Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim

Weiner

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Original Title: Legacy of Ashes

ISBN: 038551445X
ISBN13: 9780385514453
Autor: Tim Weiner (Goodreads Author)
Rating: 3.6 of 5 stars (4528) counts
Original Format: Hardcover, 702 pages
Download Format: PDF, TXT, ePub, iBook.
Published: June 28th 2007 / by Doubleday / (first published January 1st 2007)
Language: English
Genre(s):
History- 604 users
Nonfiction- 349 users
Politics- 147 users
Spy Thriller >Espionage- 72 users
North American Hi... >American History- 56 users
War- 42 users

Description:

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 Prizewinning author Tim Weiner offers the first definitive history of the CIAand
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 Weiners 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.

About Author:
Tim Weiner reported for The New York Times for many years as a foreign correspondent and as a
national security correspondent in Washington, DC. He has won the Pulitzer Prize for National
Reporting and the National Book Award for LEGACY OF ASHES: The History of the CIA. His new
book, out in July, is ONE MAN AGAINST THE WORLD: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon.

Other Editions:

- Legacy of Ashes: the History of the CIA (Paperback)

- Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Kindle Edition)

- (Paperback)

- Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Audio CD)

- Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Paperback)

Books By Author:
- Enemies: A History of the FBI

- One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon

- Betrayal: The Story of Aldrich Ames, an American Spy

- Blank Check: The Pentagon's Black Budget

 - CIA. O istorie secreta

Books In The Series:

Related Books On Our Site:

- The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping
on America

- Spycraft: The Secret History of the CIA's Spytechs, from Communism to al-
Qaeda
 - From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776

- State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration

- A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon

- The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive & the Secret History of the
KGB
 - Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden from
the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001

- The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War
on American Ideals

- Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-up

- The New American Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War

 - Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq

- Whiteout: The CIA,Drugs and the Press

- Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America's War With Militant Islam

- One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev and Castro on the Brink of

Nuclear War
 - Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda

- Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-1987

- See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on
Terrorism

- Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War
Rewiews:

Sep 01, 2016

Lyn
Rated it: liked it
This is a superbly reseached work and tells the shadowy tale of American foreign policy from the
late 40's to the present day. But it is really a 700 page indictment of how bad a government
agency can be.

The one thing the CIA did well was give money away, BILLIONS of dollars spent with a slim
margin of return at best, and at worse it became clear that the CIA had literally been conned out of
hundreds of millions by other states and even individuals.

But any work of journalism, to be regarded as

This is a superbly reseached work and tells the shadowy tale of American foreign policy from the
late 40's to the present day. But it is really a 700 page indictment of how bad a government
agency can be.

The one thing the CIA did well was give money away, BILLIONS of dollars spent with a slim
margin of return at best, and at worse it became clear that the CIA had literally been conned out of
hundreds of millions by other states and even individuals.

But any work of journalism, to be regarded as great, must be objective and here is the problem
with this book: it is such a pervasivley negative account, it reports that the CIA is so off the charts
bad, that a reader wonders if Weiner is just slamming them page after page. Surely in over 60
years of service the CIA has done something right. To his credit, he documents a rebuttal by a CIA
director that says essentially that their greatest successes were secret while only their many
failures were known publically. This could be true, but Weiner has created a work that dramatically
documents an ascerbic, scathing history of the CIA, describing them as air conditioned,
comfortable bureacrats in the suburbs of Virginia and Maryland, far from the image of worldly and
competent super spy that the agency wishes to be portayed. The agents and analysists may see
themselves as James Bond, but Weiner describes them more like the John Malkovitch character
from the Coen Brothers film Burn After Reading: inept, arrogant, ineffective, detached from reality
and drunk. Presidents have privately called the agents of the CIA clowns, jerks, idiots, drunks,
thieves, and liars.

Allen Dulles, one the earlies and most influential directors, used to heft a report to determine how
heavy it was, rather than actually reading it. He even did this in front of the author of the report,
and may have blithley given it back with an instruction that it needed more, if it were too light. Later
in his career he may watch a Washington Senators baseball game, ignoring the agent who was
trying to brief him on some issue.

Early on the CIA used the communists against the fascists, and later sided with fascists against
the communists. The CIA's battle with communism was its early raison d'etre and the fall of the
Soviet Union caused many lifelong agents to mourn the passing of its foe as a sign that their time
too had come.

The CIA had stumbled across early terrorsist plots by the PLO and had indications that sub-state
level terror may be the wave of the future but did little to prevent the rise of the terrorists, largely
due to the fact that thier credibility at the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department
had diminshed to the point where the CIA had become an almost ran in terms of US foreign policy.

Some of the notoriously bad predictions of the CIA:

The Soviet Union will not invade Afghanistan

The Shah of Iran is safe from revolution
There is no liklihood of Soviet missles in Cuba
China will not invade Korea.
We are absolutely winning the war in Vietnam.
Don't worry about an embassy attack in Iran.
Iraq will not invade Kuwait. (A senior CIA official learned of the invasion from his neighbor who had
seen it on CNN)

And worst of all, a case of the boy who cries wolf in 2001, as CIA officials actually had some idea
of plots in existence, but the seriousness of the reports were corrupted by decades of poor
intelligence and the weakened esteem at the White House and so the reports went relatively
unheeded by the Clinton and Bush administrations.

With the attacks of 9/11 in 2001, the CIA's worst nightmare had been realized as the CIA had
failed to prevent a second Pearl Harbor. Later on, the politics and ineffectiveness of the the
agency contributed to the poor intelligence that led to the US invasion of Iraq as the CIA produced
reports based upon faulty intelligence gathering, hearsay, and was essentially aimed at delivering
news that Bush wanted to hear rather than telling the truth that they just did not know for sure what
Iraq had in terms of WMD.

Scary book if it's as true as it appears.

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