not usually attempt to influence events except through pressure at national levels, among statesmen. When it began, The Agency was obsessed with Soviet power around the world and a balance of that power. Even then our intelligence was faulty, subject to political jostling, and influenced by the fears of our government. Although revolting to learn, it does us no good to turn away from Weiner’s assessment of these years, since millions of Americans before us have made their indignation known and demanded better. It forced changes in the Agency, which was decimated after the fall of the Soviet Union, which caught the vast arsenal of analysts completely by surprise.
The Agency underwent several RIFs in its history, and it was even thought that outsourcing to private contractors would provide better intelligence. The result was higher prices for intelligence and less control over agents. Weiner talks us through the failures of several directors, and their determination to make the Agency great again: Charges of too big, too small, too old, too young, too restrained, too wild have all been dealt with in the way one might expect a large bureaucracy might try to change its image. None of the changes have really worked. Finally, because presidents have had difficulty relying on the CIA for accurate information, they now call on a plethora of different agencies for intelligence which are run mostly by former military men, and much of the CIA's capabilities are outsourced.
What is undeniable is the secrecy of the organization has come close several times in its history to ruining us. Outside threats are one thing, but many times the Agency was operating to contain threats we created through fear. The reason our democracy has succeeded as long as it has is because we have managed to maintain some kind of public accountability through transparency. Weiner asserts that Soviet leaders knew before the Berlin Wall fell that the lies and secrets their government kept from their people ultimately ruined them. A large and secret bureaucracy takes on a life of its own that cannot have adequate oversight. It becomes a danger rather than an aid.
Despite his dire assessment of the Agency and its current capabilities, Weiner does not advocate its abolition. He acknowledges it may have an important role to play in spite of the difficulty of its mission and the difficulty of finding the right personnel. He suggests that it may one day be refashioned to fit the needs we have with a leadership that can shape and control it. Until then, however, it is a liability we rely upon at our peril.
The fact that we now experience violence and terror from non-state actors might predicate more changes for the CIA. More agents has been the simplistic solution loudly proposed by at least one presidential candidate (Marco Rubio), but we already know that is hardly likely to produce the desired results. The CIA has always been plagued by its inability to recruit and retain good personnel because of its image and history but also because covert work is very hard to accomplish successfully. It may be time to reduce the size of the Agency once again, which may seem counterintuitive in this time of diverse threats. Getting vast numbers of analysts or agents unsuited to the task is probably not going to yield the kind of information we wish we had.
I remain skeptical that a large bureaucracy can produce intelligence beyond what a large news organization can organize and analyze. I wonder that we have the hubris to influence events in allied countries, or to organize the defeat of leadership in countries with which we are not allied. I have no argument with obtaining information, as long as that information serves to better prepare us for changes which affect us. I note that the largest changes which are bound to affect us profoundly in immediate years, e.g., climate change, do not seem to have registered a blip on the government radar while we scurry to contain events which will not have as great an impact on us. It looks like a kind of overheated masculine-style delusion predicated on fear rather than the rational measure of risk.
Therefore, before eliminating the organization entirely, perhaps we should bring it back to its earliest roots during this time of terrorist insurgency. Keep the organization small and flexible and covert, like our enemies’ organization. Covert undercover work may have been useful during WWII, but it didn’t work well after that. The CIA did real damage to countries around the world by involving themselves with regime change predicated on fear whipped up by our leaders. Surely the American people have progressed beyond that, even if some of their self-proclaimed leaders are still caught in the dark ages.
Weiner told us nearly everything, but he didn’t tell us what became of the analyst(s) who were responsible for the U.S. bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, reporting that it was a weapons cache.
I listened to the Blackstone audio production of this book, read by Stefan Rudnicki. It was beautifully produced and read, and though Rudnicki mispronounced some people and place names, those mistakes did not obscure understanding. This is a real masterpiece of journalism.
The easy solutions to repairing or overhauling the Agency when they have done something spectacularly inept--or not done something, like prepare us for 9/11--have all been tried, each unsuccessful in its own way. Weiner has given us the material with which to begin to understand what we as citizens have tasked (and funded) the Agency to do and to ask ourselves if this is still a valid and do-able goal.
Soliciting secrets held by foreign governments can be very difficult work. Most of the time those secrets are revealed because individuals have a reason for wanting to impart the information, a reason that may have little to do with money, though money often does grease the wheels. The information could be disinformation. It takes an unusual person who is willing to use their language skills and familiarity with other countries to live overseas undercover, to deceive, steal, and manipulate their way to secrets. “It’s a dirty business.” [Richard Helms] It would seem the very nature of the work would predicate a small clandestine field arm, therefore limiting the size of the analyst arm.
Weiner starts with the genesis of the Agency, an outgrowth of the Office of Strategic Services which parachuted agents behind enemy lines in WWII Europe to sabotage the enemy and influence the course of the war. While it was put about when speaking with the American public that an Agency that could understand the intent of hostile nations would be better prepared against attack by those nations, really its model was not merely listening, but acting. Immediately upon its conception, a result of the predilection of Agency leaders and because powerful men, including presidents, found the secrecy aspect of the Agency irresistible, the Agency became an instrument, not simply of “intelligence” but of covert action. And every president sought to change (even wanted to abolish) the Agency when its failures became politically unbearable.
The truth is that a spy agency that operates in secret has also often withheld their secrets from the president and his council of advisors. Worse than that, sometimes they tailored the information they gave to the president to suit his predilections.
Weiner gives examples of successes amidst the roster of failures of intelligence. The CIA muscled the Taiwan government into abandoning its plan to develop a nuclear weapon; they managed to cripple the Abu Nidal organization through disinformation; the CIA stymied Soviet attempts to steal corporate software by implanting bugs into targeted software. And Weiner seems to admire, or at least not coruscate, certain CIA officers like Robert Ames, the Arabist scholar-spy memorialized by Kai Bird in The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames and who was killed in the Beirut embassy bombing in 1984. Weiner also gives a pass to Robert Gates, former CIA director and Secretary of Defense under two presidents. Weiner acknowledges the extraordinary patriotism and selflessness of certain agents in the field, who tried to accomplish their missions despite the dysfunction at home.
It is easy for us to forget that the Agency was only started after WWII, in 1947. Before that, we used to get intelligence through journalists, businesspeople, and embassies. We did not usually attempt to influence events except through pressure at national levels, among statesmen. When it began, The Agency was obsessed with Soviet power around the world and a balance of that power. Even then our intelligence was faulty, subject to political jostling, and influenced by the fears of our government. Although revolting to learn, it does us no good to turn away from Weiner’s assessment of these years, since millions of Americans before us have made their indignation known and demanded better. It forced changes in the Agency, which was decimated after the fall of the Soviet Union, which caught the vast arsenal of analysts completely by surprise.
The Agency underwent several RIFs in its history, and it was even thought that outsourcing to private contractors would provide better intelligence. The result was higher prices for intelligence and less control over agents. Weiner talks us through the failures of several directors, and their determination to make the Agency great again: Charges of too big, too small, too old, too young, too restrained, too wild have all been dealt with in the way one might expect a large bureaucracy might try to change its image. None of the changes have really worked. Finally, because presidents have had difficulty relying on the CIA for accurate information, they now call on a plethora of different agencies for intelligence which are run mostly by former military men, and much of the CIA's capabilities are outsourced.
What is undeniable is the secrecy of the organization has come close several times in its history to ruining us. Outside threats are one thing, but many times the Agency was operating to contain threats we created through fear. The reason our democracy has succeeded as long as it has is because we have managed to maintain some kind of public accountability through transparency. Weiner asserts that Soviet leaders knew before the Berlin Wall fell that the lies and secrets their government kept from their people ultimately ruined them. A large and secret bureaucracy takes on a life of its own that cannot have adequate oversight. It becomes a danger rather than an aid.
Despite his dire assessment of the Agency and its current capabilities, Weiner does not advocate its abolition. He acknowledges it may have an important role to play in spite of the difficulty of its mission and the difficulty of finding the right personnel. He suggests that it may one day be refashioned to fit the needs we have with a leadership that can shape and control it. Until then, however, it is a liability we rely upon at our peril.
The fact that we now experience violence and terror from non-state actors might predicate more changes for the CIA. More agents has been the simplistic solution loudly proposed by at least one presidential candidate (Marco Rubio), but we already know that is hardly likely to produce the desired results. The CIA has always been plagued by its inability to recruit and retain good personnel because of its image and history but also because covert work is very hard to accomplish successfully. It may be time to reduce the size of the Agency once again, which may seem counterintuitive in this time of diverse threats. Getting vast numbers of analysts or agents unsuited to the task is probably not going to yield the kind of information we wish we had.
I remain skeptical that a large bureaucracy can produce intelligence beyond what a large news organization can organize and analyze. I wonder that we have the hubris to influence events in allied countries, or to organize the defeat of leadership in countries with which we are not allied. I have no argument with obtaining information, as long as that information serves to better prepare us for changes which affect us. I note that the largest changes which are bound to affect us profoundly in immediate years, e.g., climate change, do not seem to have registered a blip on the government radar while we scurry to contain events which will not have as great an impact on us. It looks like a kind of overheated masculine-style delusion predicated on fear rather than the rational measure of risk.
Therefore, before eliminating the organization entirely, perhaps we should bring it back to its earliest roots during this time of terrorist insurgency. Keep the organization small and flexible and covert, like our enemies’ organization. Covert undercover work may have been useful during WWII, but it didn’t work well after that. The CIA did real damage to countries around the world by involving themselves with regime change predicated on fear whipped up by our leaders. Surely the American people have progressed beyond that, even if some of their self-proclaimed leaders are still caught in the dark ages.
Weiner told us nearly everything, but he didn’t tell us what became of the analyst(s) who were responsible for the U.S. bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, reporting that it was a weapons cache.
I listened to the Blackstone audio production of this book, read by Stefan Rudnicki. It was beautifully produced and read, and though Rudnicki mispronounced some people and place names, those mistakes did not obscure understanding. This is a real masterpiece of journalism.
