Legacy of Ashes: Book Review and Analysis. Grade A-

I just finished Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner, the history of the CIA. Let me first start by trying to explain what the CIA is actually supposed to do.

1) Gather intelligence outside the US: Until World War II, the US had no agency to gather or organization facts about governments and people outside the US. There are somewhat legal ways of doing this, such as utilizing spy satellites or by simple having people go a country and do some fieldwork. The second way is to have spies; that is to have people pretend to be someone else in order to get/steal information. The third way is to bride, blackmail, or torture people to get information.

2) To manipulate the people and leaders of foreign countries: This includes propaganda (such a fake radio or news stations or spreading rumors), sending money to political leaders, rigging elections, regime change, and supporting coups. I can see how this is related to gathering of intelligence, because you can only manipulate those in another country if you have accurate information about them.

3) To use force to complete #2. This includes assassinations, bombings, secret para-military operations, and I will also include providing the weapons and cash for others groups to do this dirty work for you (such as giving arms and money to a drug lord in order for him to overthrow the country’s communist leader). Now, it is this power which seems to be the cornerstone of all of the CIA’s problems. The CIA’s concentration on these missions led to an almost complete failure to achieve any of the goals listed above.

The CIA has failed horrible in its mission to protect the United States or the interests of the United State. During the entire cold war, they failed to understand even the basic elements of the Soviet Union, never placing a high level spy anywhere in Russia (on the other hand, the Soviets infiltrated the very highest levels of US intelligence). Time and time again the CIA positively made a judgment (based on their analysis) only to see the exact opposite happen. For example, one day they wrote that there is no chance that the Soviets would invade Afghanistan, only to see 180,000 troops attack less than a week later. They lied to Presidents and Congress to cover up their mistakes and to increase their budget. After each failure, congressional panels or presidential review teams would go over the operations of the CIA and every single time they would conclude that the CIA was not only failing to achieve its missions, but that is was incapable of doing so. Those reports were followed by a demand for change, which would and could never happen. The foundation of the CIA would never allow it to change and it never did.

One of the biggest atrocities of the CIA was its policy during that cold war to oppose any socialist-leaning leader anywhere in the world. And the easiest way to do this was to support right-wing military groups. With direct CIA cash and weapons, dozens of military coups took place, leading to some of the most horrible dictatorships in history. The Shah of Iran, "Papa Doc" Duvalier (Haiti), Rafael Trujillo (Dominican Republic), Castelo Branco (Brazil), General Suharto (Indonesia), Robert Mobutu (Congo), just to make a few. Their goal was only to stop the Soviet Union even if it meant the destruction of democracies and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of foreigners.

To give the CIA some credit, these actions did cause financial havoc in the Soviet Union. Of course the CIA didn’t know this as they thought the Soviets were getting stronger all the time.

By the 1970s the CIA had failed so many times that the President no longer trusted anything they said. The conundrum was that Presidents often wanted to see change in other countries and there was no other agency that had any authority to conduct such missions. So the CIA (unable to complete any of its tasks effectively) continued to be asked to achieve extremely complicated and often impossible goals. They were sent to overthrow Cuba, they failed. They were sent into Loas and Cambodia during the Vietnam War to stop the supple of arms and supplies to North Vietnam. They failed. Over and over again, they failed to achieve their goals, based on two main factors, 1) the inability to gather or analyze intelligence and 2) the use of horrible tactics based on that intelligence.

The CIA was a disaster, both internally and in its missions. They missed 9/11, they were wrong about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, they just have been imploding over the past 40 years. Yet, they still refuse to recruit American with families from other countries, although those people have the linguistic and cultural knowledge that they so desperately needs.

Well, back to the actual book. It was very well written and captures your attention from the very first page. It is a non-stop exploit of the CIA done in a reasonable accurate way. I say reasonable because the author (who is former Pulitzer-prize winning journalist) seems to have a certain hate for the CIA. I’m sure this is based on the real experiences he uncovered, but still I wonder if we gave fair treatment to the few CIA successes that there were. Additionally, a significant amount of information is still classified (although I believe if there was anything positive in there, it would have been made available).

This book makes me sad and ashamed of our government. Presidents had the power to change or stop this, but they didn’t (in fact every President used the CIA to conduct illegal missions). Congress had the power of oversight and continuously failed to understand, change, or hold the CIA accountability for anything. We assassinated democratically elected leaders, gave weapons to terrorists, and tortured innocent people. We did this in the name of national interest, but the ends did not justify the means.

FYI, here are two little things I learned. The CIA tried to assassinate Castro at least three times (once handing a sniper rifle to the wood-be assassin and another time giving an assassin poison pills to drop in Castro’s coffee). One of the assassins was captured by Castro and spilled his guts. Lee Harvey Oswald had been in contact with the Cuba government on a regular basis. If you were Castro and you knew Kennedy kept trying to kill you, what would you do? Ohhh, the CIA did not tell the Warren Commission (or anybody else) about their failed attempts to kill Castro or their knowledge of Oswald.

During the Clinton years, everyone knew Osama Bin Laden was a threat. The CIA was trying to find and kill him. Several times they said they had him and Clinton ordered air strikes only to later find out that they just bombed civilians (and the Bin Laden was long gone). After being wrong a few times, Clinton refused any more attacks unless the evidence was overwhelming. Since the CIA was basically guessing all the time, Clinton passed on dozens of possible opportunities.