Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
Author: Tim Weiner 2007 514 pp
My rating: 4*
Started June 13 2008, Finished June 21 2008

This book’s discouraging chronicle of the CIA’s history documents a non-stop litany of Agency ineptitude, political kowtowing, lack of oversight and even malfeasance. The salient themes include:
The CIA’s failure to accurately fulfill its primary mission of intelligence gathering resulting in failure to predict many of the major events of the last sixty years including: the development of the A-Bomb by the USSR, the invasion of South Korea by the North Koreans and subsequent Chinese entry into the war, almost anything involving Vietnam, the fall of the Shah, the collapse of the Soviet Union and various terrorist strikes against the US.
Covert operations which, especially in the agency’s early years, drained resources and usually spectacularly failed to meet their objectives though when they did succeed it was towards a goal which at this historical remove usually seems strategically counterproductive and often morally reprehensible e.g. the overthrow of Mossadeq in Iran.
Presidents who ignored the agency unless it told them what they wanted to hear. The only presidents who come across as somewhat effective and concerned in their interactions with the agency are Eisenhower and Carter. Nixon and Clinton come off particularly unfavorably.
The tendency of the later agency directors to tailor reports – corrupt the intelligence – in order to curry favor with the current president, a trend which culminated most disastrously for the US in the intelligence concocted to justify the US invasion of Iraq.
Lack of institutional controls and processes resulting in mistakes being repeated across the tenures of multiple directors: to this day, the agency lacks sufficient linguists to translate essential intercepts from the most prominent threats, moles and double agents were never effectively dealt with and covert operation seem a series of criminally wasteful rogue actions from beginning to end.

This book is certainly worthwhile reading for the concerned citizen, but to my mind it had significant weaknesses. The author is a writer for the New York Times, not an historian which perhaps is why the book occasionally comes across as somewhat rushed and unbalanced and lacking in historical perspective. In particular, the agency’s few successes are generally not discussed as thoroughly as the far more numerous failures and events are sometimes dropped after the author has made his point, even though the reader would like to know more about how they played out – this is a book that would have justified at double the length. A strength and a weakness of the book is its reliance for sources upon interviews with and the memoirs of high ranking current and former personnel, particularly directors, and internal agency histories and documents. While these sources impart a great deal of credibility to Weiner’s arguments, they often come off, no matter how badly the reflect on the CIA, as self-serving; the book could have used more outside observations, perhaps from congressmen who dealt with the agency and historians. A definite though lesser strength of the book is its self-documenting: 153 pages of thoroughly detailed endnotes.


“All told, hundreds of the CIA’s foreign agents were sent to their deaths in Russia, Poland, Romania, Ukraine, and the Baltic States during the 1950s. Their fates were unrecorded; no accounts were kept and no penalty assessed for their failure.” (47)

[1950] “… the agency had misread every global crisis of the past year: the Soviet atom bomb, the Korean War, the Chinese invasion.” (52)

“… almost all the secret information the agency gathered during the [Korean] war had been manufactured by the North Korean and Chinese security services.” (57)

[During Korean War] “The ability to represent failure as success was becoming a CIA tradition. The agency’s unwillingness to learn from its mistakes became a permanent part of its culture. The CIA’s covert operators never wrote “lessons-learned” studies. Even today there are few if any rules or procedures for producing them.” (58)

[Overthrow of Mossadeq] By renting the allegiances of soldiers and street mobs, the CIA had created a degree of violence sufficient to stage a coup. Money changed hands and those hands changed a regime” (92)
This operation was considered a great success.

CIA history re 1953 Berlin tunnel electronic intercepts: “We were never successful in obtaining as many linguists as we needed.” (111)

“The CIA knew none of this. Dulles assured Eisenhower that reports of a joint Israeli-UK-French military plan were absurd. He refused to heed the CIA’s chief intelligence analyst and the American military attaché in Tel Aviv both convinced that Israel was about to go to war against Egypt …” (128)

Wisner in Hungary, during 1956 uprising: “He had told the White Hosue he would create a nationwide underground for political and paramilitary warfare … He had failed completely. The exiles he sent to cross the border from Austria were arrested. The he tried to recruit were liars and thieves. His efforts to create a clandestine reporting network inside Hungary collapsed. He had buried weapons all over Europe, but when the crisis came, no one could find them.” (129)

“Dulles told the president ‘Because of the power of public opinion, armed force could not be effectively used. Approximately 80 percent of the Hungarian army had defected to the rebels and provided the rebels with arms.
But Dulles was dead wrong. The rebels had no guns to speak of. The Hungarian army had not switched sides.” (131)