December 22, 2007
Written by a writer who has won the Pullitzer Prize for his work on National Security for the New York Times, this is the first ever comprehensive, on the record, history of the CIA. Every interview in the book is on the record, including 10 Directors and over 100 agents. With newfound access to thousands of recently declassified documents, and extensive notes, this is the best history of the CIA you're likely to read.
This is a devastating book. The experience of reading it reminded me of the experience reading The Greatest Story Never Told by Michael K. Smith. A revelation on every page. I'd read as widely as I could about the CIA, but there's always a grain of salt involved. Finally, a book I deem credible enough to verify almost every story I'd heard of about the CIA. Secret wars, assassinations, executions, propaganda, rigged elections, LSD experimentation, secrecy, madness, paranoia, suicide. But the greatest secret Weiner reveals is the total lack of competence, the amazing number of times CIA was penetrated by foreign intelligence agents, and the fact that it failed miserably in the two tasks it was created to perform: figure out with the Soviets were doing, and prevent a second Pearl Harbor.
A warning- These dark corners of American history, the ones that haven't made it yet into the history textbooks, are painful to confront.
This is a devastating book. The experience of reading it reminded me of the experience reading The Greatest Story Never Told by Michael K. Smith. A revelation on every page. I'd read as widely as I could about the CIA, but there's always a grain of salt involved. Finally, a book I deem credible enough to verify almost every story I'd heard of about the CIA. Secret wars, assassinations, executions, propaganda, rigged elections, LSD experimentation, secrecy, madness, paranoia, suicide. But the greatest secret Weiner reveals is the total lack of competence, the amazing number of times CIA was penetrated by foreign intelligence agents, and the fact that it failed miserably in the two tasks it was created to perform: figure out with the Soviets were doing, and prevent a second Pearl Harbor.
A warning- These dark corners of American history, the ones that haven't made it yet into the history textbooks, are painful to confront.
February 23, 2022
"Hadd mondjak valamit ezekről a titkosszolgálati fickókról. Texasban nőttem fel egy farmon, ahol volt egy Bessie nevű tehenünk. Én fejtem meg kora reggel. Kikötöttem, leültem, és szépen kifejtem egy sajtár friss tejet. Egy napon különösen keményen dolgoztam, és sikerült színültig fejnem a sajtárt, de nem figyeltem eléggé, és a jó öreg Bessie egyszer csak jól belecsapott a szaros farkával a tejjel teli sajtárba. Na mármost, pontosan ugyanezt csinálják ezek a titkosszolgálati fickók is. Az ember keményen dolgozik, és beindít egy jó programot, vagy kitűz valamilyen célt, és ezek meg egy szaros farokkal jól belecsapnak az egészbe."
(Lyndon Johnson amerikai elnök helyzetértékelése a CIA-ról)
A titkosszolgálat egy demokráciában oximoron. Mert kinek is tartozik elszámolással? A népnek. Azonban ha rendesen, semmit sem leplezve elszámol a népnek, akkor ugyan mitől titkosszolgálat? Ám valamiféle titkosszolgálatra mégis szükség van, hisz ha a rivális államoknak van hírszerzésük, akkor lépéshátrányba kerülhetünk velük szemben - ám az így létrehozott intézmény szükségszerűen egy morális szürkezónában tevékenykedik majd, olyan akciókat bonyolítva, amelyekről a nép jobb, ha nem tud, és nem csak nemzetbiztonsági okokból, hanem mert piszkosul nehéz erkölcsi kérdésekkel kéne szembenéznie. (Azt meg nem szereti.) A hírszerzés tehát a demokrácia nem-demokratikus zárványa, eleven ellentmondás, ami csak akkor birtokolhat valamiféle legitimitást, ha van felé egy bizalom a politika és a társadalom felől.
Na, a CIA bő ötven éve ennek a bizalmi tőkének a folyamatos eltékozlásáról szól. Legnagyobb bravúrja pedig az, hogy amikor már mindenki azt hitte, tényleg nincs mit eltékozolni, még akkor is rá tudtak tenni még egy lapáttal.
Minden titkosszolgálat alapvetően három részből tevődik össze. Van az operatív csoport, ami az idegen államok belügyeibe való közvetlen, de titkos beavatkozásért felel. Van továbbá a hírszerzés, ami lehet egyfelől elektronikus, másfelől pedig humán - ez utóbbiakat nevezzük mindközönségesen "kémeknek". És végül van az egésznek a veleje, a hab a tortán, az elemzők, ezek a (papíron) bénítóan zseniális elmék, akik a befolyó adatok közül kirostálják a szemetet, a dezinformációt, és az egészből leszűrnek egy oldalnyi esszenciát, pontosat és világosat, hogy még Donald Trump is értse. Sajna azonban az a helyzet, hogy a CIA nem ilyen titkosszolgálat. A probléma gyökere a szervezet megalapításakor már erősen belekapaszkodott a talajba.
A negyvenes évek végén járunk, a világháború véget ért, vagy pontosabban szólva átment melegből hidegbe, egyetlen sokfejű sárkánnyal, a Szovjetunióban székelő kommunizmussal. Ez a kommunizmus egészen pöpec, félelmetes titkosszolgálatot épített ki magának, az USA pedig úgy vélte, hogy ha nem teremti meg ennek tükörképét, akkor vereségre lesz kárhoztatva. A baj az, hogy nem okosabbak, hanem félelmetesebbek akartak lenni ruszki kollégáiknál, úgyhogy telepakolták szervezetüket acéltökű fajankókkal, akik a titkosszolgálatokat a cserkészet boss level-jének képzelték el. Úgy hitték, a szolgálat magasiskolája az operatív munka kell legyen, következésképpen félkatonai szervezetek kiképzésére fókuszáltak, valamint erőszakos kormánybuktatásokra. Még ha jól csinálták volna - de nem. Az általuk kiokosított diverzánsokat ugyanis hiába dobálták le Kínában vagy a szovjet érdekszférában, vagy értelmetlenül elpusztultak, vagy megfordították őket. (Ebben az időben könnyű volt rájönni, ki kettős ügynök azok közül, akik Kínában kémkedtek a CIA-nak: mindenki, aki életben maradt.) A kormánybuktatási mánia pedig még rondább ügy volt. Bár az USA névleg a demokratikus értékrend elterjesztéséért harcolt, de ezt a CIA hidegháború kontextusában úgy fordította a saját nyelvére, hogy "legyen demokrácia, de ha nem a mi jelöltünk nyer, akkor beszántjuk az egész országot"*. Mindezek mellett az olyan apróságokra, mint a hírszerzés és az elemzés, már nem maradt kraft. Ami pont oda vezetett, amire lehetett is számítani: a szolgálat vak Jean-Claude Van Damme-ként csapkodott maga körül a ringben, elveszítette képességét a világ megértésére, a hosszú távú gondolkodás képességét pedig csak azért nem, mert sosem volt neki. Semmit sem értett meg az oroszok szándékaiból, fogalma sem volt, mit fog tenni Hruscsov vagy Gorbacsov, váratlanul érte a rakétaválság éppúgy, mint a Szovjetunió bukása. Higgadt helyzetértékelés helyett inkább arra fókuszált, hogy saját nélkülözhetetlenségének mítoszát építgesse, ennek érdekében rendesen veszélyesebbnek állította be a kommunizmust, mint amilyen (mert tudta, minél inkább be van parázva mindenki, annál könnyebben kapnak a Kongresszustól pénzt), és ezért süllyesztette el az összes kritikát. Ezzel azonban az önkorrekcióról is lemondott, nem csoda, ha a hidegháború után az új ellenfél, a terrorizmus ellen betűre elkövette ugyanazokat a hibákat és bűnöket**.
Weiner alaposan körbevezet minket azon az intézményen, ami a világ legerősebb demokráciájának hírszerző szervezeteként próbálta eladni magát, holott csak egy kupleráj volt. Azzá tették az igazgatók, az állomásvezetők, és persze az elnökök is kapnak hideget-meleget***. Szövege lendületes olvasmány, ami egyfelől az oral history-ra támaszkodik, másrészt azokra az anyagokra, amelyeket a 2000-es évek elején oldottak fel a titkosítás alól. Áthatja a tudat, hogy Amerika megérdemelne egy jobb, tisztább, eredményesebb titkosszolgálatot - szégyen, hogy ezt eddig nem sikerült tető alá hoznia. Az ember kénytelen szörnyülködve olvasni, azon morfondírozva, hogy EZEK ugyan mitől jobbak, mint akik ellen küzdenek? Hát, EZEK talán semmiben. Mondjuk legalább a rendszer javára írható, hogy ki lehetett adni EZEKről ezt a könyvet. Oroszországban Weiner valószínűleg a kézirat leadását sem érte volna meg.
* Az csak az egyik, hogy a CIA felelősége elvitathatatlan az olyan tömeggyilkosságokban, amelyeket jobboldali katonai junták követtek el a hírszerzés pénzén és nem ritkán fegyvereivel (a nicaraguai kontrák, vagy a chilei diktátor, Pinochet talán a legismertebb példa.) Erre még akár azt is mondhatnánk, hogy a nagypolitika nem tolsztoji bálterem, itt néha muszáj gonosznak lenni. (Mondjuk szerintem nem, szóval szüljetek sünt.) De ha gonosznak szabad is lenni, hülyének tilos - a CIA viszont passziót csinált abból, hogy saját ellenségeit nevelte ki például Afganisztánban.
** Szimbolikus jelenet, amikor a CIA igazgatója a felesége barátnőjétől tudja meg, hogy Irak lerohanta Kuvaitot. Mert a hölgy legalább nézte a CNN-t.
*** Gyakorlatilag nem akadt amerikai elnök, aki képes lett volna pozitív változásokat kikényszeríteni a szervezetből. Weinernek leginkább a Nixon-Kissinger tandem van a bögyében, no meg ifjabb Bush, akik értelmezésében legtöbbet ártottak a nemzetbiztonságnak.
