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25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Dismal to Abysmal, failure on a massive scale, 4 Dec 2009
The CIA was founded in 1947 to brief the President and conduct covert operations overseas. It has no monopoly, coexisting with the State Department, Pentagon and branches of military intelligence, the FBI and a plethora of other agencies. The US "never has had and does not now have a co-ordinated intelligence system." From the immense amount of data, government reports, books and memoirs and allowing for the historical context where the threat (levels of paranoia) and the political environment changed radically, just how do you produce a history of the CIA in 514 pages? The sins of selection, omission, emphasis and over simplification accepted, this book is nothing if not ambitious. It is excellent journalism, a credible work.
Weiner relates the history of the CIA in six parts grouped by presidential office holders (Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy/Johnson, Nixon/Ford, Carter/Reagan/Bush Snr, Clinton/ Bush Jnr). The relationship between the President and the CIA is crucial; it has never been solid, always imprecise and often confrontational. The CIA missed the Soviet bomb, the Korean War, misread Eastern Europe, the Cuban crisis (Bay of Pigs and missiles), the Arab Israelis Wars, Kuwait and much more. It was terrible at assessing intentions and strengths of the Soviet Union. In seeking to secure regime change in the third world countries, it has a track record of bringing down bad governments to be replaced by nastier ones. It's often farcical and tragic - for example Saddam Hussein went from close friend through to the Weapons of Mass Destruction. Even in soft intelligence, the CIA often has little more than a newspaper clippings agency collects. "While the Soviet state withered away, the CIA was constantly reporting the Soviet economy was growing" (page 429). The CIA has not gone unchallenged, "The Pentagon (has) moved stealthily and steadily into the fields of overseas covert operations, usurping traditional roles, responsibilities, authorities, and missions.........the militarization of intelligence accelerated as the nation's civilian intelligence service eroded." (page 505). Here we come full circle, at inception the Pentagon wanted the CIA to be still born.
Weiner does not dwell on the ethics of the CIA but essentially catalogues its' incompetence, billons of dollars have been squandered and American interests (it's raison d'etre) very badly served. And millions have died in events in which the CIA played a large part. This book is not a rant; his sources are typically from the establishment. Weiner gives you enough to answer the fundamental question: has the CIA done more harm than good.
Where I found this book engrossing lies in how political intentions (the need to create an espionage entity) translated into a bureaucratic structure, how it defines its goals and is run. The bottom line is the management of, and within the CIA, has been appalling. Government agencies are set up by amateurs (what professional qualifications must politicians obtain before taking office) with imprecise goals that are not measurable (the profit motive in the private sector does have its uses). It does what public servants do best - infighting with each other and rival departments while inflating it's own reputation. Weiner's final page states "For sixty years tens of thousands of clandestine service officers have gathered only the barest threads of truly important intelligence - and that is the CIA's deepest secret (p514).
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Well now we know who to blame...., 30 Jan 2008
Weiner has written a revelatory book which lays bare the history of 'The Company". If all the stories contained in this volume happened as described then much of the current woes of the western world can be laid -- quite simply -- at the feet of the idiot monomaniacs who were put in charge of the organisation. The CIA was encouraged to develop in the way it did by politicians with strange views of the world, the value of human life and the right of individual nations to choose their own destinies. It had the bad luck as an organisation to fall into the hands of incompetent leaders and because of its activities was encouraged to rapidly grow beyond the control of any form of effective democratic oversight. It was all our bad luck that this happened -- as Weiner shows in devastating detail. The book is well written; the audio version is particularly well delivered.
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19 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Pessimistic Burial Oration for American Intelligence and Covert Operations Run by the CIA, 7 Aug 2007
In the James Bond movies, James Bond saves the world virtually single-handedly. He often gets high-tech gear from Q and military backup coordinated by the CIA after the agents follow him until Bond locates the bad guys. Based on Legacy of Ashes, those movies are closer to the truth than I had thought.
In Mr. Weiner's extensive look at recently declassified documents, the CIA has always been the gang that couldn't shoot straight when it came to covert operations. To make up for that, the agency has apparently been quite good at keeping secret its bungles and shameful episodes . . . and proclaiming victory in public. The main problem has been that this gang has usually been pursuing its own agendas, disconnected from American policy and political oversight. And the agency liked covert operations so much that it rarely took intelligence gathering seriously.
The blame isn't only the agency's; there's plenty of blame to go around. Presidents in particular were addicted to the idea of quickly supplying covert efforts when something was happening that they didn't like. When that urge came over them, the CIA was called in.
You probably know some of the story, just from reading the newspapers and watching television (such as when Aldrich Ames was arrested, the missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and the lack of coordination over paying attention to evidence of the impending 9/11 attack).
What shocked me (and I don't shock easily) was how many thousands of people were sacrificed or harmed in programs that never worked. For instance, the CIA believed for decades that it could send dissidents back to their home countries and set up resistance efforts (as the OSS had done in France during World War II). Essentially everyone who was sent back for this purpose to many countries was quickly found and executed. While there is a wall at CIA headquarters for those who died in the line of duty, these sacrificed agents were largely ignored so that someone could have the stupid idea to do it all over again.
So where are we now in gathering intelligence? We don't have much of an idea of what's going on anywhere except where we buy information from other intelligence services or after we invade the country. That's not good enough in a world where nuclear proliferation is real and loose nukes are a real risk.
And where are we in covert action? We are probably still bribing any politician or military leader who wants our money. We coordinate and run lots of offshore prisons where we and those we hire can torture people who might be terrorists to their heart's content.
It's a discouraging picture. And one that's not likely to be changed any time soon.
I didn't grade the book higher because Mr. Weiner seemed to be skimming the surface in many cases, failing to get into the nuances of why things happened. I compared, for example, his account of Jack and Bobby Kennedy in working with the CIA to what is described in the book, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years by David Talbot. Legacy of Ashes comes across as oversimplified and incomplete by comparison to the Brothers book. For instance, there's no hint of the CIA's possible involvement in the two Kennedy assassinations in Legacy of Ashes.
The book would also have been improved by exploring the organizational theory reasons why the CIA has had problems. You can't change an organization's leadership and charter as often as has happened with the CIA and not make a mess. Combine that with the need to hold many secrets and it's likely that institutional reform will lag behind the rate by which new problems can develop.
I also think this would have been a better book if it had contained the context of how well those who have had good intelligence (such as the old Soviet Union) used what they knew. In the case of Stalin, the intelligence coups didn't do much good because he didn't trust the information or want to act on it . . . except for stealing technological secrets.
What should the United States do now?
It may be a good idea to continue with the current administration's preference for private contractors to gather and interpret intelligence. Then, the role of the CIA could become evaluating the effectiveness of such contractors and foreign intelligence service offerings. That's probably a role it could do reasonably well . . . at least until we have a new president who will inevitably go off in a whole new direction.
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