LEGACY OF ASHES: THE HISTORY OF THE CIA BY TIM WEINER
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BOOK REVIEW
'Legacy of Ashes' looks at the consequences of the U.S.' ineffectual
spying
Tim Weiner's book is a magisterial account of the CIA's history.
By Tim Rutten
Times Staff Writer


June 29, 2007

ANY history of a secret agency is bound to be, in certain important
respects, provisional.

Even when you take that real-world caveat into account, however, it
still is clear that Tim Weiner's "Legacy of Ashes: The History of
the CIA" is about as magisterial an account of "the agency's" 60
years as anyone has yet produced. More than that, it is a timely and
vital contribution to one of the most fraught debates now roiling
our bitterly divided capital: the correct role of the intelligence
agencies and their proper relationship not only to the executive and
legislative branches but also to the rule of law itself.

Clearly, Weiner's publisher realizes that: When the CIA announced it
would this week release redacted accounts of its misconduct over the
years — the so-called family jewels — this book's release was
advanced to this month, from Aug. 7. It was a shrewd decision. The
agency's familial gems turned out to be mostly paste — at best,
additional details concerning things already broadly known —
but "Legacy of Ashes," by contrast, fairly glitters with relevance.

Weiner, a New York Times reporter who covered the CIA for that paper
during the 1990s, has been working on this book for at least 20
years. He's a superb reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 at
the Philadelphia Inquirer for stories he did on the
Pentagon's "black," or secret, budget. He turned that material into
his first book, which was followed by what many people consider the
definitive book on Soviet mole Aldrich H. Ames' devastating betrayal
of the CIA.

The most remarkable and, for that matter, admirable thing
about "Legacy of Ashes" is that it is based entirely on primary
sources and on-the-record interviews. Nothing goes unattributed, and
when the author does draw his conclusions — which he does frequently
and with refreshing clarity — they have that muscular authority that
only facts can create.

Those facts are drawn from multiple sources, including the author's
exclusive access to the CIA's own numerous secret histories of its
operations, from more than 50,000 documents — many newly
declassified — in the archives of the agency, White House and State
Department, from on-the-record interviews with 10 directors of
central intelligence and from more than 300 interviews with current
and former CIA agents and officials.

In Weiner's view, the story that emerges is "how the most powerful
country in the history of Western civilization has failed to create
a first-rate spy service. That failure constitutes a danger to the
national security of the United States…. The annals of the Central
Intelligence Agency are filled with folly and misfortune, along with
acts of bravery and cunning. They are replete with fleeting
successes and long-lasting failures abroad…. The one crime of
lasting consequence has been the CIA's inability to carry out its
central mission: informing the president of what is happening in the
world."

The current war in Iraq is but the most immediate bloody consequence
of that failure.

Weiner does a brilliant job of delineating the ambivalence that
attended the CIA's creation after World War II. President Truman
wanted to know what was going on in the world around him but was
reluctant to create an "American Gestapo": He was initially
convinced that's what a centralized intelligence agency would
become. Indeed, the CIA's predecessor in World War II, the Office of
Strategic Services (OSS), had a spotty record, studded with heroism
and spectacularly costly failures. Its severest critics, however,
noted that the OSS' greatest strengths had been analytic rather than
operational. Truman initially decided to forgo an intelligence
agency, and then he was maneuvered into creating the CIA not only by
those in the government who thought spies were needed but also by
the increasingly urgent exigencies of the nascent Cold War.

None of that ambivalence would keep Truman or his equally conflicted
successors from turning to the CIA for extralegal, clandestine
operations at home and abroad. The temptation, right down to the
present day, simply has proved too great for any occupant of the
executive office to resist. The irony, as Weiner documents, is that
the agency never has been more of a failure than when it has been
most clandestine.

Even its storied "successes" in Iran, Guatemala, Chile and
Afghanistan — all of which are examined in fresh new light in this
book — turned out to be long-term failures. The agency — despite the
incalculable cost of its technical and analytic component — has
failed to give warning of every significant international event from
the onset of the Korean War to 9/11. Along the way, it gave American
officials and military officials particularly faulty information on
the Balkans and Somalia.

