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Usually ships in 1 business days | | | | | | 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 9/ll.
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. | | | |
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| | Product Details | | Author: | Tim Weiner | | Hardcover: | 702 pages | | Publisher: | Doubleday | | Publication Date: | June 28, 2007 | | ISBN: | 038551445X | | Package Length: | 9.3 inches | | Package Width: | 6.2 inches | | Package Height: | 1.9 inches | | Package Weight: | 2.45 pounds | | Average Customer Rating: |  based on 177 reviews |
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| | Customer Reviews | Average Customer Review:
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 Helpful but also frustrating Jul 28, 2010
This is both an illuminating and frustrating book. Tim Weiner is a long-time reporter for the New York Times whose beat has been the American intelligence community. This book is engagingly written and draws on a remarkable selection of sources--including direct interviews with many involved in intelligence work and wide-ranging examination of archival materials.
Weiner probably is uniquely qualified to write this book. To his credit, he names names, cites his sources, lays the materials openly on the table. I think we should, to a large extend at least, believe the tales he tells. And hair-raising tales they are. Weiner shows us that, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the Central Intelligence Agency has from its beginning in the aftermath of World War II been a force for incredible evil in the world.
At the same time as we learn of the CIA's mostly uninhibited zeal for murder and mayhem, generally in the context of the denial of self-determination for innumerable peoples around the world, we also learn of the extraordinary failures of the Agency. Most notably, the CIA utterly failed to gain understanding of the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War. In the first couple of decades, the CIA left the American government pretty much completely in the dark concerning Soviet activities and intentions. It's amazing and extremely distressing to realize that the entire first generation of American cold warriors, who shaped our nation in tragic ways toward domination by militarism, beat the drums of warning against the Soviet threat with absolutely no knowledge whatsoever of what was actually going on with the Soviets. It truly boggles the mind.
Then, at the end of the Cold War, with the CIA continuing to feed its political masters the analyses that were desired to sustain the Cold War that had become so profitable for the American Military-Industrial Complex, our "intelligence" service complete missed the signs of the impending collapse of the Soviet system.
However, sadly, the book is not nearly as good as it could have been. Weiner is a good storyteller, and he treats us to some extraordinary stories--most profoundly distressing. The sum is less than the parts, though. We mostly just get one story after another, numbing and troubling details one on top of the other. But Weiner does little to put it all in perspective. Part of the problem is how Weiner gives us some swashbuckling details about various nefarious projects such as the overthrow of governments in Iran and Guatemala, the attempt to overthrow the government of Indonesia, and involvement in the overthrow of Chile's government--but he doesn't give us much followup on the long-term devastation wrought by these actions. And he does little to connect the dots between the CIA's original violence and the blowback over time in terms of ensuing wars and conflicts (seen, most obviously, in Iran and Afghanistan).
Weiner doesn't himself seem to accept the logic of the account he gives. Simply based on this book, we would have to conclude that the CIA has been hopelessly flawed from the start, embarking upon one disastrous mission after another, combining incompetence with malevolence. But in the end, inexplicably, Weiner leaves us with a pretty benign conclusion--the U.S. needs the kind of intelligence the CIA could provide for the well-being of our nation, so let's hope for constructive reform. Strangely, as he recounts the demise of the CIA in the 21st century, Weiner acts as if the earlier history included many successes--even though he has not told us of those and in fact tells stories of one failure after another.
With all the shortcomings of this book, Legacy of Ashes nonetheless paints a devastating picture of American foreign policy. From its beginnings, the CIA has constantly subverted democracy both within the US and around the world.
Weiner makes it clear, though with too little elaboration, that all post-World War II American presidents have been utterly disdainful of the ideals of democracy and self-determination whenever it suited their interests to "turn the CIA loose" in messing with other countries. One story I was unfamiliar with was President Eisenhower's orders that the CIA overthrow the government of Indonesia in the 1950s. Due to incompetence, the Americans failed initially; but the stage was set for one of this centuries worse bloodbaths several years later when General Suharto came into power and under his leadership (and with CIA complicity) hundreds of thousands of Indonesians were slaughtered. Weiner doesn't give us much on the followup, and doesn't mention at all a later directly related bloodbath when Indonesia massacred hundreds of thousands of Timorese.
The big irony of Weiner's story, which he completely misses, is that with all its malevolence and incompetence, the CIA utterly failed in its stated task of serving American national security--yet, the sky did not fall! America didn't need the kind of "intelligence" the CIA was supposed to provide after all. The CIA's is indeed a "legacy of ashes," but its extraordinary failures did not result in severe damage to the United States. We more or less managed just fine without the CIA's "product." In fact, to the extent that America's genuine national interests have been at risk in the past sixty years, it has not so much been because of the failures of the CIA to protect us from our "enemies," but more because of how the CIA has created enemies due to its violent and destructive deeds.
Encyclopedic in scope... Jul 23, 2010
A dense, factual, eye-opening account of the CIA from Truman to Bush43, Weiner is unsparing in spotlighting their mistakes. He outlines the history of the CIA's decision-making -- the hubris, the predominance of covert action over active intelligence (spying), the inability to self-examine when things go wrong, and just the nasty push and pull of politics between the Whitehouse and the Director(s) of the CIA. His research is based on recently declassified information (some have been recently "re-classified") and interviews, with extensive notes at the end.
Now that the CIA appears to be swallowed up by the Pentagon after the fiasco of Iraq's WMD's, (Weiner views this as a testament of the loss of faith in the CIA but not necessarily what's best for the CIA as an institution), he rather poignantly wonders if it might be too late for the CIA to rise again from the ashes of a legacy that has fallen far, far short of delivering its best work.
