The agency’s triumphs have saved some blood and treasure.
They are marked by political battles and power struggles at home. They are replete with fleeting successes and long–lasting failures abroad. History, Edward Gibbon wrote in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is “little more than the register of crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” The annals of the Central Intelligence Agency are filled with folly and misfortune, along with acts of bravery and cunning. But throughout its history as a superpower, the United States has not had such a service. Without a strong, smart, sharp intelligence service, presidents and generals alike can become blind and crippled.
Eisenhower called it “a distasteful but vital necessity.” A nation that wants to project its power beyond its borders needs to see over the horizon, to know what is coming, to prevent attacks against its people. Intelligence is secret action aimed at understanding or changing what goes on abroad. That failure constitutes a danger to the national security of the United States. It describes how the most powerful country in the history of Western civilization has failed to create a first-rate spy service. (Aug.Legacy of Ashes is the record of the first sixty years of the Central Intelligence Agency. The result is a credible and damning indictment of American intelligence policy. Many of the misadventures Weiner covers, at times sketchily, are familiar, but his comprehensive survey brings out the persistent problems that plague the agency. With its operations easily penetrated by enemy spies, the CIA was blind to events in adversarial countries like Russia, Cuba and Iraq and tragically wrong about the crucial developments under its purview, from the Iranian revolution and the fall of communism to the absence of Iraqi WMDs. Meanwhile, Weiner contends, its proper function of gathering accurate intelligence languished. Hypnotized by covert action and pressured by presidents, the CIA, he claims, wasted its resources fomenting coups, assassinations and insurgencies, rigging foreign elections and bribing political leaders, while its rare successes inspired fiascoes like the Bay of Pigs and the Iran-Contra affair. Pulitzer Prize–winning New York TimesĬorrespondent Weiner musters extensive archival research and interviews with top-ranking insiders, including former CIA chiefs Richard Helms and Stansfield Turner, to present the agency's saga as an exercise in trying to change the world without bothering to understand it.
Is the Central Intelligence Agency a bulwark of freedom against dangerous foes, or a malevolent conspiracy to spread American imperialism? A little of both, according to this absorbing study, but, the author concludes, it is mainly a reservoir of incompetence and delusions that serves no one's interests well.
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