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For the last sixty years, the CIA has managed to maintain a formidable reputation in spite of its terrible record, burying its blunders in top-secret archives. Its mission was to know the world. When it did not succeed, it set out to change the world. Its failures have handed us, in the words of President Eisenhower, “a legacy of ashes.”Now Pulitzer Prize–winning author Tim Weiner offers the first definitive history of the CIA—and everything is on the record. LEGACY OF ASHES is based on more than 50,000 documents, primarily from the archives of the CIA itself, and hundreds of interviews with CIA veterans, including ten Directors of Central Intelligence. It takes the CIA from its creation after World War II, through its battles in the cold war and the war on terror, to its near-collapse after 9/ll.Tim Weiner’s past work on the CIA and American intelligence was hailed as “impressively reported” and “immensely entertaining” in The New York Times. The Wall Street Journal called it “truly extraordinary . . . the best book ever written on a case of espionage.” Here is the hidden history of the CIA: why eleven presidents and three generations of CIA officers have been unable to understand the world; why nearly every CIA director has left the agency in worse shape than he found it; and how these failures have profoundly jeopardized our national security.From Publishers WeeklyStarred Review. Is the Central Intelligence Agency a bulwark of freedom against dangerous foes, or a malevolent conspiracy to spread American imperialism? A little of both, according to this absorbing study, but, the author concludes, it is mainly a reservoir of incompetence and delusions that serves no one's interests well. Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times correspondent Weiner musters extensive archival research and interviews with top-ranking insiders, including former CIA chiefs Richard Helms and Stansfield Turner, to present the agency's saga as an exercise in trying to change the world without bothering to understand it. Hypnotized by covert action and pressured by presidents, the CIA, he claims, wasted its resources fomenting coups, assassinations and insurgencies, rigging foreign elections and bribing political leaders, while its rare successes inspired fiascoes like the Bay of Pigs and the Iran-Contra affair. Meanwhile, Weiner contends, its proper function of gathering accurate intelligence languished. With its operations easily penetrated by enemy spies, the CIA was blind to events in adversarial countries like Russia, Cuba and Iraq and tragically wrong about the crucial developments under its purview, from the Iranian revolution and the fall of communism to the absence of Iraqi WMDs. Many of the misadventures Weiner covers, at times sketchily, are familiar, but his comprehensive survey brings out the persistent problems that plague the agency. The result is a credible and damning indictment of American intelligence policy. (Aug. 7) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Bookmarks MagazineTim Weiner, multiple Pulitzer Prize winner, longtime New York Times reporter, and the author of Betrayal: The Story of Aldrich Ames, American Spy (1995) and Blank Check: The Pentagon's Black Budget (1991) hits his marks in Legacy of Ashes. Drawing on more than 50,000 documents and 300 on-the-record interviews with key players (10 of them former directors of the agency; all of the book's many notes and quotations are attributed), Weiner treats his subject with a ruthless, journalistic eye, skewering Republican and Democratic administrations alike for the CIA's slide into mediocrity. One critic finds a weakness in Weiner's exuberant dismantling of the old guard at the expense of more contemporary analysis. Still, this is an important book that will capture the attention of anyone interested in the CIA's checkered history.Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. Cover......Page 1 Copyright page......Page 8 Contents......Page 13 Author's note......Page 17 General Hoyt Vandenberg, the second director, testifies before Congress......Page 23 A worried Frank Wisner, who ran the CIAs covert operations from 1948 until his mental breakdown in 1958, stares into space......Page 24 President Johnson rejected McCone and hired the hapless Admiral Red Raborn, at the LBJ Ranch in April 1965......Page 25 In 1968, a confident Helms briefs LBJ and Secretary of State Dean Rusk at the Tuesday lunch—the best table in Washington......Page 26 George H. W. Bush and President Gerald R. Ford discussing evacuating Americans from Beirut with L. Dean Brown, special envoy to Lebanon, June 17, 1976......Page 27 In June 1985, President Reagan and his national security team in the White House Situation Room during the hijacking of a TWA flight bound for Beirut, a hostage drama that ended with a secret deal; Bill Casey is at far right......Page 28 George Tenet, with a wheelchair-bound President Clinton, tried desperately to rebuild the CIA for seven years......Page 29 In March 2006, General Mike Hayden was sworn in as CIA director at headquarters. The new boss, Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, applauded as Wild Bill Donovan's statue stood watch......Page 30 Part One – "In the Beginning, We Knew Nothing": The CIA Under Truman, 1945 to 1953......Page 31 1 "Intelligence Must Be Global And Totalitarian"......Page 33 "An Extremely Dangerous Thing"......Page 35 2 "The Logic Of Force"......Page 39 "The Holy Cause of Central Intelligence"......Page 40 "An Apparently Bastard Organization"......Page 42 "What Does the Soviet Union Want?"......Page 44 "An Apprentice Juggler"......Page 46 3 "Fight Fire With Fire"......Page 50 "The Greatest Intelligence Service in the World"......Page 51 "The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare"......Page 56 "One Man Must Be Boss"......Page 59 4 "The Most Secret Thing"......Page 62 "We Were Seen As Kings"......Page 65 "The Heat of Confusion"......Page 67 5 "A Rich Blind Man"......Page 69 "The Less We Say About This Bill, the Better"......Page 70 "We Did Not Want to Touch It"......Page 72 "We Weren't Going to Sit Still"......Page 73 "What Had We Done Wrong?"......Page 75 "A Fundamentally Bad Idea"......Page 76 6 "They Were Suicide Missions"......Page 79 "An Impossible Task"......Page 80 "No Convincing Indications"......Page 82 "A Distinct Danger"......Page 83 "We Didn't Know What We Were Doing"......Page 84 "CIA Was Being Duped"......Page 85 "Some People Have to Get Killed"......Page 88 7 "A Vast Field Of Illusion"......Page 93 "You Own Him Body and Soul"......Page 94 "A Well Thought-Out Plan, Except..."......Page 96 "The Agency's Future"......Page 98 Part Two – "A Strange Kind of Genius": The CIA Under Eisenhower, 1953 to 1961......Page 101 8 "We Have No Plan"......Page 103 "We Could Lick the Whole World"......Page 105 "A Rapidly Deteriorating Situation"......Page 107 "Somebody to Do the Dirty Work"......Page 109 9 "CIA's Greatest Single Triumph"......Page 111 "Cia Makes Policy by Default"......Page 113 "After You, Your Majesty"......Page 117 "A Passionate Embrace"......Page 120 10 "Bomb Repeat Bomb"......Page 123 "The Big Stick"......Page 124 "What We Wanted to Do Was to Have a Terror Campaign"......Page 126 "Consider Uprising a Farce"......Page 129 "Incredible"......Page 134 11 "And Then We'll Have A Storm"......Page 135 "This Fundamentally Repugnant Philosophy"......Page 136 "We Didn't Raise the Right Questions"......Page 140 "There Are Some Things He Doesn't Tell the President"......Page 144 12 "We Ran It In A Different Way"......Page 146 "We're All Democrats Now"......Page 147 "A Great Coup"......Page 149 13 "Wishful Blindness"......Page 152 "Indict the Whole Soviet System"......Page 153 "CIA Represented Great Power"......Page 155 "Wishful Blindness"......Page 156 "The Fever of the Times"......Page 159 "Strange Things Are Apt to Develop"......Page 161 14 "Ham-Handed Operations Of All Kinds"......Page 166 "Ripe for a Military Coup D'Etat"......Page 168 "We Came to Power on a CIA Train"......Page 170 15 "A Very Strange War"......Page 172 "Subversion by Ballot"......Page 173 "The Sons of Eisenhower"......Page 176 "The Best Crowd We Could Get Together"......Page 179 "They Convicted Me of Murder"......Page 181 "Our Problems Were Getting Greater Every Year"......Page 183 16 "He Was Lying Down And He Was Lying Up"......Page 185 "Our Hand Should Not Show"......Page 186 "We Were Going to Pay for That Lie"......Page 188 "To Avoid Another Cuba"......Page 192 "An Absolutely Untenable Position"......Page 194 "An Eight-Year Defeat"......Page 196 Part Three – Lost Causes: The CIA Under Kennedy and Johnson, 1961 to 1968......Page 199 17 "Nobody Knew What To Do"......Page 201 "I Was Ashamed of My Country"......Page 203 "Take the Bucket of Slop and Put Another Cover Over It"......Page 207 "You Are Now Living on the