(Lyndon Johnson amerikai elnök helyzetértékelése a CIA-ról)
A titkosszolgálat egy demokráciában oximoron. Mert kinek is tartozik elszámolással? A népnek. Azonban ha rendesen, semmit sem leplezve elszámol a népnek, akkor ugyan mitől titkosszolgálat? Ám valamiféle titkosszolgálatra mégis szükség van, hisz ha a rivális államoknak van hírszerzésük, akkor lépéshátrányba kerülhetünk velük szemben - ám az így létrehozott intézmény szükségszerűen egy morális szürkezónában tevékenykedik majd, olyan akciókat bonyolítva, amelyekről a nép jobb, ha nem tud, és nem csak nemzetbiztonsági okokból, hanem mert piszkosul nehéz erkölcsi kérdésekkel kéne szembenéznie. (Azt meg nem szereti.) A hírszerzés tehát a demokrácia nem-demokratikus zárványa, eleven ellentmondás, ami csak akkor birtokolhat valamiféle legitimitást, ha van felé egy bizalom a politika és a társadalom felől.
Na, a CIA bő ötven éve ennek a bizalmi tőkének a folyamatos eltékozlásáról szól. Legnagyobb bravúrja pedig az, hogy amikor már mindenki azt hitte, tényleg nincs mit eltékozolni, még akkor is rá tudtak tenni még egy lapáttal.
Minden titkosszolgálat alapvetően három részből tevődik össze. Van az operatív csoport, ami az idegen államok belügyeibe való közvetlen, de titkos beavatkozásért felel. Van továbbá a hírszerzés, ami lehet egyfelől elektronikus, másfelől pedig humán - ez utóbbiakat nevezzük mindközönségesen "kémeknek". És végül van az egésznek a veleje, a hab a tortán, az elemzők, ezek a (papíron) bénítóan zseniális elmék, akik a befolyó adatok közül kirostálják a szemetet, a dezinformációt, és az egészből leszűrnek egy oldalnyi esszenciát, pontosat és világosat, hogy még Donald Trump is értse. Sajna azonban az a helyzet, hogy a CIA nem ilyen titkosszolgálat. A probléma gyökere a szervezet megalapításakor már erősen belekapaszkodott a talajba.
A negyvenes évek végén járunk, a világháború véget ért, vagy pontosabban szólva átment melegből hidegbe, egyetlen sokfejű sárkánnyal, a Szovjetunióban székelő kommunizmussal. Ez a kommunizmus egészen pöpec, félelmetes titkosszolgálatot épített ki magának, az USA pedig úgy vélte, hogy ha nem teremti meg ennek tükörképét, akkor vereségre lesz kárhoztatva. A baj az, hogy nem okosabbak, hanem félelmetesebbek akartak lenni ruszki kollégáiknál, úgyhogy telepakolták szervezetüket acéltökű fajankókkal, akik a titkosszolgálatokat a cserkészet boss level-jének képzelték el. Úgy hitték, a szolgálat magasiskolája az operatív munka kell legyen, következésképpen félkatonai szervezetek kiképzésére fókuszáltak, valamint erőszakos kormánybuktatásokra. Még ha jól csinálták volna - de nem. Az általuk kiokosított diverzánsokat ugyanis hiába dobálták le Kínában vagy a szovjet érdekszférában, vagy értelmetlenül elpusztultak, vagy megfordították őket. (Ebben az időben könnyű volt rájönni, ki kettős ügynök azok közül, akik Kínában kémkedtek a CIA-nak: mindenki, aki életben maradt.) A kormánybuktatási mánia pedig még rondább ügy volt. Bár az USA névleg a demokratikus értékrend elterjesztéséért harcolt, de ezt a CIA hidegháború kontextusában úgy fordította a saját nyelvére, hogy "legyen demokrácia, de ha nem a mi jelöltünk nyer, akkor beszántjuk az egész országot"*. Mindezek mellett az olyan apróságokra, mint a hírszerzés és az elemzés, már nem maradt kraft. Ami pont oda vezetett, amire lehetett is számítani: a szolgálat vak Jean-Claude Van Damme-ként csapkodott maga körül a ringben, elveszítette képességét a világ megértésére, a hosszú távú gondolkodás képességét pedig csak azért nem, mert sosem volt neki. Semmit sem értett meg az oroszok szándékaiból, fogalma sem volt, mit fog tenni Hruscsov vagy Gorbacsov, váratlanul érte a rakétaválság éppúgy, mint a Szovjetunió bukása. Higgadt helyzetértékelés helyett inkább arra fókuszált, hogy saját nélkülözhetetlenségének mítoszát építgesse, ennek érdekében rendesen veszélyesebbnek állította be a kommunizmust, mint amilyen (mert tudta, minél inkább be van parázva mindenki, annál könnyebben kapnak a Kongresszustól pénzt), és ezért süllyesztette el az összes kritikát. Ezzel azonban az önkorrekcióról is lemondott, nem csoda, ha a hidegháború után az új ellenfél, a terrorizmus ellen betűre elkövette ugyanazokat a hibákat és bűnöket**.
Weiner alaposan körbevezet minket azon az intézményen, ami a világ legerősebb demokráciájának hírszerző szervezeteként próbálta eladni magát, holott csak egy kupleráj volt. Azzá tették az igazgatók, az állomásvezetők, és persze az elnökök is kapnak hideget-meleget***. Szövege lendületes olvasmány, ami egyfelől az oral history-ra támaszkodik, másrészt azokra az anyagokra, amelyeket a 2000-es évek elején oldottak fel a titkosítás alól. Áthatja a tudat, hogy Amerika megérdemelne egy jobb, tisztább, eredményesebb titkosszolgálatot - szégyen, hogy ezt eddig nem sikerült tető alá hoznia. Az ember kénytelen szörnyülködve olvasni, azon morfondírozva, hogy EZEK ugyan mitől jobbak, mint akik ellen küzdenek? Hát, EZEK talán semmiben. Mondjuk legalább a rendszer javára írható, hogy ki lehetett adni EZEKről ezt a könyvet. Oroszországban Weiner valószínűleg a kézirat leadását sem érte volna meg.
* Az csak az egyik, hogy a CIA felelősége elvitathatatlan az olyan tömeggyilkosságokban, amelyeket jobboldali katonai junták követtek el a hírszerzés pénzén és nem ritkán fegyvereivel (a nicaraguai kontrák, vagy a chilei diktátor, Pinochet talán a legismertebb példa.) Erre még akár azt is mondhatnánk, hogy a nagypolitika nem tolsztoji bálterem, itt néha muszáj gonosznak lenni. (Mondjuk szerintem nem, szóval szüljetek sünt.) De ha gonosznak szabad is lenni, hülyének tilos - a CIA viszont passziót csinált abból, hogy saját ellenségeit nevelte ki például Afganisztánban.
** Szimbolikus jelenet, amikor a CIA igazgatója a felesége barátnőjétől tudja meg, hogy Irak lerohanta Kuvaitot. Mert a hölgy legalább nézte a CNN-t.
*** Gyakorlatilag nem akadt amerikai elnök, aki képes lett volna pozitív változásokat kikényszeríteni a szervezetből. Weinernek leginkább a Nixon-Kissinger tandem van a bögyében, no meg ifjabb Bush, akik értelmezésében legtöbbet ártottak a nemzetbiztonságnak.
February 13, 2019
When I see, “the History of...” something, I expect the actual history of it.
While this book was extremely well-researched, some claims that were provided had only a basis in conjecture and no actual proof.
In addition, rather than giving the actual history of the CIA, the author only provides an 800-page critique of the agency. I prefer learning history that is based in fact, not having a political agenda. While this book was certainly interesting, it was too politically biased to be enjoyable.
While this book was extremely well-researched, some claims that were provided had only a basis in conjecture and no actual proof.
In addition, rather than giving the actual history of the CIA, the author only provides an 800-page critique of the agency. I prefer learning history that is based in fact, not having a political agenda. While this book was certainly interesting, it was too politically biased to be enjoyable.
June 19, 2021
This book is fantastic and something every American should read. It isn’t just a history of the CIA but a history of America’s epic 20th century failures. It’s a laundry list of every asshole move our government has made in the past 60 years, and almost everything we’ve done has been an asshole move. When will we learn that we can’t kill our way to where we want to be as a nation? Like the man said, all we are saying is give peace a chance.
Now people will hold up the killing of Bin Laden as a great victory for the CIA but it took ten years and who knows how much money. I wouldn’t even want to think about the price tag. And for what? We killed some miserable little creep living in some stinkhole in Pakistan. There is no great shortage of fanatic Muslims who want to kill Americans so one less doesn’t really mean much. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad they put a bullet in his head but that doesn’t justify what we spend on intelligence.
Our intelligence apparatus, just like our military, seems completely incapable of learning from their mistakes. Or better yet, they seem incapable of even recognizing their horrible failures as mistakes. Do they teach military officers that Viet Nam was a complete and utter failure or do they teach the Rambo ideology that we could have won but the politicians screwed it for us? The CIA basically has been running wild for 60 years with little civilian oversight. They have treated our elected leaders with contempt and kept secret some pretty horrible facts of how they do business.
It seemed pretty obvious in Iraq that the Dick Cheney privatized military was not the way to wage war yet we keep going in that direction. In a war, we shouldn’t have civilians in the front areas in support positions, and do we really need to build Pizza Huts in a country we are occupying? Then there’s Blackwater, or whatever the hell they call themselves these days. The American taxpayers are funding a private army headed by proto-fascist Christian fanatics. Does that seem like a good idea to anyone not receiving a check from Uncle Sam?
What we need to understand as a nation is that we have no control over these organizations and the will of the people means exactly nothing—not hardly an endorsement for our democracy, if we can still call it that.
You just have to wonder about what kind of world we would be living in if instead of all of the murder and mayhem sowed by our military and CIA we had used even a small fraction of the money and effort they wasted to actually try to help people. Is our idea better than those who oppose us? I think it is, and that idea is much more powerful than anything in our military or intelligence arsenal.
Instead of droning the shit out of every idiot religious fanatic in the Middle East, we should be putting our efforts into broadcasting a counter-narrative to that of the Muslim extremists. What we now offer the Muslim world is hardly an alternative to fanaticism.
Now people will hold up the killing of Bin Laden as a great victory for the CIA but it took ten years and who knows how much money. I wouldn’t even want to think about the price tag. And for what? We killed some miserable little creep living in some stinkhole in Pakistan. There is no great shortage of fanatic Muslims who want to kill Americans so one less doesn’t really mean much. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad they put a bullet in his head but that doesn’t justify what we spend on intelligence.