1 of 3 found the following review helpful:
 Legacy of Disinformation Jul 17, 2010
One would expect that the most prominent critical history of the CIA in the past 20 years would spend considerable time examining the CIA's possible involvement in John F. Kennedy's assassination, which has been the subject of countless other books. If you look up "assassination" in the index, you'll observe that there is no entry. Strange. Then turn a few pages to the entry for "Kennedy, John F.". Look further down for a sub-entry on "assassination" and you'll see this reference: "See also Kennedy (John F), assassination," a circular reference. Doh!
Weiner's book does offer some facile coverage of the Kennedy assassination, a 12-page chapter called "I Thought It Was a Conspiracy," a reference to a quote from Lyndon Johnson. Half the chapter is dedicated to the story of Yuri Nosenko, a KGB defector who claimed that the KGB determined that Lee Harvey Oswald was unstable and unfit for use as a double-agent, proving that the Soviet Union was not using Oswald as an agent at the time of Kennedy's murder. By the end of the chapter, Weiner reluctantly concedes that it is likely that Nosenko was telling the truth, which suggests that Richard Helms and James Jesus Angleton were not, and perhaps had a great deal to hide.
If Lyndon Johnson, a determined cold warrior, thought Kennedy's assassination was a conspiracy (as the chapter title implies), it's unlikely that he thought it a Soviet-Cuban plot. At 9:20 a.m. on November 23, 1963, the day after Kennedy was shot, CIA director John McCone phoned Johnson and informed him that Oswald's foreign connections were strong evidence of a Soviet-Cuban plot. At 10:01 a.m., less than an hour later, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover phoned Johnson and informed him that the evidence against Oswald had been falsified by the CIA, and he had proof (tapes and photographs). In other words, the CIA could not be trusted. Johnson was in a predicament. What should he do about the CIA, who might very well have been involved in the murder of his predecessor? His solution was to appoint Allan Dulles, former CIA Director who had been fired by JFK after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, to the Warren Commission to ensure that any CIA involvement in the Oswald case remain hidden from public view for years. The Warren Commission, consequently, portrayed the Kennedy assassination as the work of a deranged drifter with a cheap rifle and a seven-dollar scope, rather than the more terrible truth: a CIA plot.
Weiner, apparently, would like that terrible truth to continue to remain hidden.
0 of 2 found the following review helpful:
 A series of criminal acts by the CIA, but lacking in context Jul 06, 2010
I am not quite done with the book and I'm not sure I'll ever be able to finish it. It's not just that this catalog of crimes, blunders, and wasted lives and treasure makes depressing reading, although it does. After reading the reviews here, I thought I'd be reading a better book than the author actually wrote. I feel like I'm getting a lot of smoke, but little fire. So much historical context is left out, and insignificant details are kept in (at times the author repeats word for word dialogue between JFK and his brother.) The author jumps from crises to crises, and continent to continent, without really illuminating the actions and motivations of the agency, besides blaming the sinful natures of the people involved. (A cast of characters would have been helpful, as there are too many to remember.) The author doesn't consider the possible limited alternatives that the U.S. government might have taken to stop the Soviets and Communism. He also doesn't consider the very real fear our government had concerning Communism. We know it was a flawed institution and would fail, but those men did not. A case in point is the Soviet's spy network that seemed so invasive and successful, according to the author, while ours was always unsuccessful. Why wouldn't the men in the CIA be fearful! Even so, why did Eisenhower allow the agency to continue with its inefficiency and criminality? The author states there was no one to replace Dulles--but this is not an answer. As the President, it would have been Eisenhower's job to find a replacement--and if Dulles was so bad, Eisenhower acted incorrectly by keeping him. Why was the agency not made to follow its mandate? Why did Congressional oversight fail? Why was the CIA supported by our politicians decade after decade, if they constantly failed and wasted millions? More blame needs to fall on our elected leaders that the author will admit. I'm not disagreeing with the author's thesis in general, I'm just feeling like he was focused more on laying out all he was able to research into a book, instead of focusing more deeply on fewer examples. I think it would have been a better book if he had just taken a shorter span of time and delved deeply into the causes and consequences of events, and added enough historical context to make his conclusions more understandable.
0 of 2 found the following review helpful:
Damned with faint praise Jun 18, 2010
I slogged my way through this book. The writing style was rather jarring, as if only viewed on a computer screen, with cut and paste being dropped halfways through the process.
The author had some interesting tidbits and statements based on information for released files. Unfortunately, he lovingly focused on every negative piece of information and glossed over anything done right, i.e. "one of the few times the CIA was on target". Screw ups- while many, especially in the 1960s- dominated, and the author seemed almost puritanical in his condemnation of all of the heavy drinking and Harvard/Yale/Ivy League connections of the CIA. [has he noticed where most of our presidents and SCOTUS judges in recent history have come from? Perhaps there is a pattern here...]
I felt he was rushing through the early years to get to the real point of the book: the 21st century [even though he managed digs at Bush prior to that section of the book]. All relevant documentation has not yet been released, even though he had named sources to provide information. It IS human nature to paint yourself in the best possible light, but I do not have the impression that this was taken into account when the process for deciding inclusion in the book was decided.
All in all, I found it obvious Weiner knew what he wanted have as the outcome of the book- CIA bad, idea bad. I will admit that I was surprised at the conclusion that Tenet gave Bush inaccurate information about WMDs in Iraq- although he excused that because Tenet was so eager to please Bush, somehow making it the presidents fault.
I am glad I received this book as a gift, and will read other sources for more information about the history of the CIA. As another review mentioned, my soft cover book fell apart.
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