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Author | Tim Weiner |
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Country | United States |
Language | English |
Subject | Central Intelligence Agency |
Genre | Non-fiction |
Publisher | Doubleday |
Publication date | 2007 |
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]
The United States National Security Council (NSC) is the principal forum used by the President of the United States for consideration of national security, military, and foreign policy matters. Based in the White House, it is part of the Executive Office of the President of the United States, and composed of senior national security advisors and Cabinet officials.
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.
Richard McGarrah Helms was an American government official and diplomat who served as Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) from 1966 to 1973. Helms began intelligence work with the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. Following the 1947 creation of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), he rose in its ranks during the presidencies of Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy. Helms then was DCI under Presidents Johnson and Nixon, yielding to James R. Schlesinger in early 1973.
John Mark Deutch is an American physical chemist and civil servant. He was the United States Deputy Secretary of Defense from 1994 to 1995 and Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) from May 10, 1995 until December 15, 1996. He is an emeritus Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and serves on the boards of directors of Citigroup, Cummins, Raytheon, and Schlumberger Ltd. Deutch is also a member of the Trilateral Commission.
In political science, rollback is the strategy of forcing a change in the major policies of a state, usually by replacing its ruling regime. It contrasts with containment, which means preventing the expansion of that state; and with détente, which means a working relationship with that state. Most of the discussions of rollback in the scholarly literature deal with United States foreign policy toward communist countries during the Cold War. The rollback strategy was tried and was not successful in Korea in 1950 and in Cuba in 1961, but it was successful in Grenada in 1983. The political leadership of the United States discussed the use of rollback during the East German uprising of 1953 and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, but decided against it to avoid the risk of Soviet intervention or a major war.
The Directorate of Operations (DO), less formally called the Clandestine Service, is a component of the US Central Intelligence Agency. It was known as the Directorate of Plans from 1951 to 1973; as the Directorate of Operations from 1973 to 2005; and as the National Clandestine Service (NCS) from 2005 to 2015.
The Central Intelligence Agency, known informally as theAgency and historically as thecompany, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially 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. As a principal member of the United States Intelligence Community (IC), the CIA reports to the Director of National Intelligence and is primarily focused on providing intelligence for the President and Cabinet of the United States. Following the dissolution of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) at the end of World War II, President Harry S. Truman created the Central Intelligence Group under the direction of a Director of Central Intelligence by presidential directive on January 22, 1946, and this group was transformed into the Central Intelligence Agency by implementation of the National Security Act of 1947.
Executive oversight of United States covert operations has been carried out by a series of sub-committees of the National Security Council (NSC).
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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.
At various times since the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal government of the United States has produced comprehensive reports on CIA actions that marked historical watersheds in how CIA went about trying to fulfill its vague charter purposes from 1947. These reports were the result of internal or presidential studies, external investigations by congressional committees or other arms of the Federal government of the United States, or even the simple releases and declassification of large quantities of documents by the CIA.
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.
The Pinochet File is a National Security Archive book written by Peter Kornbluh covering over approximately two decades of declassified documents, from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), White House, and United States Department of State, regarding American covert activities in Chile. It is based on more than 24,000 previously classified documents that were released as part of the Chilean Declassification Project during the Clinton administration, between June 1999 and June 2000.
Rufus Lackland Taylor Jr. was an officer in the United States Navy. Eventually he became Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence and held the rank of Vice Admiral. In 1966 he was appointed as Deputy Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), then shortly thereafter as Deputy Director of the CIA, where he served from 1966 to 1969.
The United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) dates from September 18, 1947, when President Harry S. Truman signed the National Security Act of 1947 into law. A major impetus that has been cited over the years for the creation of the CIA was the unforeseen attack on Pearl Harbor, but whatever Pearl Harbor's role, at the close of World War II government circles identified a need for a group to coordinate government intelligence efforts, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the State Department, the War Department, and even the Post Office were all jockeying for that new power.
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The Overseas Internal Security Program was a United States Central Intelligence Agency program led by CIA Counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton to train military and police officers for secret police work in more than 25 countries. First revealed in a 2007 CIA history, the program trained 771,217 officers and helped create the secret police in Cambodia, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Iran, Iraq, Laos, Peru, the Philippines, South Korea, South Vietnam, and Thailand. Many of these officers were trained in the School of the Americas in the Panama Canal Zone, including officers who went on to lead "death squads" in their home countries of Honduras and El Salvador.