Our intelligence apparatus, just like our military, seems completely incapable of learning from their mistakes. Or better yet, they seem incapable of even recognizing their horrible failures as mistakes. Do they teach military officers that Viet Nam was a complete and utter failure or do they teach the Rambo ideology that we could have won but the politicians screwed it for us? The CIA basically has been running wild for 60 years with little civilian oversight. They have treated our elected leaders with contempt and kept secret some pretty horrible facts of how they do business.
It seemed pretty obvious in Iraq that the Dick Cheney privatized military was not the way to wage war yet we keep going in that direction. In a war, we shouldn’t have civilians in the front areas in support positions, and do we really need to build Pizza Huts in a country we are occupying? Then there’s Blackwater, or whatever the hell they call themselves these days. The American taxpayers are funding a private army headed by proto-fascist Christian fanatics. Does that seem like a good idea to anyone not receiving a check from Uncle Sam?
What we need to understand as a nation is that we have no control over these organizations and the will of the people means exactly nothing—not hardly an endorsement for our democracy, if we can still call it that.
You just have to wonder about what kind of world we would be living in if instead of all of the murder and mayhem sowed by our military and CIA we had used even a small fraction of the money and effort they wasted to actually try to help people. Is our idea better than those who oppose us? I think it is, and that idea is much more powerful than anything in our military or intelligence arsenal.
Instead of droning the shit out of every idiot religious fanatic in the Middle East, we should be putting our efforts into broadcasting a counter-narrative to that of the Muslim extremists. What we now offer the Muslim world is hardly an alternative to fanaticism.
June 12, 2010
Oddly enough, it was
The Looking Glass War
that early on opened my eyes to the fact that intelligence work was not conducted with the hyper-competency and machinelike efficiency with which it was depicted in most fiction. When it comes to the Western intelligence agencies, one would think, with a seemingly bottomless budget and access to vast congeries of technology, weaponry, and personnel - state-of-the-art all - there would be few secrets, allied or enemy, incapable of being swiftly ferreted out. Alas, intelligence work is ultimately reliant upon human intelligence, which means its methods will always be vulnerable to all of the frailties and follies and failures endemic to human endeavor.
Weiner depicts how this applies to the fabled CIA, ruthlessly and relentlessly, in a book that sheds light upon an appalling history of misjudgments, misdirections, and mistakes, beginning in the maelstrom final years of the Second World War, and accreting throughout the progressing stages of the Cold War and the brief starburst of relaxed tension that followed gingerly in the wake of its demise. The interagency collisions and confusions that hobbled their ability to detect the 9/11 attack in time to prevent it were entirely presaged by CIA failures in Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, Cuba, and Latin America. Saddled with conflicting Directors of Intelligence and their political masters; infiltrated by communist moles that compromised and frustrated major operations; dogged by evidence of complicity in assassinations and barbaric experimentation; the one redoubtable victory over the Soviet Union that severely affected the latter's fate, that of supporting the Afghani mujahideen in their insurgency, proving a double-edged sword that cleaved its agency enablers on the rebound stroke from that which struck at the Soviet occupiers; Weiner grimly provides the details, clearly exasperated by the agency's remarkable ability to shoot itself in the foot on a steady basis.
Somewhat surprisingly, I found the end result of Weiner's book was to engender a sympathy for the organization - routinely overmatched by an enemy completely unrestrained by the legal, ethical, and political rules the agency had to operate (or at least been seen operating) within, riven by the huge egos and personalities that cast their imprimatur upon their respective departments and operations, endeavoring to penetrate alien cultures by means of methods co-mingling the military with the bureaucratic and aided by contacts who tended to either disappear or betray, so many career operators succumbed to the same bleak routine: despair and disillusionment as they realized their limitations, consolation within the bleary strictures of alcoholism, and, shockingly often, premature death by means of a self-administered bullet. For some reason, the story of Frank Wisner - a wartime agent runner who sent countless covert teams to their deaths via nighttime drops into an Albanian countryside pre-warned of their coming, and who seemed to learn little of value from this exercise in lethal futility - and his descent into insanity and suicide particularly haunted me. The anguish accumulated over years of stunted achievement is perfectly captured by his presence in a photo in the book. Amidst smiling colleagues, the balding Wisner presents to the camera a bleak gaze of nullity; he is the epitome of a shattered man. Then there is James Jesus Angleton, for ages the CIA's director of counter-intelligence, a man gifted and flawed in equal measure, likewise driven to the limits of alcohol-fueled paranoia over his inability to uncover the fabled CIA mole, a paranoia that spread like a virus to infect much of the organization. In the echoes of Weiner's condemning history, it is clear that the agency has been deficient from inception and is badly in need of a reconfiguration if ever the United States is to consistently achieve first-rate, reliable intelligence. It is the personal cost, that of so many committed men broken on the wheel of futility, that is the most stinging legacy of all.
Weiner depicts how this applies to the fabled CIA, ruthlessly and relentlessly, in a book that sheds light upon an appalling history of misjudgments, misdirections, and mistakes, beginning in the maelstrom final years of the Second World War, and accreting throughout the progressing stages of the Cold War and the brief starburst of relaxed tension that followed gingerly in the wake of its demise. The interagency collisions and confusions that hobbled their ability to detect the 9/11 attack in time to prevent it were entirely presaged by CIA failures in Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, Cuba, and Latin America. Saddled with conflicting Directors of Intelligence and their political masters; infiltrated by communist moles that compromised and frustrated major operations; dogged by evidence of complicity in assassinations and barbaric experimentation; the one redoubtable victory over the Soviet Union that severely affected the latter's fate, that of supporting the Afghani mujahideen in their insurgency, proving a double-edged sword that cleaved its agency enablers on the rebound stroke from that which struck at the Soviet occupiers; Weiner grimly provides the details, clearly exasperated by the agency's remarkable ability to shoot itself in the foot on a steady basis.
Somewhat surprisingly, I found the end result of Weiner's book was to engender a sympathy for the organization - routinely overmatched by an enemy completely unrestrained by the legal, ethical, and political rules the agency had to operate (or at least been seen operating) within, riven by the huge egos and personalities that cast their imprimatur upon their respective departments and operations, endeavoring to penetrate alien cultures by means of methods co-mingling the military with the bureaucratic and aided by contacts who tended to either disappear or betray, so many career operators succumbed to the same bleak routine: despair and disillusionment as they realized their limitations, consolation within the bleary strictures of alcoholism, and, shockingly often, premature death by means of a self-administered bullet. For some reason, the story of Frank Wisner - a wartime agent runner who sent countless covert teams to their deaths via nighttime drops into an Albanian countryside pre-warned of their coming, and who seemed to learn little of value from this exercise in lethal futility - and his descent into insanity and suicide particularly haunted me. The anguish accumulated over years of stunted achievement is perfectly captured by his presence in a photo in the book. Amidst smiling colleagues, the balding Wisner presents to the camera a bleak gaze of nullity; he is the epitome of a shattered man. Then there is James Jesus Angleton, for ages the CIA's director of counter-intelligence, a man gifted and flawed in equal measure, likewise driven to the limits of alcohol-fueled paranoia over his inability to uncover the fabled CIA mole, a paranoia that spread like a virus to infect much of the organization. In the echoes of Weiner's condemning history, it is clear that the agency has been deficient from inception and is badly in need of a reconfiguration if ever the United States is to consistently achieve first-rate, reliable intelligence. It is the personal cost, that of so many committed men broken on the wheel of futility, that is the most stinging legacy of all.
March 28, 2013
A five star topic, with five star research, does not a five star book make. I give Mr. Weiner one star for this 'book,' which is not a book at all. It is a collection of research notes that would be better titled "What the CIA did after the second world war to ruin the world for most people, including its own agents."
Though Weiner has done a great job of bringing them together, there's no 'organization' to the facts. The title of each chapter is a quote from someone taken from that chapter; each chapter is split up into oodles of 1-2 page sections that are, again, headed by a quote from someone in from that section. In other words, this is one-damn-thing-after-another history. That's great if you're doing research, but is a torturous read; a friend of mine summed it up nicely: he can write great sentences, but he has no idea how to put sentences together into paragraphs. And the same thing goes for his sections/chapters/book sections/the book's narrative. The general narrative is meant to be "The CIA does too much covert operating and not enough collection and analyzing of data." Which might be true, but given the immense pressure that ever more idiotic American presidents have applied to the Agency, it's hardly the big cause for concern. Maybe *not* trying to murder everyone to the left of Goldwater in South American/Asian/African/Middle Eastern/European politics would be a good idea?
Anyway, this is less a review than a warning: I'd advise you to buy this book, and dip into it every now and then. There's no reason to read it cover to cover when you could be reading good, depressing spy novels instead.
Though Weiner has done a great job of bringing them together, there's no 'organization' to the facts. The title of each chapter is a quote from someone taken from that chapter; each chapter is split up into oodles of 1-2 page sections that are, again, headed by a quote from someone in from that section. In other words, this is one-damn-thing-after-another history. That's great if you're doing research, but is a torturous read; a friend of mine summed it up nicely: he can write great sentences, but he has no idea how to put sentences together into paragraphs. And the same thing goes for his sections/chapters/book sections/the book's narrative. The general narrative is meant to be "The CIA does too much covert operating and not enough collection and analyzing of data." Which might be true, but given the immense pressure that ever more idiotic American presidents have applied to the Agency, it's hardly the big cause for concern. Maybe *not* trying to murder everyone to the left of Goldwater in South American/Asian/African/Middle Eastern/European politics would be a good idea?
Anyway, this is less a review than a warning: I'd advise you to buy this book, and dip into it every now and then. There's no reason to read it cover to cover when you could be reading good, depressing spy novels instead.
April 29, 2022
Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes recounts the first six decades of the Central Intelligence Agency's existence. Weiner's account, presented in a terse, staccato prose style, is unquestionably damning: from its earliest days in the post-WWII era, the CIA struggled both to articulate a clear mission and to carry out its ostensible function of providing intelligence on America's enemies. Early leaders of the Agency, many veterans of the wartime OSS, were obsessed with daring behind-the-lines missions that proved worse than useless in penetrating the Iron Curtain; it took years before the CIA successfully managed to plant spies within the USSR, and never succeeded in North Korea. Unsurprisingly, its predictive powers were marginal at best, with crises from the Korean War to the Cuban Missile Crisis, the fall of the Soviet Union and 9/11 missed or downplayed by the Agency. If the purpose of the CIA is to protect the United States and identify its enemies, Weiner argues, its history has been one of repeated failure.
