This is the book the CIA does not want you to read. For sixty years, the CIA has maintained its reputation while hiding its blunders from the public.Now a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter reveals the truth.
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But must reading for anyone interested in American history.
What a disaster the CIA has been from its inception under Harry Truman.
It has failed to be aware of any important change coming in the world (the disintegration of Russia, the rise of Al Queda)
It has fed billions of dollars to political thugs all over the world.
It has hired street thugs to riot against leaders it (the CIA) decided were unacceptable.
Almost all American presidents have ordered it to commit murder (most notably Kennedy and Johnson).
It hired Mafia assasins to kill Castro (not notably successfully), but Castro got there first and killed Kennedy (The CIA lied through it teeth to the Warren Commission).
America's foes and rivals have long overrated the CIA. When Henry Kissinger traveled to China in 1971, Prime Minister Chou En-lai asked about the CIA. Kissinger told Chou that he "vastly overestimates the competence of the CIA." Chou persisted that "whenever something happens in the world they are always thought of." Kissinger acknowledged, "That is true, and it flatters them, but they don't deserve it." "Legacy of Ashes" is a litany of failure. But I am not as interested in the incompetence of spying but on the havoc that was set upon the rest of the world "making it safe for democracy."
One director of the CIA said about overthrowing democratically elected leftist governments: "Why should we be put out because they don't know how to vote properly."
The CIA only began in 1945, yet their were many times that the US was involved in nefarious foreign operations: the colonization of Hawaii's, the Spanish American war to steal the Philippines and many incidents in south and central Americas.
The USA was not the only nation interfering with foreign nations. That could be a definition of colonialism. The British were taking twice the profit from gas being drilled in Iran than Iran was left with, before WWII.
In 54 Eisenhower said one thing about Guatemala but under the table acted completely the opposite to please one of his major funders. "Guatemala was at the beginning of forty years of military ruler, death squads, and armed repression."
"Eisenhower wanted to promote the idea of an Islamic jihad against godless communism."
In Indonesia, when President Sukarno allied himself with the PKI (the dreaded communists) the CIA backed General Suharto ($1/2 million). "A great wave of violence began in Indonesia. A multitude was massacred. 3-400,000 people were slain in a blood bath." The CIA agent who set this up (for President Johnson) later served as the president of the General Assembly of the United Nations.
South Africa: CIA had a role in imprisoning Nelson Mandela.
Kennedy set in motion the assassination his ally the President of South Vietnam, Diem. Johnson felt the Kennedy's death was divine retribution for the assassination of Diem
"The war in Vietnam began with political lies based on fake intelligence." Sound familiar?
Vietnam: "Never had so much intelligence meant so little. The conduct of the war had been set by a series of lies that the leader of the US told one another and the American people. The White House and the Pentagon kept trying to convince the people that the war was going well.
Pres. Johnson (67) feared the peace movement and believed that it was controlled and financed by Moscow and Beijing. He ordered the CIA to prove it. "In a blatant violation of his powers under law, the director of the central intelligence became a part-time secret-police chief."
Chile: CIA had kept Allende from being elected in 64 with a Kennedy approved political-warfare program costing $3 million, about a dollar a vote. In 70 they failed to stop his election so Nixon ordered $10 million to destabilize the country after the election until Pinochet established a military Junta. His long rein of repression, death, torture and murder is called the Caravan of Death.
Both Noriega, Panama dictator and Sadam Hussein were recipients of CIA's largess before they were considered enemies.
"Bush (the first) was the only president who knew how the CIA worked. He had daily briefings."
"Under Bush's (2nd) order the CIA began to function as a global military police, throwing hundreds of suspects into secret jails in Afghanistan, Thailand, Poland and Guantanamo. Discussion of implanting every American citizen with a micro chip, for security purposes took place."
"We know Sadam Hussein has weapons of mass destructions.""