From the beginning, the CIA's most crucial responsibility —
appraising Soviet intentions and capabilities — evoked a mixture of
invincible ignorance and incomprehension. Weiner sketches out a
particularly chilling and detailed scene in which then U.S. envoy to
Moscow Walter Bedell Smith (Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower's former chief
of staff) goes alone to the Kremlin for a one-on-one meeting with
Josef Stalin, designed to divine the dictator's intentions. Further
description of their encounter would undercut the confrontation's
cinematic impact in the book, which is considerable.

When it came to understanding and grappling directly with the Soviet
Union and its very effective intelligence operations, the CIA failed
miserably over and over again. As late as May 1981, Weiner
writes, "[t]he Soviets weighed the rhetoric and the realities of the
Reagan Administration and began to fear a surprise attack by the
United States. They went on a global nuclear alert that lasted for
two years. The superpowers came too close for comfort to an
accidental nuclear war without the CIA ever realizing it." Former
CIA director (and now secretary of Defense) Robert M. Gates, who was
then the agency's foremost Soviet analyst, told Weiner, "We did not
then grasp the growing desperation of the men in the Kremlin … how
pedestrian, isolated and self-absorbed they were; how paranoid,
fearful they were."

Equally disturbing, the record shows that when it came to spy vs.
spy, the Soviets had the CIA for lunch. Moscow infiltrated the OSS
and the CIA from the start, planting moles who did invaluable
service for the Kremlin, decade after decade. The CIA never
succeeded in penetrating the Soviet regime or its intelligence
agencies on any significant or consistent level.

Weiner is particularly good on Bill Clinton's cluelessly
dysfunctional relationship with the CIA — and on its consequences.
It was a devastating period for the agency, which had enjoyed a
particularly favored position when one of its former directors,
George H.W. Bush, occupied the White House. Clinton knew next to
nothing about R. James Woolsey when he named him director, and the
two met precisely twice over the next two years.

"I didn't have a bad relationship with the president," Woolsey
said, "I just didn't have one at all."

Clinton further affronted the agency because he "never came to the
CIA to pay respects to the dead and wounded" after a Pakistani-born
gunman attacked the agency's Langley, Va., offices in 1993. "He sent
his wife instead." According to Weiner, "It is hard to exaggerate
how much fury this created at headquarters."

That anger was equaled when Clinton ordered an entirely ineffectual
response to what the CIA believed was Saddam Hussein's attempt to
kill former President Bush and members of his family when they
visited Kuwait. The U.S. retaliated with a missile strike on the
headquarters of Iraqi intelligence, but as Woolsey told
Weiner, "Saddam tries to assassinate former President Bush and
President Clinton fires a couple of dozen cruise missiles into an
empty building in the middle of the night in Baghdad, thereby
retaliating quite effectively against Iraqi cleaning women and night
watchmen."

Clinton also refused to accept one of the agency's rare, real-time
warnings concerning an impending international catastrophe: the
genocide in Rwanda. When he chose to intervene in Haiti to support
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, he discovered that the priest-turned-
president's major antagonists were drug-dealing Haitian intelligence
officials, trained and financed by the CIA. As a consequence, he —
like other chief executives before him (notably Richard Nixon) —
came to believe the agency was riddled with opponents of his
policies.

That was one of the reasons Clinton delegated dealing with the CIA
to a national security staffer, George J. Tenet. We're still dealing
with the consequences of that mistake, though Weiner gives a far
more coherent and convincing account of the agency's failures in the
run-up to the Iraq war than Tenet did in his own recent memoir.

Weiner believes in the indispensability of an intelligence agency,
but he's too good a reporter and too realistic an analyst not to
weigh the possibility that, as the world's most open society, we may
lack the genius for constructing a necessarily secret institution.
As he points out, during the years when the myth of the agency's
omnipotence was being constructed, the CIA "concealed its failures
abroad, lying to Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. It told those
lies to preserve its standing in Washington. The truth, said Don
Gregg, a skilled Cold War station chief, was that the agency at the
height of its powers had a great reputation and a terrible record."

In other words, we Americans may not be much good at spying, but
we're hell at public relations.

timothy.rutten@...

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