What the CIA excelled at was funneling money to friendly political movements (democratic or otherwise) and sewing chaos in the Third World - fomenting coups, civil wars and terrorism in countries from Chile and Guatemala to Iran and Indonesia. The book is at its best (if most infuriating) when Weiner chronicles these misadventures, which even when successful invariably had detrimental effects both on the United States and the countries impacted. Its leadership fragmented into factions, led by imperious men like the amoral Allen Dulles, arrogant Richard Helms and the paranoiac James Jesus Angleton (who regularly accused rivals of being Soviet moles) which prevented effective intelligence-gathering during the height of the Cold War. And its near-constant abuse by presidents: Eisenhower and Kennedy's obsession with covert actions, Lyndon Johnson unleashing it on the antiwar movement, Richard Nixon using it to harass political opponents (and purging its leadership for failing to comply), Ronald Reagan's enlisting it into the Iran-Contra Affair and George Bush pressuring them to cook intelligence justifying the Iraq War. Probes into its effectiveness by Congress, most notably the Church and Pike Committees of the 1970s, led not to solid reforms but a defensive crouch that benefited neither the Agency nor the government. It became a classic bureaucracy in the worst sense, binsular and self-protective but also unable to stop from being buffeted by political winds.
Weiner's book has received criticism both from other historians of the CIA, who find his portrait unremittingly critical and occasionally inaccurate (the title comes from a mangled Eisenhower quote that didn't refer to the CIA at all), and those who insist on viewing the Agency as part of an all-powerful "Deep State" or "Secret Government." Certainly it's hard to view the CIA as the hyper-competent, nigh-omnipotent organization of legend when its history appears to be an unremitting parade of catastrophes (perhaps even more so when Weiner relegates its domestic shenanigans to a few, scattered paragraphs), though the evils of the Phoenix Program, the subversion of Chilean democracy or "enhanced interrogation" of suspected terrorists remain clear enough. Still, Legacy of Ashes makes a compelling argument that America's premiere intelligence branch is neither effective at its job nor helpful to the interests of the United States, let alone the world, and that only major reforms (if not abolition) could salvage it. A masterful, compelling portrait of failure, folly and hubris.
What the CIA excelled at was funneling money to friendly political movements (democratic or otherwise) and sewing chaos in the Third World - fomenting coups, civil wars and terrorism in countries from Chile and Guatemala to Iran and Indonesia. The book is at its best (if most infuriating) when Weiner chronicles these misadventures, which even when successful invariably had detrimental effects both on the United States and the countries impacted. Its leadership fragmented into factions, led by imperious men like the amoral Allen Dulles, arrogant Richard Helms and the paranoiac James Jesus Angleton (who regularly accused rivals of being Soviet moles) which prevented effective intelligence-gathering during the height of the Cold War. And its near-constant abuse by presidents: Eisenhower and Kennedy's obsession with covert actions, Lyndon Johnson unleashing it on the antiwar movement, Richard Nixon using it to harass political opponents (and purging its leadership for failing to comply), Ronald Reagan's enlisting it into the Iran-Contra Affair and George Bush pressuring them to cook intelligence justifying the Iraq War. Probes into its effectiveness by Congress, most notably the Church and Pike Committees of the 1970s, led not to solid reforms but a defensive crouch that benefited neither the Agency nor the government. It became a classic bureaucracy in the worst sense, binsular and self-protective but also unable to stop from being buffeted by political winds.
Weiner's book has received criticism both from other historians of the CIA, who find his portrait unremittingly critical and occasionally inaccurate (the title comes from a mangled Eisenhower quote that didn't refer to the CIA at all), and those who insist on viewing the Agency as part of an all-powerful "Deep State" or "Secret Government." Certainly it's hard to view the CIA as the hyper-competent, nigh-omnipotent organization of legend when its history appears to be an unremitting parade of catastrophes (perhaps even more so when Weiner relegates its domestic shenanigans to a few, scattered paragraphs), though the evils of the Phoenix Program, the subversion of Chilean democracy or "enhanced interrogation" of suspected terrorists remain clear enough. Still, Legacy of Ashes makes a compelling argument that America's premiere intelligence branch is neither effective at its job nor helpful to the interests of the United States, let alone the world, and that only major reforms (if not abolition) could salvage it. A masterful, compelling portrait of failure, folly and hubris.
May 27, 2022
يفترض أن أكتب هذه المراجعة تحت جنح الظلام، متنكر أو متلثم بوشاح، وفي مكان لا يعرفه أحد. ذلك أن هذه المراجعة تخص كتاباً ينتقد السي آي أيه، وبالتالي، يجب أن احتاط من صاروخ قد ينطلق ليهد السقف على رأسي، أو من رصاصة قناص تتسلل من نافذتي، أو لغم تحت مفتاح (إدخال) في لوحة المفاتيح. أقول يُفترض، إذ أنه بعد قراءة هذا الكتاب، أصبحت أعرف جهاز المخابرات الأشهر على حقيقته وأعرف حجمه الفعلي.
عبر صفحات هذا الكتاب، ينشر تيم واينر غسيل المخابرات المركزية الأمنية ليفضح مواطن القصور في أداءها ويكشف الستار عن أفشل عملياتها. حسب واينر، فإن الجهاز يعاني مما يلي، على سبيل المثال لا الحصر:
1- بدلاً من جمع المعلومات المطلوبة للأمن القومي والعمليات العسكرية والمفاوضات السياسية، اتجهت السي آي أيه إلى الأعمال الخفية، أو القذرة، حيث تخصصت بتدبير الانقلابات وارتكاب الاغتيالات وإدارة دفة الانتخابات إلى جانب إنشاء السجون والتعذيب.
2- الوكالة مخترقة من قِبل أعداءها على الدوام، سواءً كانوا من السوفيات أو من سواهم. ما يجعل العدو قادراً على التلاعب بك والتأثير على قرارك والتشكيك في جواسيسك.
3- تسعى الوكالة إلى عدم التصادم مع مؤسسة الرئاسة، لذا فهي تزيف التقارير وتدفن الأخبار السيئة حتى تنال الحظوة.
4- تفشل السي آي أيه في جمع المعلومات عن أعدائها من أشخاص ودول، لذا فهي تدفع بالقيادة السياسة لاتخاذ القرارات "على العمياني".
5- حتى عندما تنجح الوكالة في تنفيذ انقلاب أو التخلص من غريم، فإنها تعجز عن إيجاد البدائل وغالبا ما تترك الدول تغرق في الفوضى لتدفع الثمن لاحقاً.
6- لا تتورع المخابرات في التجسس على المواطنين الأمريكيين وسائر سكان المعمورة.
7- هناك معارك خفية بين موظفي الوكالة ورؤسائها أحياناً، وأحياناً بين الوكالة والسياسيين، فتلجأ الأطراف إلى التشويه والتشهير وتدبير المكائد.
8- تبدي المخابرات المركزية أعتى أشكال المقاومة للتغيير والتطوير. كما أن منسوبيها ماهرون في مراوغة القوانين والتهرب من تقديم الإجابات.
9- تتكبد الحكومة الفدرالية تكاليفاً فادحة لتشغيل السي آي أيه، ولكن الفاتورة الأعظم تدفعها شعوب العالم التي يسقط قادتها أو تشن عليها الحروب أو تحاصر اقتصاديا بناءً على توصيات المخابرات الأمريكية.
الكتاب جاد ومكتوب بطريقة احترافية، اعتمد فيه الكاتب على وثائق رُفعت عنها السرية، بالإضافة إلى المقابلات الشخصية والتقارير الصحفية. ومع ذلك فلم يكن الكتاب ثقيلاً كما توقعت. الانتقال بين الأماكن والعهود والأحداث يكفل للقارئ عدم الشعور بالملل. هناك وقائع حدثت لم أكن أعرف عنها شيئاً، وأخرى كنت قد قرأت عنها مرة أو مرتين، وأخرى عاصرتها في حياتي. الكتاب كوكتيل من الحروب والانقلابات والاغتيالات، تقرأ عن جمال عبد الناصر، حافظ الأسد، صدام حسين، ستالين، محمد مصدق، أسامة بن لادن، فيديل كاسترو وغيرهم. سيتعرف القارئ على شذرات من التاريخ ولمحات من الجغرافيا ويعرف الكثير عن السياسة والحروب.
ثمة سؤال وجيه يطرح نفسه على القارئ: إذا كانت السي آي أيه بهذا المستوى من انعدام الكفاءة، فلم تتمتع الولايات المتحدة بكل هذا السلطة على مستوى العالم؟ أولاً، أعتقد أن الكاتب ينتقد مستوى الوكالة مقارنة بما هو مأمول منها كجهاز ينتمي لدولة بحجم أمريكا ويحظى بميزانية فلكية ودعم لا محدود. أضف إلى ذلك أن هناك فرقاً بين الأداء الاستخباراتي والقوة العسكرية والثقل الدبلوماسي والاقتصادي والتفوق التكنولوجي، كل العوامل السابقة تدعم سلطة العم سام أكثر من جهاز استخباراته. وأخيراً، لا يمكن للقارئ أن يُخطئ نبرة التحامل المتجسدة بطرق مختلفة خلال صفحات الكتاب.
أتمنى ألا يكون بين قرّاء هذه المراجعة عميل سري يضع اسمي على قائمة سوداء كشخص أصبح "يعرف أكثر من اللازم"، فما أنا سوى قارئ عابر، واللوم كل اللوم يقع على تيم واينر الذي أخرج الرماد من الجرة ونثره على الملأ.