Bull's Eye"......Page 210 "Out of the Question"......Page 213 "The President Wants Some Action, Right Now"......Page 214 "There Is Nothing on Paper, of Course"......Page 216 "A True Uncertainty"......Page 217 18 "We Had Also Fooled Ourselves"......Page 219 "The Most Dangerous Area in the World"......Page 221 "Put It in the Box and Nail It Shut"......Page 224 "Near-Total Intelligence Surprise"......Page 226 19 "We'd Be Delighted To Trade Those Missiles"......Page 229 "That'd Be Goddamn Dangerous"......Page 230 "The Course Which I Had Recommended"......Page 231 "I Woulda Been Impeached"......Page 233 "To Eliminate Fidel, by Execution If Necessary"......Page 237 20 "Hey, Boss, We Did A Good Job, Didn't We?"......Page 240 "The Ignorance and the Arrogance"......Page 241 "We Harvested a Lot of Lies"......Page 243 "Nobody Liked Diem"......Page 244 "A Complete Lack of Intelligence"......Page 247 "Who Gave Those Orders?"......Page 249 21 "I Thought It Was A Conspiracy"......Page 252 "The Effect Was Electric"......Page 253 "We Were Treading Very Lightly"......Page 256 "The Implications... Would Have Been Cataclysmic"......Page 260 22 "An Ominous Drift"......Page 266 "Nobody Can Run the Intelligence Business"......Page 267 "Shooting at Flying Fish"......Page 269 23 "More Courage Than Wisdom"......Page 274 "McCone's War"......Page 275 "A Military Effort That We Cannot Win"......Page 278 24 "The Beginning Of A Long Slide Downwards"......Page 279 "A Sacred War"......Page 282 "An Exemplary Success Story"......Page 286 "An Anchor Land in Southeast Asia"......Page 287 "We Only Rode the Waves Ashore"......Page 288 "Genuinely and Deeply Troubled"......Page 292 25 "We Knew Then That We Could Not Win The War"......Page 295 "Circle Now Squared"......Page 296 26 "A Political H-Bomb"......Page 300 "What They Have Specifically in Mind Is Killing Him"......Page 302 "A Man Obsessed"......Page 305 "An Enormous Amount of Plumbing"......Page 308 "Remember, You Are Killing a Man"......Page 310 "Paramount Considerations Must Be Political Sensitivity"......Page 313 27 "Track Down The Foreign Communists"......Page 315 Part Four – "Get Rid of the Clowns": The CIA Under Nixon and Ford, 1968 to 1977......Page 319 28 "What The Hell Do Those Clowns Do Out There In Langley?"......Page 321 "Incurably Covert"......Page 322 "Hit the Soviets, and Hit Them Hard"......Page 326 "The Only Way to Go Was the Old Way"......Page 328 "We Are Conscious of What Is at Stake"......Page 330 "Democracy Doesn't Work"......Page 333 "Get the CIA Jerks Working"......Page 334 29 "USG Wants A Military Solution"......Page 336 "You Already Have Your Vietnam"......Page 338 "What We Need Is a General with Balls"......Page 339 "The CIA Isn't Worth a Damn"......Page 343 "The Natural and Probable Consequences"......Page 345 30 "We Are Going To Catch A Lot Of Hell"......Page 348 "Every Tree in the Forest Will Fall"......Page 350 "Everyone Knew We Were in for a Bad Time"......Page 352 31 "To Change The Concept Of A Secret Service"......Page 355 "Outside the Legislative Charter of This Agency"......Page 357 32 "A Classic Fascist Ideal"......Page 360 "Conned by a Piss-Ant General"......Page 362 "The Terrible Price"......Page 363 33 "The CIA Would Be Destroyed"......Page 365 "Dead Cats Will Come Out"......Page 367 34 "Saigon Signing Off"......Page 370 "It Has Been a Long Fight and We Have Lost"......Page 371 "Fifteen Years of Hard Work That Turned to Nothing"......Page 373 35 "Ineffective And Scared"......Page 376 "The CIA Was Cut Off"......Page 378 "I Feel Like I Have Been Had"......Page 379 "The Greatness That Is CIA"......Page 383 Part Five – Victory Without Joy: The CIA Under Carter, Reagan, and George H. W. Bush, 1977 to 1993......Page 385 36 "He Sought To Overthrow Their System"......Page 387 "That Was Not the Right Way to Play the Game"......Page 388 "Carter Had Changed the Long-Standing Rules"......Page 389 "From a Black-White Conflict Into a Red-White Conflict"......Page 391 "They're a Unique Culture"......Page 393 "A Spectator Sport"......Page 395 37 "We Were Just Plain Asleep"......Page 398 "We Did Not Understand Who Khomeini Was"......Page 399 "It Was Beyond Insult"......Page 400 "An Act of Vengeance"......Page 403 38 "A Freelance Buccaneer"......Page 405 "A Blindered Fraternity"......Page 407 "I'll Take Care of Central America"......Page 409 "Fuck the Congress"......Page 411 "Someday the United States Will Not Be Here"......Page 414 "A Brilliant Plan"......Page 415 39 "In A Dangerous Way"......Page 418 "Too Little Intelligence for a Long Time"......Page 419 "Operating Virtually in the Dark"......Page 422 40 "He Was Running A Great Risk"......Page 424 "What the Hell Kind of Intelligence Agency Are You Running?"