Legacy of Ashes: the History of the CIA Tim Weiner Doubleday, 702pp, £25

On 26 June, to much fanfare, the director general of the CIA, Michael V Hayden, authorised the release of the agency's so-called "family jewels", a collection of long-secret papers cataloguing many of the ills that have driven paranoia about the CIA for decades: mind-control experiments, assassination attempts, the creation of secret police forces from Iran to Guatemala.

The 700-plus pages released that day turned out to be something of a disappointment, particularly for conspiracy theorists. The broad outlines of the plots and activities mentioned in the documents were the same as those uncovered decades ago by journalists and congressional committees, and many details remain redacted. But the implicit message behind going public was plain. After blistering criticism for running a network of secret prisons and using harsh interrogation practices on detainees - not to mention the utter failure of intelligence in the lead-up to the Iraq war - the modern-day CIA has learned from its mistakes. "The documents provide a glimpse of a very different time and a very different agency," Hayden said when he announced the release. "Most of it is unflattering, but it is CIA history."

A far more spellbinding - and complete - history of the agency is Legacy of Ashes: the History of the CIA, by the New York Times reporter Tim Weiner. Legacy of Ashes provides a masterful account of the personalities and political crises that have shaped the CIA since its inception. Charting the agency's creation ("All Harry Truman wanted was a newspaper") to the infamous "slam dunk" in Iraq, Weiner proves an able guide through six decades of failure, incompetence and deception.

From the start, the CIA struggled to balance its twin functions: gathering quality intelligence and performing the covert operations - coups, fixed elections and assassinations - that presidents and agency directors came to prefer to traditional, time-consuming espionage. The result, Weiner suggests, is an agency which has always been confused as to its raison d'être, which allowed its leadership to make endless excuses for continued failures.

Many of those failures are well known. The CIA failed to anticipate a good number of the major political upheavals of the second half of the 20th century: the Korean war, the Cuban missile crisis, the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, the fall of the Soviet Union and India's nuclear bomb test in 1998. But to add to this litany, Weiner has tens of thousands of recently declassified documents and on-the-record interviews with dozens of former directors and senior officials. He unearths evidence of the thousands of agents dropped behind the Iron Curtain and Asian enemy lines, only to be double-crossed and, very often, eliminated. And he reveals how director after director fabricated or manipulated intelligence for the White House, often to protect the agency or maintain the president's good graces.

Weiner also shows that the CIA has never really gotten it right on Iraq. In the summer of 1990, as Saddam Hussein's troops crossed the Kuwaiti border, Robert Gates, then President George H W Bush's top intelligence adviser, threw a backyard picnic for friends. Someone asked the future secretary of defence what he was doing there, given the invasion. What invasion? Gates asked.

It's an apt illustration of Weiner's central thesis. If the CIA has been successful at anything during its six decades, it is masking its repeated failures. "For 60 years tens of thousands of clandestine service officers have gathered only the barest threads of truly important intelligence," Weiner writes, "and that is the CIA's deepest secret."

The official reaction has been repeated calls for an overhaul, and repeated resistance to change. But after the intelligence debacle in Iraq, President George W Bush has been able to institute wide-ranging reforms - that have done little but drive many of the nation's most experienced intelligence officials into retirement or private practice. By 2005, half of the CIA workforce had less than five years' experience. And under Bush, the Pentagon has increasingly asserted dominance over US intelligence-gathering and analysis. When Gates took over the defence department in December 2006, nearly all of the top American intelligence jobs, historically held by civilians, were held by military generals.

This militarisation of intelligence and the agency's continued inability to recruit Arabic- and Farsi-speaking agents clearly trouble Weiner. It's a scathing critique, and one that suggests the agency has always had more arrogance than aptitude. As Weiner recounts it, when Henry Kissinger met with the Chinese prime minister Zhou Enlai in 1971, Kissinger assured Zhou, who was concerned about CIA subversion, that "he vastly overestimates the competence of the CIA". Zhou pressed Kissinger, insistent that "whenever something happens in the world they are always thought of".

"That is true," Kissinger said. "It flatters them, but they don't deserve it."

Carolyn O'Hara is assistant editor at Foreign Policy magazine

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website