عبر صفحات هذا الكتاب، ينشر تيم واينر غسيل المخابرات المركزية الأمنية ليفضح مواطن القصور في أداءها ويكشف الستار عن أفشل عملياتها. حسب واينر، فإن الجهاز يعاني مما يلي، على سبيل المثال لا الحصر:
1- بدلاً من جمع المعلومات المطلوبة للأمن القومي والعمليات العسكرية والمفاوضات السياسية، اتجهت السي آي أيه إلى الأعمال الخفية، أو القذرة، حيث تخصصت بتدبير الانقلابات وارتكاب الاغتيالات وإدارة دفة الانتخابات إلى جانب إنشاء السجون والتعذيب.
2- الوكالة مخترقة من قِبل أعداءها على الدوام، سواءً كانوا من السوفيات أو من سواهم. ما يجعل العدو قادراً على التلاعب بك والتأثير على قرارك والتشكيك في جواسيسك.
3- تسعى الوكالة إلى عدم التصادم مع مؤسسة الرئاسة، لذا فهي تزيف التقارير وتدفن الأخبار السيئة حتى تنال الحظوة.
4- تفشل السي آي أيه في جمع المعلومات عن أعدائها من أشخاص ودول، لذا فهي تدفع بالقيادة السياسة لاتخاذ القرارات "على العمياني".
5- حتى عندما تنجح الوكالة في تنفيذ انقلاب أو التخلص من غريم، فإنها تعجز عن إيجاد البدائل وغالبا ما تترك الدول تغرق في الفوضى لتدفع الثمن لاحقاً.
6- لا تتورع المخابرات في التجسس على المواطنين الأمريكيين وسائر سكان المعمورة.
7- هناك معارك خفية بين موظفي الوكالة ورؤسائها أحياناً، وأحياناً بين الوكالة والسياسيين، فتلجأ الأطراف إلى التشويه والتشهير وتدبير المكائد.
8- تبدي المخابرات المركزية أعتى أشكال المقاومة للتغيير والتطوير. كما أن منسوبيها ماهرون في مراوغة القوانين والتهرب من تقديم الإجابات.
9- تتكبد الحكومة الفدرالية تكاليفاً فادحة لتشغيل السي آي أيه، ولكن الفاتورة الأعظم تدفعها شعوب العالم التي يسقط قادتها أو تشن عليها الحروب أو تحاصر اقتصاديا بناءً على توصيات المخابرات الأمريكية.
الكتاب جاد ومكتوب بطريقة احترافية، اعتمد فيه الكاتب على وثائق رُفعت عنها السرية، بالإضافة إلى المقابلات الشخصية والتقارير الصحفية. ومع ذلك فلم يكن الكتاب ثقيلاً كما توقعت. الانتقال بين الأماكن والعهود والأحداث يكفل للقارئ عدم الشعور بالملل. هناك وقائع حدثت لم أكن أعرف عنها شيئاً، وأخرى كنت قد قرأت عنها مرة أو مرتين، وأخرى عاصرتها في حياتي. الكتاب كوكتيل من الحروب والانقلابات والاغتيالات، تقرأ عن جمال عبد الناصر، حافظ الأسد، صدام حسين، ستالين، محمد مصدق، أسامة بن لادن، فيديل كاسترو وغيرهم. سيتعرف القارئ على شذرات من التاريخ ولمحات من الجغرافيا ويعرف الكثير عن السياسة والحروب.
ثمة سؤال وجيه يطرح نفسه على القارئ: إذا كانت السي آي أيه بهذا المستوى من انعدام الكفاءة، فلم تتمتع الولايات المتحدة بكل هذا السلطة على مستوى العالم؟ أولاً، أعتقد أن الكاتب ينتقد مستوى الوكالة مقارنة بما هو مأمول منها كجهاز ينتمي لدولة بحجم أمريكا ويحظى بميزانية فلكية ودعم لا محدود. أضف إلى ذلك أن هناك فرقاً بين الأداء الاستخباراتي والقوة العسكرية والثقل الدبلوماسي والاقتصادي والتفوق التكنولوجي، كل العوامل السابقة تدعم سلطة العم سام أكثر من جهاز استخباراته. وأخيراً، لا يمكن للقارئ أن يُخطئ نبرة التحامل المتجسدة بطرق مختلفة خلال صفحات الكتاب.
أتمنى ألا يكون بين قرّاء هذه المراجعة عميل سري يضع اسمي على قائمة سوداء كشخص أصبح "يعرف أكثر من اللازم"، فما أنا سوى قارئ عابر، واللوم كل اللوم يقع على تيم واينر الذي أخرج الرماد من الجرة ونثره على الملأ.
August 16, 2008
Legacy of Ashes is founded on three premises.
1. The CIA is incompetent. The author gathers plenty of ammo to back this one up, to the point of downplaying the agency’s successes and highlighting its failures. He still makes a compelling argument that the CIA’s track record isn’t good.
2. The CIA’s dual functions – gathering intelligence and covert operations – are fundamentally at odds with each other. This is obvious: covert operations thrive on secrecy, not openness. On a more practical level: if you try to gather accurate information and disseminate disinformation at the same time you will invariably get the two confused. This is the best argument in the book; the author should have focused on this one more.
3. An organization like the CIA can not be truly effective in a democracy. The author does not say this, but it’s what he thinks. He might state it differently, more like: an organization like the CIA has no place in a democracy.
Legacy of Ashes contains a lot of information. The author did his homework, and then some. This book isn’t a real history because true historians try not to let their personal biases affect their thinking, which the author does. Also: after Richard Nixon the book gets sketchy. I'm assuming this is because a lot of the information has not yet been declassified (the author gets most of his information from primary documents from the CIA's archives).
Still a good read.
1. The CIA is incompetent. The author gathers plenty of ammo to back this one up, to the point of downplaying the agency’s successes and highlighting its failures. He still makes a compelling argument that the CIA’s track record isn’t good.
2. The CIA’s dual functions – gathering intelligence and covert operations – are fundamentally at odds with each other. This is obvious: covert operations thrive on secrecy, not openness. On a more practical level: if you try to gather accurate information and disseminate disinformation at the same time you will invariably get the two confused. This is the best argument in the book; the author should have focused on this one more.
3. An organization like the CIA can not be truly effective in a democracy. The author does not say this, but it’s what he thinks. He might state it differently, more like: an organization like the CIA has no place in a democracy.
Legacy of Ashes contains a lot of information. The author did his homework, and then some. This book isn’t a real history because true historians try not to let their personal biases affect their thinking, which the author does. Also: after Richard Nixon the book gets sketchy. I'm assuming this is because a lot of the information has not yet been declassified (the author gets most of his information from primary documents from the CIA's archives).
Still a good read.
June 2, 2012
إرث من الرماد
هذا كتاب طويل، جاف ومفصل، والأسوأ من هذا كله أنه ترجم بطريقة زادته تعقيداً، إن تجاوزت هذا كله وقرأته كاملاً، فستجد بين يديك صورة أخرى لم تتوقعها، صورة لوكالة المخابرات الأمريكية تختلف تماماً عن ما قرأته في الروايات الخيالية، وما شاهدته في الأفلام الهوليودية.
فالمخابرات هنا، جسم غريب ظهر في الحكومة الأمريكية أثناء الحرب العالمية الثانية، وظل لسنوات يعاني من فهم مكانه ودوره، عامله الرؤساء باستخفاف، طالبه بعضهم بالمستحيل، بينما لم يلتفت له البعض الآخر، جهاز فشل في الكثير من العمليات التي قام بها، لم يفلح في اختراق الاتحاد السوفييتي، ولا الصين، ولا فهم ما الذي كان يدور في فيتنام.
وأنت تقرأ الكتاب ستشعر بأن المؤلف لا يروي إلا قصة نكبات المخابرات الأمريكية التي تمتد على مدى وجودها، كما يروي تدخلها في الدول الأخرى، وقوفها وراء الانقلابات والاغتيالات، مخالب عنيفة، قذرة، والأدهى الذي نكتشفه ونحن نقرأ الكتاب أنها كانت فوق كل هذا غبية.
ربما المؤلف يبالغ !! لا أدري ولكن الشعور الذي خرجت به في النهاية هو أن المخابرات الأمريكية جسم ضخم جداً، ولكنه برأس صغير، بالكاد ينتبه إلى الأشياء المهمة، وتفوته دائماً أهم الأحداث التي لونت القرن العشرين.
هذا كتاب طويل، جاف ومفصل، والأسوأ من هذا كله أنه ترجم بطريقة زادته تعقيداً، إن تجاوزت هذا كله وقرأته كاملاً، فستجد بين يديك صورة أخرى لم تتوقعها، صورة لوكالة المخابرات الأمريكية تختلف تماماً عن ما قرأته في الروايات الخيالية، وما شاهدته في الأفلام الهوليودية.
فالمخابرات هنا، جسم غريب ظهر في الحكومة الأمريكية أثناء الحرب العالمية الثانية، وظل لسنوات يعاني من فهم مكانه ودوره، عامله الرؤساء باستخفاف، طالبه بعضهم بالمستحيل، بينما لم يلتفت له البعض الآخر، جهاز فشل في الكثير من العمليات التي قام بها، لم يفلح في اختراق الاتحاد السوفييتي، ولا الصين، ولا فهم ما الذي كان يدور في فيتنام.
وأنت تقرأ الكتاب ستشعر بأن المؤلف لا يروي إلا قصة نكبات المخابرات الأمريكية التي تمتد على مدى وجودها، كما يروي تدخلها في الدول الأخرى، وقوفها وراء الانقلابات والاغتيالات، مخالب عنيفة، قذرة، والأدهى الذي نكتشفه ونحن نقرأ الكتاب أنها كانت فوق كل هذا غبية.
ربما المؤلف يبالغ !! لا أدري ولكن الشعور الذي خرجت به في النهاية هو أن المخابرات الأمريكية جسم ضخم جداً، ولكنه برأس صغير، بالكاد ينتبه إلى الأشياء المهمة، وتفوته دائماً أهم الأحداث التي لونت القرن العشرين.
April 13, 2018
I mean, wow. I knew about most of the big events covered and the CIA's involvement in so much pot stirring and nation-changing and election-stealing abroad, but it was jaw dropping to hear about what they weren't doing during all this time: their core mission of collecting intelligence. I think a lot of conspiracy theorists are terrified of the CIA--especially abroad, but this book makes clear that yes, they should be worried, but also they've given the agency too much credit. They do not have eyes and ears everywhere. They definitely go in and break things, but they aren't very good spies--or at least they weren't yet. The book is a bit dry, but it's a must-read for every American. And it does need to be updated, but there are a few good updates out there like Secret Wars
May 9, 2013
-El coloso con pies (y cerebro, ojos, manos, boca…) de barro, como mínimo-.