......Page 426 "It Was of Our Own Making"......Page 428 41 "A Con Man's Con Man"......Page 431 "This Really Isn't Worth It"......Page 432 "A Neat Idea"......Page 435 "I Hope It Will Not Leak"......Page 436 "No One in the U.S. Government Knew"......Page 438 "The Silence Seemed to Last Forever"......Page 440 42 "To Think The Unthinkable"......Page 443 "American Intelligence Was Generous"......Page 445 "They Actually Did Something Right"......Page 447 "We Walked Away"......Page 450 43 "What Are We Going To Do When The Wall Comes Down?"......Page 453 "I Can Never Trust CIA Again"......Page 455 "And Now the Mission Is Over"......Page 459 "Adjust or Die"......Page 461 Part Six – The Reckoning: The CIA Under Clinton and George W. Bush, 1993 to 2007......Page 467 44 "We Had No Facts"......Page 469 "There Was No Intelligence Network"......Page 471 "Retaliating Quite Effectively Against Iraqi Cleaning Women"......Page 472 "Blow It Up"......Page 476 45 "Why In The World Didn't We Know?"......Page 478 "A Violation of Commandment Number One"......Page 480 "The Place Just Needs a Total Overhaul"......Page 481 46 "We're In Trouble"......Page 484 "It Was Clearly Malice"......Page 488 "We Want to Get This Right"......Page 491 "Failure Is Inevitable"......Page 493 47 "The Threat Could Not Be More Real"......Page 497 "Catastrophic Systemic Intelligence Failure"......Page 498 "We Will Continue to Be Surprised"......Page 500 "We're Going to Bomb This"......Page 502 "You Americans Are Crazy"......Page 504 48 "The Dark Side"......Page 507 "A Hollow Shell of Words Without Deeds"......Page 508 "We're at War"......Page 510 "I Could Not Not Do This"......Page 512 49 "A Grave Mistake"......Page 516 "We Had No Answers"......Page 518 "Facts and Conclusions Based on Solid Intelligence"......Page 520 "Just Guessing"......Page 523 "The Evidence Was Completely Frail"......Page 524 "We Didn't Get the Job Done"......Page 526 50 "The Burial Ceremony"......Page 528 "It Will Take Us Another Five Years"......Page 529 "In the End, They Won't Stay"......Page 531 "Failure Cannot Be Explained"......Page 535 "Admit Nothing, Deny Everything"......Page 538 "The Disastrous Rise of Misplaced Power"......Page 540 "To Organize and Run an Espionage Service"......Page 543 Acknowledgments......Page 545 Primary Sources......Page 547 1 "Intelligence Must Be Global And Totalitarian"......Page 548 2 "The Logic Of Force"......Page 550 3 "Fight Fire With Fire"......Page 555 4 "The Most Secret Thing"......Page 565 5 "A Rich Blind Man"......Page 568 6 "They Were Suicide Missions"......Page 574 7 "A Vast Field Of Illusion"......Page 584 8 "We Have No Plan"......Page 586 9 "CIA's Greatest Single Triumph"......Page 589 10 "Bomb Repeat Bomb"......Page 592 11 "And Then We'll Have A Storm"......Page 594 12 "We Ran It In A Different Way"......Page 597 13 "Wishful Blindness"......Page 599 14 "Ham-Handed Operations Of All Kinds"......Page 605 15 "A Very Strange War"......Page 607 16 "He Was Lying Down And He Was Lying Up"......Page 611 17 "Nobody Knew What To Do"......Page 615 18 "We Had Also Fooled Ourselves"......Page 619 19 "We'd Be Delighted To Trade Those Missiles"......Page 624 20 "Hey, Boss, We Did A Good Job, Didn't We?"......Page 626 21 "I Thought It Was A Conspiracy"......Page 632 22 "An Ominous Drift"......Page 635 23 "More Courage Than Wisdom"......Page 638 24 "The Beginning Of A Long Slide Downwards"......Page 639 25 "We Knew Then That We Could Not Win The War"......Page 642 26 "A Political H-Bomb"......Page 644 27 "Track Down The Foreign Communists"......Page 647 28 "What The Hell Do Those Clowns Do Out There In Langley?"......Page 648 29 "USG Wants A Military Solution"......Page 654 30 "We Are Going To Catch A Lot Of Hell"......Page 659 31 "To Change The Concept Of A Secret Service"......Page 661 32 "A Classic Fascist Ideal"......Page 662 33 "The CIA Would Be Destroyed"......Page 664 34 "Saigon Signing Off"......Page 665 35 "Ineffective And Scared"......Page 666 36 "He Sought To Overthrow Their System"......Page 668 37 "We Were Just Plain Asleep"......Page 671 38 "A Freelance Buccaneer"......Page 673 39 "In A Dangerous Way"......Page 679 41 "A Con Man's Con Man"......Page 682 42 "To Think The Unthinkable"......Page 684 43 "What Are We Going To Do When The Wall Comes Down?"