Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA by Tim Weiner

According to Tim Weiner's history of the Central Intelligence Agency, the problem with American intelligence is two-fold:

#1 We don't know what we're doing.

#2 If you can't understand a situation, then change it.

Weiner's history of the Agency begins with its inception on the heels of Pearl Harbor, focusing on a livid President Harry Truman, vowing that such a surprise attack on U.S. soil would never happen again. Truman wanted intelligence from well-trained men and he wanted it quickly. What he got, says Weiner, wasn't quite what he wanted.

With the threat of Communism growing after the end of World War II, the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and the CIA all became major players in the Cold War. The problem for the agency became one of intelligence. Far too often, field agents literally didn't know what they were doing. They didn't understand the languages and cultures they were in, a problem that only got worse in Korea, Vietnam, Central America and now, Iraq. (See #1) Rather than fixing the problem, the Agency spent billions on mostly failed covert operations, pumped money into foreign governments, and financed regimes that would champion U.S. interests. (See #2) Few lessons were learned from Vietnam and apparently no one in the CIA expected to see the Cold War end for economic (not military) reasons. Yet for all its failures, the Agency frequently enjoyed a stellar public reputation.

Weiner's documentation of the early days of the CIA and it's operations seems stronger and more credible than in later years, possibly due to the large amounts of declassified documents from that time. In comparison, sections on Agency activity from the Reagan administration to the present are quite thin. And the author spends almost no time examining how the Agency interacted (or failed to interact) with other government agencies.

As you might expect, Weiner has faced an enormous amount of criticism as a result of Legacy of Ashes, including claims that he has misinterpreted much of the information from the 50,000 documents he examined (many of them recently declassified for the first time), dwelling on negatives and distorting agency achievements. Even so, this was both a fascinating and discouraging book to read. I've encountered very few people who have read it, but I hope they do, whether they agree or disagree with Weiner's findings.