Review: Legacy of Ashes

Abstract

LEGACY OF ASHES History of the CIA Tim Weiner Toronto: Doubleday, 2007. 702pp, $35.95 cloth (ISBN 978-0385514453)Writing about national intelligence systems can be tricky work. Writing about American national intelligence is doubly so, and the decisive politicisation of the study of intelligence has become clear over the last decade. CIA, rightly or wrongly, has come to represent all that people feel is either or right about America's intelligence community and indeed America's foreign policy.No better example of the very wrong school can be found than Legacy of Ashes, an attempt at a definitive history of the CIA, written by Pulitzerprize winning journalist Tim Weiner, who covered the CIA for more than 20 years as the New York Times's national security correspondent. Aware of the personalities and fights in the capital, having interviewed 10 former directors of central intelligence, dozens of other senior intelligence officers, and enjoying access to many government officials, he would seem an ideal candidate to write a balanced account of the CIA's first 50 years. He has not done so.In the second sentence of his introduction, Wiener states his argument clearly: The most powerful country in the history of western civilisation has failed to create a first-rate spy service. 500 pages of text that follow attempt, through a breathtaking post hoc ergo propter hoc argument, to prove that CIA's putative failures surrounding 9/11 were the direct result of its preceding 50 years of botched operations. polemical style of the prose-which I must add is impeccable and pleasant to read-does not let up. If the CIA got it wrong, Weiner tells you about it in episodic, anecdotal, and high-impact style.On the surface this might suit most people. CIA has indeed made a big mess of a lot of big operations. North Korea's invasion of the south caught it by surprise, and the agency failed to predict the first Soviet, Chinese, and even Indian nuclear tests. Whether they succeeded or not, CIA covert actions in places such as Guatemala, Iran, Indonesia, and Cuba deserve much criticism.But a litany of failures does not a definitive history of the CIA make. Through the first third or so of the book, Weiner concentrates heavily on covert action but says little about the CIA's efforts to build up a picture of the world-the intelligence function which is its core, if not sole, mission. Worse, he discusses these covert actions in isolation from the global context of the Cold War. This myopia leads to an image of the agency as an unprovoked bully in cases when it was-at least in part-responding to aggressive opponents on the basis of explicit instructions from legitimate policymakers. While this does not excuse every action of the US government, it does put them in proper perspective. Weiner accuses the CIA of not understanding the wider world, but he seems to suffer the same deficit himself. …