1958, CIA attempts to overthrow Indonesia’s Sukarno, heretofore believed to be anti-American and pro communism, collapsed when leading American operative is captured with all his identifying documentation after attempting to bomb Indonesian ships, causing US to stage an intelligence and policy reversal. “As quickly as possible, American foreign policy reversed course. The CIA’s reporting instantly reflected the changed. … For the rest of his days in power, Sukarno rarely failed to mention [the US’s attempt coup] He knew the CIA had tried to overthrow his government … The ultimate effect was to strengthen Indonesia’s communists …” (153)

One of the CIA’s “best analysts” in 1958: “we had constructed for ourselves a picture of the USSR, and whatever happened to be made to fit into that picture. Intelligence estimators can hardly commit a more abominable sin.” (154)

“In 1960, the agency .. projected … that the Soviets would have five hundred ICBMs ready to strike by 1961.” Moscow actually had four missiles pointed at the US. (158)

CIA puts Mobutu in power in Congo. (163)

“Long before Nixon created his “plumbers” unit of CIA veterans to stop news leaks, Kennedy used the agency to spy on Americans” (193)

Implies CIA dropped ball on Oswald: “In short, an angry defector who admired Castro, whom the CIA had reason to believe might be a recruited communist agent, who was urgently seeking to return to Moscow via Havana, was staking out the route of the president’s motorcade in Dallas.” (228)
DG: would the CIA have any reason to know the route of the presidential motorcade?

1964: Director McCone wants to get CIA “out of the cloak-and-dagger business” and concentrate on intelligence. “the clandestine service was consuming close to two-thirds of the agency’s budget and 90 percent of McCone’s time.” (239)

Tonkin Gulf: “Within an hour [onseen commander] reported: “ENTIRE ACTION LEAVES MANY DOUBTS.” Ninety minutes later, those doubts vanished in Washington. The NSA told the secretary of defense and the president … that it had intercepted a North Vietnamese naval communiqué reading: “SACRIFICED TWO SHIPS AND ALL THE REST ARE OKAY.”
… “Upon review, the message actually read: “WE SACRIFICED TWO COMRADES BUT ALL ARE BRAVE. … [After a couple of days, NSA reviewed the message and its time of transmission, retranslated it and determined the correct translation; it turned out not to be about the pivotal second clash when US ships were allegedly fired upon, but the first one, two nights earlier] … The NSA buried this salient fact.” (241-2)

“Within the Agency, our failure to penetrate the North Vietnamese government was the single most frustrating aspect of those years. We could not determine what was going on at the highest levels of Ho’s government, nor could we learn how policy was mad or who was making it. [At the root of this failure of intelligence was] our national ignorance of Vietnamese history, society, and language” (244)

After an early setback in Vietnam, the White House orders heavy bombing: “The White House sent an urgent message to Saigon seeking the CIA’s best estimate of the situation. George W. Allen, the most experienced Vietnamese intelligence analyst at the Saigon station, said the enemy would not be deterred by bombs. It was growing stronger. Its will was unbroken. But Ambassador Maxwell Taylor went over the report line by line, methodically deleting each pessimistic paragraph before sending it to the president.”
(247)

“Like almost all who followed him, LBJ liked the agency’s work only if it fit his thinking.” (248)

“Four times in 1965, the Americans destroyed innocent civilian targets in Laos, once bombing a friendly village that Ambassador Sullivan had blessed with a goodwill visit the day before. The bombing run had been called in by Bill Lair, who was trying to rescue a CIA pilot who had touched down in a hot landing zone and was captured by the Pathet Lao. The bombs fell twenty miles from the intended target; the pilot, Ernie Brace, spent eight years as a prisoner of war in the Hanoi Hilton.” (255)

“Yet the CIA’s best analysts had concluded in a book-length study, The Vietnamese Communists’ Will to Persist, sent to the president and perhaps a half dozen top aides, that nothing the United States was doing could defeat the enemy.” (266) But Helms, for no reason other than political pressure to support military’s more optimistic picture, later reduces agency’s estimates of Vietcong in South Vietnam by more than 25% (268)

Helm’s “greatest triumph as director of central intelligence: the CIA’s accurate call of the Six-Day War. (277) (From Israelis through Angelton.)

