Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA Book

I enjoyed Legacy of Ashes a little less than Enemies by the same author. Not that it is not fascinating and horrifying, just that perhaps it painted such an abysmal picture of the agency - probably deserved, I know - but did not really point to things they do right or should do better.

The Central Intelligence Group (the predecessor to the CIA) was created in the wake of the end of WWII by President Harry Truman in order to focus the FBI on internal surveillance and investigation and have an intelligence gathering organization focused on outside sources. The first director of national intelligence was wealthy Rear Admiral Sidney W Souers (who also happened to make his fortune with the first self-service supermarket chain the US - Piggly Wiggly (and FUN FACT: I worked for a Piggly Wiggly when I was 13-15 and have fond memories of slicing the meat of my thumb open when cutting some OJ cartons and tipping over a 6-tier wine rack with the floor wax machine)). But Souers quickly found that there was no mandate and was not long in this position for this organization which itself had a very short shelf life. The CIA was created in the wake of the dissolution of the CIG and continued with a poorly defined mission and with directors that were more obsessed with black ops (reversal of regimes "hostile to the US" and cloak and dagger stuff) than the actual intelligence they gathered. Due to this, it took decades to have reliable information from the Soviet Union and yet the CIA prided itself in overturning regimes in Iraq and Guatemala (the true facts of these operations were far more sordid as documented by Tim Weiner). I was appalled at many of the details, not the least of which was the use of Jew-baiting as propaganda to try and raise a crowd to support the US-backed coups. Particularly enlightening was the description in chapter 14 of the attempted coup in Syria in '57 which has such painful and dramatic resonance now, 60 years later.

Of course, the Korean War (also a CIA screwup by underestimating the Chinese strength amassed at the NK-China border) and the Vietnam War (replete with senseless murders of civilians in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam including torture and napalm bombings). Someone, despite all these catastrophes, the CIA was able to paint a nice picture to VP Nixon and later President Johnson. From Weiner's notes, we can see that there is a great deal of evidence behind the theories that the Cubans with some aid from the KGB had the best reason for Kennedy's assassination in retaliation for the Bay of Pigs disaster and that the Cuban Missile crisis was not the story of Kennedy bravely staring down the nuclear barrel but rather Kruschev offering an exchange of US removal of arms in Turkey for USSR removal of arms in Cuba. A majority of the document sources Weiner is using are declassified dossiers from 2002-2004, so the research is relatively recent and contains many facts previously hidden to the public. In fact, there had been multiple illegal attempts on Castro's life by the CIA of which Bobby Kennedy as Attorney General was well aware, and it is highly likely that the use of deranged USSR-citizen-wannabe Oswald was acting on the orders of the Cubans with aid from the USSR.

Moving on towards the late 60s early 70s, the catastrophe in Indonesia was also largely the CIA's fault costing literally hundreds of thousands of lives. The issue is that the massive amounts of dark money that could be coerced out of Congress to fund these operations regardless of their income were so appetizing to the folks running the CIA and they had no qualms about lying about their intentions (spies being good at lying, right?) This lead to incredible abuses of power and the law and a shocking number of lost lives - both enemy and friendly, both military/CIA and civilian.

I am unable to continue detailing each of the many disasters that the CIA ham-handed, but I will mention the two that were most influential on my personal opinion of the CIA - the false information on "weapons of mass destruction" that Saddam Hussain (who the CIA put into power and armed) that the CIA gave knowingly to Colin Powell who then knowingly lied about it in front of the UN justifying a useless invasion of Iraq under Dubya, and then the supreme crime of the CIA - their complete lack of any warning whatsoever in the 9/11 bombings in NYC. Due to these failures, there was a bit of a come to Jesus moment back in 2005-2006 at which time the CIA was nearly disbanded. Unfortunately, the book was written in 2007, so I do not have any information on what happened in the 10 years lapse. I suppose it does not look like Carrie, Saul and Quinn going after the bad guys, but something far different.

Highly readable and well-researched, Legacy of Ashes is an important book right now was some fundamentals of democracy are being called to attention and in some cases destroyed by Drumpf's government. The question of collective national security vs individual freedom is one in which the latter has most often lost the battle (and seems to be losing again in terms of Drumpf Internet Policy). I think that this book makes the argument that hiding things from citizens nearly always leads to catastrophe and that when the government steamrolls individual rights, it almost always comes back to haunt them one way or another.