Género. Ensayo.
Lo que nos cuenta. Desde la investigación y con vocación periodística (incluso histórica, quizás hasta política, pero las fronteras entre géneros y estilos son más tenues cada vez), retrato descarnado de la CIA desde su formación hasta fechas más cercanas, estructurado desde las sucesivas presidencias de EEUU.
¿Quiere saber más del libro, sin spoilers? Visite:
http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/...
Género. Ensayo.
Lo que nos cuenta. Desde la investigación y con vocación periodística (incluso histórica, quizás hasta política, pero las fronteras entre géneros y estilos son más tenues cada vez), retrato descarnado de la CIA desde su formación hasta fechas más cercanas, estructurado desde las sucesivas presidencias de EEUU.
¿Quiere saber más del libro, sin spoilers? Visite:
http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/...
November 25, 2022
an utterly fascinating critical history of the CIA ... of particular interest to me and my in-process novel were Weiner's reporting of the Nixon years and the CIA/China interactions ... my guess is that some will object to Weiner's conclusions, which are quite damning, but what he wrote seemed credible to me
A few excerpts ...
... Richard Nixon was another problem altogether. Helms knew how deep his resentments ran. Nixon thought the agency was filled with eastern elitists, knee-jerk liberals, Georgetown gossips, Kennedy men. It was an open secret that Nixon held the CIA responsible for the greatest disaster in his life: his defeat in the 1960 election.
... Nixon & Kissinger had reached an understanding: they alone would conceive, command, and control clandestine operations. Covert action and espionage could be tools fitted for their personal use. Nixon used them to build a political fortress at the White House, and Kissinger became, in the words of his aide Roger Morris, the acting chief of state for national security.
... When Kissinger finally sat down with Chou, the prime minister asked about the latest Free Taiwan campaign: “The CIA had no hand in it?” Kissinger assured Chou that “he vastly overestimates the competence of the CIA.” ... Chou was fascinated to learn that Kissinger personally approved the CIA’s covert operations. He voiced his suspicions that the agency was still subverting the People’s Republic. Kissinger replied that most CIA officers “write long, incomprehensible reports and don’t make revolution.” “You use the word revolution,” Chou said. “We say subversion.” “Or subversion,” Kissinger conceded. “I understand. We are conscious of what is at stake in our relationship, and we will not let one organization carry out petty operations that could hinder this course.” That was the end of that. The CIA was out of business in China for years to come.
A few excerpts ...
... Richard Nixon was another problem altogether. Helms knew how deep his resentments ran. Nixon thought the agency was filled with eastern elitists, knee-jerk liberals, Georgetown gossips, Kennedy men. It was an open secret that Nixon held the CIA responsible for the greatest disaster in his life: his defeat in the 1960 election.
... Nixon & Kissinger had reached an understanding: they alone would conceive, command, and control clandestine operations. Covert action and espionage could be tools fitted for their personal use. Nixon used them to build a political fortress at the White House, and Kissinger became, in the words of his aide Roger Morris, the acting chief of state for national security.
... When Kissinger finally sat down with Chou, the prime minister asked about the latest Free Taiwan campaign: “The CIA had no hand in it?” Kissinger assured Chou that “he vastly overestimates the competence of the CIA.” ... Chou was fascinated to learn that Kissinger personally approved the CIA’s covert operations. He voiced his suspicions that the agency was still subverting the People’s Republic. Kissinger replied that most CIA officers “write long, incomprehensible reports and don’t make revolution.” “You use the word revolution,” Chou said. “We say subversion.” “Or subversion,” Kissinger conceded. “I understand. We are conscious of what is at stake in our relationship, and we will not let one organization carry out petty operations that could hinder this course.” That was the end of that. The CIA was out of business in China for years to come.
March 14, 2013
This book is a big bold project. Covering the history of this agency in this way might not be feasible for 550 pages.
The author discusses the shifting mission of the agency and the ongoing debate of spies vs. gadgets. He shows how the agency was not (always) rogue, since both Democratic and Republican presidents authorized some of its most controversial actions and lied about them.
Weiner shows how the CIA was founded to provide intelligence and analysis. Intelligence operations grew from dropping dissidents of unfriendly governments inside their borders (not at all successful) to actually toppling distrusted leaders (quite successful in the short term). Through its operations it effectively set major pieces of US foreign policy. Some of these operations were dictated by whims and biases of its leadership. Weiner portrays some of these leaders as high living alcoholics.
This agency has been costly in money and human life. Thousands have been lost in the wars the CIA started and in its intelligence failures. What would Iran be like without the CIA involvement, first in toppling Mossadeq and later strengthening the hard liners by selling them advanced weapons? The miscalculation on Russia is exemplary, had they read Hedrick Smith's The Russians, a best seller of the time, they could have predicted the USSR's ultimate implosion and saved billions in weaponry and the failed spy operations it was running. If the Fire Chief of your city made 1% of these mistakes, the Chief would be long gone.
The book has a number of shortcomings. It's a National Book Award winner, so I expected more. The story is told in a stream of vignettes. They aren't well tied together. Almost every episode (there may be 100 or so) deserves a book of its own. With so much to cover, everything is once over lightly. This is OK with high profile and well known events like the Bay of Pigs and Iran-Contra, but the less prominent episodes need more description and discussion.
Is it in the interest of space that rumors of CIA involvement in the Kennedy assassination(s) and in Iran's release of the hostages are not addressed, or does the author conclude there is nothing there? Similarly, Iraq's WMD mistake is shown as fully a CIA problem. There is no discussion of the intelligence being "fixed" around the policy by the administration.
While the book sprawls, the author does make his point. He sees the CIA as an agency that in the early days carved out a role beyond its assigned mission and has failed in both the mission and its enhanced mission. I'd be interested in a more cohesive history that includes the debate on the possibility of the success of such an agency in a democratic and open society.
The author discusses the shifting mission of the agency and the ongoing debate of spies vs. gadgets. He shows how the agency was not (always) rogue, since both Democratic and Republican presidents authorized some of its most controversial actions and lied about them.
Weiner shows how the CIA was founded to provide intelligence and analysis. Intelligence operations grew from dropping dissidents of unfriendly governments inside their borders (not at all successful) to actually toppling distrusted leaders (quite successful in the short term). Through its operations it effectively set major pieces of US foreign policy. Some of these operations were dictated by whims and biases of its leadership. Weiner portrays some of these leaders as high living alcoholics.
This agency has been costly in money and human life. Thousands have been lost in the wars the CIA started and in its intelligence failures. What would Iran be like without the CIA involvement, first in toppling Mossadeq and later strengthening the hard liners by selling them advanced weapons? The miscalculation on Russia is exemplary, had they read Hedrick Smith's The Russians, a best seller of the time, they could have predicted the USSR's ultimate implosion and saved billions in weaponry and the failed spy operations it was running. If the Fire Chief of your city made 1% of these mistakes, the Chief would be long gone.
The book has a number of shortcomings. It's a National Book Award winner, so I expected more. The story is told in a stream of vignettes. They aren't well tied together. Almost every episode (there may be 100 or so) deserves a book of its own. With so much to cover, everything is once over lightly. This is OK with high profile and well known events like the Bay of Pigs and Iran-Contra, but the less prominent episodes need more description and discussion.
Is it in the interest of space that rumors of CIA involvement in the Kennedy assassination(s) and in Iran's release of the hostages are not addressed, or does the author conclude there is nothing there? Similarly, Iraq's WMD mistake is shown as fully a CIA problem. There is no discussion of the intelligence being "fixed" around the policy by the administration.
While the book sprawls, the author does make his point. He sees the CIA as an agency that in the early days carved out a role beyond its assigned mission and has failed in both the mission and its enhanced mission. I'd be interested in a more cohesive history that includes the debate on the possibility of the success of such an agency in a democratic and open society.
April 21, 2021
An intriguing look into the workings of the CIA and its role in recent history. This is not a book that will help you sleep easy at night. It shows how a parade of directors have eroded the abilities of the spy organization and led to many intelligence failures.
October 29, 2007
The title of Tim Weiner's tome about the CIA, "Legacy of Ashes", is a quote taken from a comment Dwight Eisenhower made about what he was leaving behind for subsequent presidents. Ike felt he had left a broken and ineffectual intelligence agency far removed from the reality of what America needed. In "Legacy of Ashes", Weiner proves Ike right. Starting with the 1947 birth of the Central Intelligence Agency, Weiner takes us through intelligence bungle after intelligence bungle. Today, everyone is interested in intelligence failures and the reasons behind the CIA's failure to prevent the tragedy of September 11, 2001. Reading Weiner's book makes it obvious that such failures were long in the making, and not uncommon in CIA history. The failure to predict the fall of communism is discussed in detail, as are the agency's failures in Vietnam, Laos, Iran, Iraq, Central America... Parts of the book read like a comedy bit from Catch-22, with Milo Minderbinder replaced by Dick Cheney and the Reagan administration, as the CIA simultaneously arms Iraq and Iran, simultaneously gives them each satellite information about the other's capabilities and battlefield locations, then sets them to fighting each other. Other parts of the book read like Greek tragedy. The times the US armed brutal dictators and overthrew democratically elected regimes are too numerous to count. Other surprises include the revelations of which Presidents used covert action and which Presidents used assassination as US policy. Startling secrets about JFK are revealed, as well his brother's almost criminal use of the CIA as his own personal hit squad. Several famous scandals are covered, including Iran-contra, Iraq's missing WMDs, Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missle Crisis, Watergate... If Weiner has one fault it is that he fails to qualify some of his gripes with administrations who mistrusted the CIA. He spends an entire chapter explaining why the CIA shouldn't be trusted, then he tears Bill Clinton apart for not trusting the agency. This could be seen as a fault of Weiner's writing, but this Pulitzer Prize-winning author probably suffers more for the weight of his topic than his lack of skill as a reporter. The truth is, this book - at close to 500 pages - probably could have been another 500 pages long and still not told the whole story. A fascinating read about an organization that may be past its time for retirement.