“Nixon was outraged when the agency argued that the Soviets had neither the intention nor the technology to launch a knockout nuclear first strike [which] flew in the face of Nixon’s plans to build an antiballistic missile system.” In the end, Helms fold to political pressure, “erasing a key passage of the CIA’s most important estimate on Soviet nuclear forces in 1969.” (296)

“Under President Nixon, secret government surveillance reached a peak in the spring of 1971. The CIA, the NSA and the FBI were spying on American citizens.” (318)

1980: “Intelligence analysis had become corrupted – another tool wielded for political advantage – and it would never recover its integrity. The CIA’s estimates had been blatantly politicized since 1969, when President Nixon forced the agency to change its views on the Soviets abilities to launch a first strike.” (352)

“The Soviets would be most reluctant to introduce large numbers of ground forces into Afghanistan,” the CIA’s National Intelligence Daily, its top secret report to the White, the Pentagon, and the State Department, confidently stated on March 23, 1979. That wee, thirty thousand Soviet combat troops began to deploy near the Afghan border in trucks, tanks, and armored personnel carriers.” (365-6)

Success: “ … in January 1980, the agency execute a classic espioage operation to extract six State Department employees who had managed to find refuge across town at the Canadian embassy.” (372)

“When Casey disagree with his analysts, as he often did, he rewrote their conclusions to reflect his views. When told the president, ‘This is what the CIA thinks,’ he meant, ‘This is what I think.’ He chased independent-minded. Let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may analysts out of the CIA.” (379)

Success, plot to sell faulty gas pipeline control software through Canadian shell company to Soviets was “a smashing success” (387)

Iran-Contra, Casey persuades Reagan to make a public statement saying the operation was intended “to foil the Soviets and the terrorists in Iran – not trading weapons for hostages … Once again, as in the U-2 shootdown, as at the Bay of Pigs, as in the war in Central America, the president lied to protect the covert operations of the CIA.” (408)

Successes: uncovers Taiwan ability to build nuclear weapons; destruction of the Abu Nidal terrorist organization, Afghanistan. (419)

After repeatedly saying Saddam was unlikely to invade Kuwait, CIA warned White House that invasion was imminent. “Bush did not believe his CIA.” Hours later, Iraq invaded. (426-7)

Ames: “his personnel records were a chronicle of drunkenness and ineptitude. He had failed upward for seventeen years. In 1985, he had reached a pinnacle: chief of counterintelligence for the Soviet Union and Easter Europe. He was known to be an alcoholic malcontent. Yet the agency gave him access to the files of nearly every important spy working for the United States behind the iron curtain.” (448) “ … he named every name he knew … The agency knew that something had destroyed its Soviet operation. But it took seven years to being to face the facts.” (449) “For eight years, from 1986 to 1994, the senior CIA officers responsible for these reports had known that some of their sources were controlled by Russian intelligence. The agency knowingly gave the White House information manipulated by Moscow – and deliberately concealed the fact.” (450)

1994: “ … a total of three people in the American intelligence community had the linguistic ability to understand excited Muslims talking to each other.” (453)

Guatemala, early 90s: CIA was supporting murderous right wing military dictatorship while unknowing American ambassadors were “preaching human rights and justice.” Guatemalan intelligence provided CIA with tapes of US ambassador engaged in pillow talk with her secretary, Carol Murphy, in the ambassador’s bedroom. CIA spread this report throughout Washington – the “ … CIA had defamed an ambassador by back channels.” Turned out the tapes were of the ambassador talking to her pet poodle.” (459-60)

Agency caught by surprise when India explodes a nuclear bomb. “ … a nuclear blast by the world’s largest democracy should not have come as a shock – but it did. The reporting from the CIA’s station in New Delhi was lazy. The analysis at headquarters was fuzzy. … The test revealed a failure of espionage, a failure to read photographs, a failure to see.” (468)

A few months prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Tenet told the Senate Intelligence committee “’Iraq provided al Qaeda with various kinds of training – combat, bomb-making, and [CBR] and nuclear.’ He based that statement on the confessions of a single source … a fringe player who had been beaten, stuffed in a two-foot-square box for seventeen hours, and threatened with prolonged torture. The prisoner had recanted after the threat of torture receded. Tenet did not correct the record.” (486)`

Powell addressing the UN on 5 Feb 03: “Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.” (491) Powell asserted, based on CIA’s “best intelligence” that Saddam had biological weapons, mobile bio-weapons labs and massive stocks of chemical weaponry. (491)

Judge Silberman’s report on CIA’s prewar Iraq intelligence: “The president’s daily briefs … left an impression of many corroborating reports where in fact there were very few … the daily reports seemed to be ‘selling’ intelligence – in order to keep its customers, or at least the First Customer, interested.” (495)

“The clandestine service routinely ‘used different descriptions for the same source,’ so that readers of its reports believed they had three corroborating sources on information when they had one.” (496)

[Porter Goss, upon becoming director] “ … surrounded himself with a team of political hacks he had imported from Capitol Hill. They believed they were on a mission from the White House … to rid the CIA of left wind subversives. It was the perception at headquarters that Goss and his staff … prized loyalty to the president and his policies above all.” (503)