"This succinct history of the CIA is fascinating, if also a little bit forced in its message. A friend of mine often talks about how he much prefers scholarly nonfiction to commercial nonfiction reading because the former is thesis driven. Soon after I read the introduction to this book, I cornered him to tell him all about this piece of commercial nonfiction with a very clear thesis. Basically, the book is about how the CIA messes--and always has messed--up, how, closer to how the author puts it, the United States has failed to build an effective clandestine service. The thesis gives the book focus but also, I think, occasionally makes it a bit myopic.
What I mean by myopic is that the author puts the CIA's problems are front and center here and interprets all of the CIA's history through that lens. Certainly, the CIA has had its problems, but even its "successes" here are reinterpreted as failures or simply skimmed over. Certainly, some of the "successes," such as removing the democratically elected ruler of Iran (who the U.S. government thought too closely tied to communists) to reinstall the shah, have come back to bite the United States in some very inconvenient ways. And certainly the CIA has missed some very key events. But where it has managed to do things "right," such as helping to dismantle weapons programs in Pakistan and Libya or feeding disinformation for years to the Soviet Union, the author brushes past with simply a mention. The author points to other nations being much better at covert action, but his claims are never substantiated (indeed, such substantiation would be beyond the scope of this book, lest it grow to twice its size). But just how easy is it to spy, to tell the future, to subvert another nation's government? I don't think these are things any nation seems particularly good at, let alone the CIA.
Because of this singular focus on the CIA's failings, I'm left with a lot of questions--for example, about the CIA's role in the runup to the latest war in Iraq. The author notes how the CIA fed very misleading information to the Bush administration about Iraq's weapons capabilities. If the reports were as alarming as the author makes them sound, no wonder President Bush took the nation to war. But mention of how the administration itself insisted on including certain information in media press releases and the like that the CIA had in fact debunked (or debunked soon after such things were made public) isn't included. The author mostly takes the Bush administration line and blames the fiasco of the war almost completely on CIA misinformation, ignoring that much of that blame was assigned after George Tenet was removed. My impression at the time--subsequently reinforced by Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine--was that Tenet and the agency were made to take the fall for things it had never done. The fact that none of the information in Suskind's book, some of which Weiner would have had access to, even made it into this book makes me question how much I have been mislead--either by Suskind or by Weiner or by both. With hatchets to bury, as each of these authors had, it's hard to get a straight story.
But these things aside, Weiner has written a really compelling book, one that makes me cringe. I cringe because of the things the U.S. government has done in the name of national security, democracy, freedom, or whatever. I cringe because here is an agency built on lies, built on deceit, built on doing things in the shadows--illegal things, including (how typically hypocritical of our nation) terrorism. How does a president visit a foreign leader and then order an agency to assassinate him? How can a country that supposedly values freedom do all in its power to remove governments elected by their own people that it doesn't like and replace them with repressive regimes? How can humans be so cold to one another? Perhaps, the answer is in a statement by as one person interviewed in the book: once one pushes a button to detonate a bomb in a war, how different is it to assassinate someone in a covert war? After all, it's all just killing. And I suppose that's why this whole world is in the kind of state that it is in. God help us all before we destroy everything that lives on this planet."
"A page-turner and a sleep-depriver, and it's all true! Well, most of it. Weiner focuses mostly on the insane covert operations the CIA launched to overthrow (often) democratically-elected heads of state in far-flung places like Indonesia, Iran, Congo, and Nicaragua. Oh yeah, and they spied on U.S. citizens too, in complete contempt of their own charter. You finish the book somewhat drained of humanity.
Though the book is scorchingly good--I gave it the full nod--it should be supplemented with the critical reviews written by MI6 folks, CIA PR folks, and the one dude from the National Intelligence archives. Their take: "Hey there, Weiner, what about all the _great_ things the CIA has done!" It's a legit crit, but if even half the crazy stuff Weiner writes about is true, then we shouldn't be sleeping much at night."
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