NC
NC
January 21, 2019
the bottom line of this book is the following, no matter how much technology one might have, the human factor is still and would be the number 1 issue in Intelligence, gathering, analysis, and execution of a plan. CIA understood that one needs not only linguists to translate communication but understanding the context of the discussion and probable outcomes. Georgios Tenet, a true American hero, tried to correct this by focusing on local analysis, all previous directors failed on creating a reliable analytical service because they relied on wrong or manage the elements. Basically, the mistakes on analysis have led the Service to fail on multiple missions. From the fake reports from Korea to the Serbian mess, CIA failed not because they didn't have Intelligence but because they didn't have the right analysis on the local grounds. Maybe in the future, we will see a common task cyber task force as President Putin proposed, the evil of the world might not be a state but non-state actors that want simply to put the whole world on fire, just like Nero wanted to burn Rome to write a poem.
December 16, 2021
This book has an obvious message; the CIA is and has been entirely useless throughout their history. Is this true, or is it the opinion of the author bleeding through? With that in mind, this book still fascinated me by tearing away the facade of mystery surrounding the agency and giving it a human (and likewise, faulty) image. Like many others, when I thought of the CIA I thought of dashing spies and covert masterminds, running intrigues across the globe and dealing in secrets. In reality, it seems that for the most part, it was people in over their heads trying not to get themselves killed at every turn (which generally didn't work out). The amount of people that were killed without accomplishing a single worthwhile task is astonishing. The reality of how little we knew (and still know) about foreign governments is a sad state of affairs. I think one of the most illustrative passages in the book deals with a captured spy in Afganistan. He was tortured and interrogated in order to drop the act that he didn't understand their language or their country. His captors couldn't believe the Americans would send a spy that knew next to nothing about the people he was spying on. When they actually realized that he was as clueless as he seemed, they were OFFENDED that America would send this person to be their clandestine operative. I think that word is the operative term for how the CIA is viewed throughout the global community; offensive.
The biggest takeaway from this book is how sad it is that an agency that could have been such a help to our country has been used and abused until it is practically worthless. Instead of data and intelligence being used to better our country, Presidents have simply used it to further their preconceived notions, doctoring intelligence to meet their needs. The CIA is complicit in this, publishing reports to please those in power so that they don't lose their jobs. In the end, the agency is just there to make sure they can keep themselves in a job until they can retire.
The book ends on the note of private information companies taking over the business, and this has come true. Now, the spies have even less oversight, and when you see the atrocities committed by those previously in the name of the United States, you can only flinch at what they will now do in the name of money.
The biggest takeaway from this book is how sad it is that an agency that could have been such a help to our country has been used and abused until it is practically worthless. Instead of data and intelligence being used to better our country, Presidents have simply used it to further their preconceived notions, doctoring intelligence to meet their needs. The CIA is complicit in this, publishing reports to please those in power so that they don't lose their jobs. In the end, the agency is just there to make sure they can keep themselves in a job until they can retire.
The book ends on the note of private information companies taking over the business, and this has come true. Now, the spies have even less oversight, and when you see the atrocities committed by those previously in the name of the United States, you can only flinch at what they will now do in the name of money.
January 20, 2018
Once upon a time, a little band called Van Halen put out a music video that had a bunch of quotes sprinkled through it. One of them was, "Right now, our government is doing things that we think only other countries do." Now, I was raised in a very patriotic family with many soldiers and veterans that believe in America, which for us meant trusting that the government tries to do the right things to protect its citizens and ensure that democracy flourishes. I know this sounds ultimately naive, but my dad is... of a different time.
Anyway, back to the VH quote. It always niggled at my kid-brain that there might be something to it even though I had that family philosophy thing. But life went on, I got older, saw more of the world and I came around to thinking that yeah, it probably does do bad things. But only when necessary. Based on good reasons. On occasion. To bad people. Not because I'm some babe in the woods, but because I'm an optimist who wants to believe the best about people.
Well, this book will never allow you to cling to such myths again. Since Eisenhower, we have meddled in countries you have probably never heard of, for reasons that are unclear or make no sense, at the cost of many lives (both American and otherwise), for virtually no gain. I could not have imagined that an agency with so much power be so corrupt, inept, unproductive... just utterly worthless. And wait until you read about what Bobby Kennedy was really like! Read this book and have the scales fall from your eyes too.
(Btw, this didn't get 5 stars because the author was one-sided. I know for a fact that there have been success stories at the CIA, but you won't hear about a single one of them here. However, the book is credible and well-written in spite of the skew.)
Anyway, back to the VH quote. It always niggled at my kid-brain that there might be something to it even though I had that family philosophy thing. But life went on, I got older, saw more of the world and I came around to thinking that yeah, it probably does do bad things. But only when necessary. Based on good reasons. On occasion. To bad people. Not because I'm some babe in the woods, but because I'm an optimist who wants to believe the best about people.
Well, this book will never allow you to cling to such myths again. Since Eisenhower, we have meddled in countries you have probably never heard of, for reasons that are unclear or make no sense, at the cost of many lives (both American and otherwise), for virtually no gain. I could not have imagined that an agency with so much power be so corrupt, inept, unproductive... just utterly worthless. And wait until you read about what Bobby Kennedy was really like! Read this book and have the scales fall from your eyes too.
(Btw, this didn't get 5 stars because the author was one-sided. I know for a fact that there have been success stories at the CIA, but you won't hear about a single one of them here. However, the book is credible and well-written in spite of the skew.)
August 14, 2017
53rd book for 2017.
A damning and illuminating history of the first 60 years for the CIA, from its founding in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, until shortly before President Obama took office.
The book lists a litany of failures by the CIA, but more damning is the moral repugnance of much of what the CIA did over many decades, with the knowledge of successive presidents, to undermine or damage other nations (including multiple democracies) that were not seen as on the US's side.
One of the more disturbing facts to come out is that widespread practice of using the CIA to offer large amounts of funding and other sorts of support to various right-wing political parties across the world. For instance, strongly contributing to the hegemony of right-wing corrupt political power in Japan for decades. Not to mentioning supporting, or directly contributing to, the overthrow of legitimately elected governments by dictators more inline with perceived US needs, with the ensuing deaths of 10000s-100000s of innocent civilian lives.
Everything that Russia/Trump has been accused of in the last election cycle, can be put at the feet of the CIA, with US Presidential support, over many decades in many countries.
A damning and illuminating history of the first 60 years for the CIA, from its founding in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, until shortly before President Obama took office.
The book lists a litany of failures by the CIA, but more damning is the moral repugnance of much of what the CIA did over many decades, with the knowledge of successive presidents, to undermine or damage other nations (including multiple democracies) that were not seen as on the US's side.
One of the more disturbing facts to come out is that widespread practice of using the CIA to offer large amounts of funding and other sorts of support to various right-wing political parties across the world. For instance, strongly contributing to the hegemony of right-wing corrupt political power in Japan for decades. Not to mentioning supporting, or directly contributing to, the overthrow of legitimately elected governments by dictators more inline with perceived US needs, with the ensuing deaths of 10000s-100000s of innocent civilian lives.
Everything that Russia/Trump has been accused of in the last election cycle, can be put at the feet of the CIA, with US Presidential support, over many decades in many countries.
March 23, 2019
I was disappointed in the quality of the book.
I was really looking forward to learn about the legacy of the CIA and earnestly attempted to finish listening to the audiobook. I ended up listening to about 55% of the book for the following reason -
1.) The research is extensive but seems to support one biase- CIA leadership is flawed, and lies were invented to cover up for the failed missions or high fatality.
2.) The flow of the reading was monotonous and choppy. There was consistency of "single sentences" that seemed to repeat the main point of "CIA is flawed and has not learned its lessons from their past."
What were the positives of the book?
1.) It shares information of fully documented research.
2.) Author adds his comments from his experiences.
3.) In mystery/thriller books, the CIA agent's roles are aggrandized as reputable heroes. However, this book exposes dark truths behind the CIA.
***I would have loved to see research presented from both sides of the coins than one side. Even though the book did not reach my expectations, I still learned facts about the CIA! :)
I was really looking forward to learn about the legacy of the CIA and earnestly attempted to finish listening to the audiobook. I ended up listening to about 55% of the book for the following reason -
1.) The research is extensive but seems to support one biase- CIA leadership is flawed, and lies were invented to cover up for the failed missions or high fatality.
2.) The flow of the reading was monotonous and choppy. There was consistency of "single sentences" that seemed to repeat the main point of "CIA is flawed and has not learned its lessons from their past."
What were the positives of the book?
1.) It shares information of fully documented research.
2.) Author adds his comments from his experiences.
3.) In mystery/thriller books, the CIA agent's roles are aggrandized as reputable heroes. However, this book exposes dark truths behind the CIA.
***I would have loved to see research presented from both sides of the coins than one side. Even though the book did not reach my expectations, I still learned facts about the CIA! :)
Currently reading
June 21, 2023Notes:
❝Will the world get any warning if Mr Putin is about to go over the nuclear brink? Probably, say Western spooks. To judge from their foreknowledge of Russia’s invasion, they seem to have good insight into the Kremlin’s decision-making.❞ from https://www.economist.com/europe/2022...
Listening to a year-old podcast on Psychedelic Medicine and of course the CIA is mentioned with respect to MKUltra. (Oh, I see from that Wikipedia page that this will be covered in the book later.)
If and when I get back to this book: https://openyls.law.yale.edu/handle/2... and https://www.nytimes.com/1976/01/19/ar...
❝Will the world get any warning if Mr Putin is about to go over the nuclear brink? Probably, say Western spooks. To judge from their foreknowledge of Russia’s invasion, they seem to have good insight into the Kremlin’s decision-making.❞ from https://www.economist.com/europe/2022...
Listening to a year-old podcast on Psychedelic Medicine and of course the CIA is mentioned with respect to MKUltra. (Oh, I see from that Wikipedia page that this will be covered in the book later.)
If and when I get back to this book: https://openyls.law.yale.edu/handle/2... and https://www.nytimes.com/1976/01/19/ar...
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