LEGACY OF ASHES
The History of the CIA
By Tim Weiner
Doubleday, 702 pages, $35.95
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Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes is a magisterial book and a natural candidate for the Pulitzer Prize. It's smart, extensively researched, exceedingly well written and passionate. It also nests in the zeitgeist of a country that is deeply critical of the CIA as the agent of its misfortunes in Iraq and in the stalemated global war on terror. Put your money on this book.
Tim Weiner's study of the history of the Central Intelligence Agency, a blow-by-hammer-blow account of its misdeeds and failings under successive U.S. presidents since Harry S Truman, is a legacy of Weiner's 20 years on the national security beat for The New York Times. Weiner has interviewed scores of senior CIA officials and plumbed the vast declassified records relating to the CIA since its birth at the end of the Second World War. He is proud his evidence is "on the record," without recourse to the prop of anonymous sources.
Weiner's book has a deeper taproot, as well. In the dark days of the Nixon presidency and Watergate, the then-director of the CIA, James Schlesinger (still around as a political gun for hire), ordered all CIA employees to report on any activities known to them to have been outside the agency's formal charter, such as spying on Americans, mind-control experiments and covert assassination attempts. Schlesinger's order produced an initial file containing 693 potential violations. Nixon's secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, not a sentimental man, called it the "horrors book." The CIA was forced to look into its own abyss, and the record it produced has been a mainstay for congressional investigators, historians, journalists and commentators ever since.
On June 26 this year, the CIA finally released the so-called "Family Jewels" papers to the public. CIA Director Mike Hayden referred to their revelations as deeds from another era. Tim Weiner doesn't think so. For him, the CIA's history is determinative. Not only has the agency failed to learn lessons from the past, it remains stuck in the mire of its previous "horrors." Tim Weiner's publisher, Doubleday, accelerated the publication of Legacy of Ashes to correspond with the release of the Family Jewels. The two stories are wedded at the hip, but Weiner's account brings essential perspective.
Legacy of Ashes assembles its history by tracking the activities and power (or lack of it) of the CIA under successive presidents. The strategy is fitting, for it serves to emphasize two key truths. One is that, in the U.S. model, intelligence power is an instrument of the White House. The other is that there are no heroes in the executive office. Truman founded the CIA in 1947, and then watched it grow into an organization well beyond his original intentions as the provider of a top-secret news digest (the president's "newspaper"). Eisenhower was determined to use the CIA as a Cold War trump card in a global contest for influence with the Soviet Union. This meant a mission increasingly devoted not to the gathering and analysis of information, but to reshaping the political forces of the globe by political manipulation and intervention. It was Ike who coined the phrase "legacy of ashes" to refer to the CIA, but he did much to shape that legacy during his time in the Oval Office.
The Kennedy brothers had a love/hate relationship with intelligence. The hate part was a result of the CIA's failures over Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. JFK wanted to smash the CIA into a thousand pieces (but didn't). The love part was an infatuation with the idea that the CIA could strangle Castro and other regimes that were hostile to U.S. interests. LBJ, when it came to intelligence, was a ranter and had a pronounced paranoid streak, but he had the sense ultimately to pay some attention to the CIA's pessimistic analysis of the Vietnam War. According to Weiner, it was the CIA's analysis of failure in Vietnam in 1968 that finally destroyed Lyndon Johnson's political will to continue in office.
Nixon was the CIA's worst nightmare. He profoundly distrusted the agency as a nest of Eastern liberals, intellectuals with government paycheques who sat on their hands. In one notable outburst, he condemned the CIA as "the clowns" and raged about its uselessness: "They've got 40,000 people over there reading newspapers." In truth, Nixon just wanted a different message from the CIA, especially about what was behind opposition to the Vietnam War (must be the Commies), and had an itch to use the CIA as his own private police force.
