Author | Tim Weiner |
---|---|
Language | English |
Subject | Central Intelligence Agency |
Genre | Non-fiction |
Publisher | Doubleday |
Publication date | 2007 |
Publication place | United States |
Pages | 702 pp (first edition) |
ISBN | 978-0-385-51445-3 |
OCLC | 82367780 |
327.1273009 22 | |
LC Class | JK468.I6 W44 2007 |
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA is a 2007 book by Tim Weiner. Legacy of Ashes is a detailed history of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from its creation after World War II, through the Cold War years and the War on Terror. The book is based on more than 50,000 documents, primarily from the archives of the CIA, and hundreds of interviews with CIA veterans, including ten Directors of Central Intelligence. [1] Legacy of Ashes won the 2007 National Book Award for Nonfiction. [2]
In a press release coinciding with the book's release, the CIA claimed: "With a strong range of sources, Tim Weiner had an opportunity to write a balanced history of a complex, important subject. But he did not. His bias overwhelms his scholarship. One cannot learn the true story of the CIA from Legacy of Ashes." [3] However, The New York Times reviewed it positively, calling it "engrossing" and "comprehensive". [1]
The title of the book comes from a misrepresented [4] [5] quotation from U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower during a meeting of the National Security Council (NSC) in 1961. Weiner incorrectly attributes the phrase "legacy of ashes" to Eisenhower's assessment of the CIA's performance under his administration. However, the January 5, 1961 meeting of the NSC focused on perceived redundancies in each military service's intelligence arms. As described by the meeting notes: "The President then remarked that soon after Pearl Harbor, he was engaged in an operation which required him to have certain information which he was unable to obtain from the Navy, i.e. the strength the Navy had left in the Pacific.
The President also noted that the U.S. fought the first year of the war in Europe entirely on the basis of British intelligence. Subsequently, each Military Service developed its own intelligence organization. He thought this situation made little sense in managerial terms. He had suffered an eight-year defeat on this question but would leave a legacy of ashes for his successor." [6]
David M. Barrett observes that "as more than one reviewer of Weiner's book has shown, Eisenhower was not talking about the CIA; he was addressing another subject altogether—the fact that each branch of the US military had its own intelligence agency, and the failure during his administration to centralize that ongoing, wasteful, inefficient military intelligence setup. (John F. Kennedy and Robert McNamara would have a solution, of sorts, in creating the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1961)." [5]
David Wise, coauthor of The Invisible Government , faulted Weiner for portraying Allen Dulles as "a doddering old man in carpet slippers" rather than the "shrewd professional spy" he knew and for refusing "to concede that the agency's leaders may have acted from patriotic motives or that the CIA ever did anything right," but concluded: "Legacy of Ashes succeeds as both journalism and history, and it is must reading for anyone interested in the CIA or American intelligence since World War II." [7] However, despite favorable reception among journalists, many academics and intelligence specialists were relatively critical of Weiner's work. Loch K. Johnson and Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones wrote that "as for scholars, the consensus seems to be that the work lacks both objectivity and thorough research"; [8]
James Callanan states that "What is also clear is the inaccuracy of Tim Weiner's description of a CIA that subverted its own mission ... There is, in fact, little evidence to suggest that the agency behaved as a rogue elephant"; [9] Jeffrey T. Richelson of the National Security Archive at George Washington University describes the book as "a profoundly tendentious and unreliable guide to the overall history of the CIA"; [10] and CIA in-house historian Nicholas Dujmovic opines that "The errors of fact in Legacy of Ashes are numerous and of the kind that a half-way diligent graduate student would spot." [4] According to Johnson and Jeffreys-Jones, Weiner "seem[s] to have no knowledge at all of the solid academic work on intelligence that scholars have published." [8]
Daniel Byman acknowledges CIA errors such as the failure to predict the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and an erroneous 2002 assessment regarding Iraqi possession of weapons of mass destruction, but states that Weiner's analysis of CIA mistakes is often "simplistic, cherry-picked, and overblown" and omits the "broader structural, cognitive, and political explanations of success and failure". [11]
An intelligence agency is a government agency responsible for the collection, analysis, and exploitation of information in support of law enforcement, national security, military, public safety, and foreign policy objectives.
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The Central Intelligence Agency, known informally as the Agency, metonymously as Langley and historically as the Company, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States tasked with gathering, processing, and analyzing national security information from around the world, primarily through the use of human intelligence (HUMINT) and conducting covert action through its Directorate of Operations. The agency is headquartered in the George Bush Center for Intelligence in Langley, Virginia.
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Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones is professor of American history emeritus and an honorary fellow in History at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. He is an authority on American intelligence history, having written two American intelligence history surveys and studies of the CIA and FBI. He has also written books on women and American foreign policy, America and the Vietnam War, and American labor history.
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Tim Weiner is an American reporter and author. He is the author of five books and co-author of a sixth, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award.
The Report on the Covert Activities of the Central Intelligence Agency is a 69-page formerly classified comprehensive study on the personnel, security, adequacy, and efficacy of the Central Intelligence Agency written by Lieutenant General James H. Doolittle. United States President Dwight Eisenhower requested the report in July 1954 at the height of the Cold War and following coups in Iran and Guatemala. The report compares with other contemporary Cold War documents such as George Kennan's "X" article in Foreign Affairs, which recommended a policy of "containment" rather than direct confrontation with the Soviet Union, and NSC 68, the secret policy document produced in 1950, which recommended a similarly restrained policy of “gradual coercion.” Doolittle wrote with an abandon-all-principles approach that conveyed the national fear that the United States faced the prospect of annihilation at the hands of the Soviet Union: “It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost,” Doolittle wrote. “There are no rules in such a game… If the United States is to survive, long standing concepts of ‘fair play’ must be reconsidered.” Doolittle’s forceful policy and language reflected the fear that motivated American citizens and policymakers in the wake of Soviet Communism.
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