Legacy of Ashes - A Review

Weiner, Tim. Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Auckland: Doubleday, 2007. xvii + 702 pages. Acknowledgments. Notes. Index. $27.95.

Legacy of Ashes purports to be a definitive history of the Central Intelligence Agency from its founding in the Truman administration, to the subordination of the Director of Central Intelligence to the new national intelligence director. I’m not sure how “definitive” a history can be when a considerable amount of the evidence is still classified, but Weiner has certainly done a lot of work, interviewed many knowledgeable people, read a lot, and used the results of a quite remarkable oral history project.

This is a long book, arranged by presidential administration, in the manner in which, as Josephine Tey noted, English history is arranged by reign. There are 500 pages of exposition, 150 or more pages of notes, and an extensive index. It gives the reader the impression of having learned a great deal about the history of the agency, and even of have gotten the “inside story.” Since, however, the story of the CIA is the story of people who tended to lie rather easily, it’s hard to know how much credence to place in the insiders’ versions of things.

What is clear is that the CIA’s career followed an arc of sorts. It started with disaster and incompetence, when the covert operations boys got into the business of dropping anti-communist warriors into China, North Korea, and part of the Soviet Union. These teams of saboteurs and guerrillas were quickly swept up by the local authorities, even when these had not been tipped off in advance. There are some sad stories here, but the real theme is that the CIA early on developed a certain routine in which it persisted for its entire career, and which was of little use to the United States.

First, the CIA was never very good at the intelligence business. For a variety of reasons – the proclivities of its leadership, its recruiting methods, the desires of its customers – the CIA always emphasized covert operations at the expense of intelligence gathering and analysis. We have been told for years that humint was starved for money, while the military poured billions into satellites and listening devices, but reading Weiner’s book I had the impression that while the CIA never had the analytic capabilities it needed, it probably had as much as it wanted. The CIA did not have the language skills for its job, and it did not develop them. The CIA relied on foreign intelligence services for most of its information, including relying almost completely on the Israelis for intelligence on the Middle East. The Agency never developed a good system for filtering and refining information.

Second, fascinated by covert ops, the Agency not only failed to develop intelligence for its customers, it didn’t do very well by itself. Operations were often undertaken without either a serious intelligence objective or the information needed to give them any chance of success. Moreover, the CIA would get carried away with itself and create very destructive situations. On several occasions, from Hungary in 1956 to Iraq in 1991, the Agency encouraged local populations to rise against their tyrannical masters, and then watched helplessly as those foolish enough to listen to them were slaughtered.

Third, the CIA lied to its bosses, it lied to its agents, it lied to Congress, it lied to itself. This may have been especially true of Allan Dulles and Dick Bissell, but everyone was suppressing some piece of information. There were several internal reports which might actually have helped the CIA to find a useful role and an effective modus vivendi, if the various directors hadn’t carefully filed them away to be forgotten.

The CIA rose from its distressing beginnings to a peak under Richard Helms. It is notable that the CIA was probably at its best when it had Helms and William Colby, both career intelligence men, in the Director’s job. The end of Vietnam, the revelations in the mid-70s under the Church and Pike committees, the decline into such irrelevance that, at the time this book was written, all of the key players were either military or State Department veterans – not career Agency people. And, with 9/11, having proven once more that it didn’t know who was threatening the United States, what they might do, or when they might do it, the agency revealed its irrelevance.

One factor, which Weiner develops very well, was the end of the Cold War. The Soviet Union, the Soviet “target,” as I heard it referred to, gave the CIA a mission. The Agency never penetrated the USSR, and it failed to protect itself against it, but the existence of the Soviet Union gave the CIA a focus, a guiding principle, something concrete to work on. At one point, when Robert Gates was running the agency under George Bush, he “compiled a to-do list for the new world, completed it in February, and presented it to Congress on April 2, 1992. The final draft included 176 threats, from climate change to cybercrime.” In other words, the CIA had no clear and self-evident mission, and it needed someone to give it one.

There are some people who would say that the CIA’s problem is not how to come up with a mission – counter-terrorism, say – to replace the all-consuming struggle against world Communism. The problem is how to get out of Cold War modes of thinking, how to learn to deal with non-state actors, and how to get out of crisis mode and into a mode of permanent operations. For many years, the Foreign Service has provided diplomatic services to the nation, in minor countries as well as great, keeping an eye on small American interests as well as the global threats and opportunities. Foreign Service Officers learn the languages they need to learn, they go where they’re told to go, and, in the course of a career, they generally gain the skills they need to operate at senior levels of government. The military has a similar system, and similar expertise. The CIA never developed that sort of combination of structure and esprit. Perhaps, just perhaps, the problem was that it was established to battle the enemy at Armageddon, not to live in the world as it is.