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 …
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.
The book reads like a grocery list of failures, which is fine, but there's just too little context. Very little space is spent explaining why things didn't work - the reader is mostly left to conclude that the plan was stupid and the people attempting to execute it were also stupid.
The author also goes out of his way to share his disdain, either through direct editorializing or sharing an anecdote to demonstrate the outrageous behavior of the people involved. Simply describing the failure would have been sufficient - the remainder just made it seem like the author had an axe to grind.
i wish i read the reviews before i bought this, once weiner got to post-war italy and incompetent agents handing over sackloads of money to dodgy informants and then took us away from italy without mentioning anything about CIA stay-behinds i started to realise how liberal the author's outlook was. i just started to skim from that point onwards, the hypothesis seems to be that the CIA was a state within a state doing things completely alien and counter to the interests of american democracy, that its allying with israel was some sort of error or accident, etc. etc. avoid at all costs