......Page 685 44 "We Had No Facts"......Page 688 46 "We're In Trouble"......Page 690 47 "The Threat Could Not Be More Real"......Page 693 48 "The Dark Side"......Page 695 49 "A Grave Mistake"......Page 696 50 "The Burial Ceremony"......Page 699 A......Page 703 B......Page 704 C......Page 706 D......Page 710 F......Page 712 G......Page 713 H......Page 714 I......Page 716 J......Page 717 K......Page 718 M......Page 720 N......Page 722 P......Page 723 R......Page 724 S......Page 725 T......Page 727 V......Page 728 W......Page 729 Z......Page 730 Photography credits......Page 731 For the last sixty years, the CIA has managed to maintain a formidable reputation in spite of its terrible record, burying its blunders in top-secret archives. Its mission was to know the world. When it did not succeed, it set out to change the world. Its failures have handed us, in the words of President Eisenhower, a legacy of ashes. Now Pulitzer Prizewinning author Tim Weiner offers the first definitive history of the CIAand everything is on the record. LEGACY OF ASHES is based on more than 50,000 documents, primarily from the archives of the CIA itself, and hundreds of interviews with CIA veterans, including ten Directors of Central Intelligence. It takes the CIA from its creation after World War II, through its battles in the cold war and the war on terror, to its near-collapse after September 11th, 2001. Tim Weiners past work on the CIA and American intelligence was hailed as impressively reported and immensely entertaining in The New York Times . The Wall Street Journal called it truly extraordinary . . . the best book ever written on a case of espionage. Here is the hidden history of the CIA: why eleven presidents and three generations of CIA officers have been unable to understand the world; why nearly every CIA director has left the agency in worse shape than he found it; and how these failures have profoundly jeopardized our national security. Here is the hidden history of the CIA: why eleven presidents and three generations of CIA officers have been unable to understand the world; why nearly every CIA director has left the agency in worse shape than he found it; and how these failures have profoundly jeopardized our national security. For sixty years, the CIA has managed to maintain a formidable reputation in spite of its terrible record, burying its blunders in top-secret archives. Its mission was to know the world--when it did not succeed, it set out to change the world instead. Now Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Weiner offers the first definitive history of the CIA, based on more than 50,000 documents, primarily from the archives of the CIA itself, and hundreds of interviews with CIA veterans, including ten Directors of Central Intelligence.--From publisher description Here is the hidden history of the CIA: why eleven presidents and three generations of CIA officers have been unable to understand the world; why nearly every CIA director has left the agency in worse shape than he found it; and how these failures have profoundly jeopardized United States national security. For sixty years, the CIA has managed to maintain a formidable reputation in spite of its terrible record, burying its blunders in top-secret archives. Its mission was to know the world - when it did not succeed, it set out to change the world instead. The author offers the first definitive history of the CIA, based on more than 50,000 documents, primarily from the archives of the CIA itself, and hundreds of interviews with CIA veterans, including ten Directors of Central Intelligence. This is an excellent and easy read chock full of fascinating stories that simply scare the pants off you as you learn how incredibly inept our "INTELLIGENCE" service has been. If the book is accurate - and I have no reason to believe it isn't - it is amazing we survived. I thoroughly enjoyed the read not knowing if it is fact or fiction. How can we mere mortal citizens know? I tend to believe that what is written here is true and the truth is as scary as any spy thriller turned horror story could possibly be. In fact I read it twice. Traces The History Of The Cia From The End Of World War Ii To Iraq, In A Study That Condemns The Organization For Its Record, Its Inability To Understand World Affairs, The Violence It Has Unleashed, And Its Undermining Of American Politics.