I have been interviewing authors and reviewing their books on both television programs and talk radio. This book Legacy of Ashes, The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner reveals how the agency has not fulfilled its job.

Do you remember after 9/11 investigators concluded that one of the reasons it happened was a lack of communication among agencies such as: the CIA, the FBI and immigration. To correct this lack of communication the investigators came up with a mandate that agencies cooperate more fully. Experts designed a very elaborate computer system that would facilitate that cooperation and implement better communication. When the bi-partisan 9/11 commission finished its work a few years later, it was very harsh in its criticism of agencies failure to communicate vital information to other agencies (criticism along with President’s Bush failure to be honest with the American people.) That communication system was never installed. At the time I thought what is the problem that these agencies can’t cooperate with one another; that is the best move we could make to avert terrorism (not invade Iraq).

Now Tim Weiner’s book on the CIA and its failures over the past sixty years has been released in paperback. How naïve I was! Weiner is a New York Time reporter who has won a Pulitzer for his work investigating the nation’s security. In his book Legacy of Ashes he shows how poorly the CIA does its job. What is even more frightening is how powerful the military has become in national security. Once civilians led the CIA and its ranks included an experienced staff. Now national security is primarily in the hands of the military. That is enough for me to lose a few nights sleep.
In his book Weiner outlines sixty years of incompetence and pressures that made it virtually impotent. There are more than enough problems to fill 601 pages: opening of letters, snooping on critics, trying out drugs on Russian prisoners, torture and plots to kill foreign leaders. But at the bottom of all of this Weiner finds despite a couple of stellar accomplishments in the past sixty years the agency has been incompetent. Advisers at the highest level warned that the CIA was not doing its job. Over the years they pointed out: the CIA failed to warn the President of the first Soviet atom bomb (1949), the Chinese invasion of South Korea (1950). Anti-Soviet uprising in East Germany (1953 And Hungary (1956) the dispatch of missiles to Cuba (1962, The Arab-Israel war of 1967 and Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Its operations in the Soviet Union were severely undermined by Aldrich Ames a counter spy for the Russians whose revelations resulted in the deaths of 10 CIA agents working in the Soviet Union and revealed the names of hundred of agents within the CIA and well as disclosing vital information about US operations It took nine years of the CIA to discover the damage and arrest him.
What is particularly unsettling is the CIA’s bogus intelligence on Iraq in 2002-2003 based on lies of completely unreliable sources like the one known as Curveball. But this was not the first time faulty intelligence led to a war. To justify the Johnson administration’s desire for a pro-war Congressional resolution on Vietnam in 1964, the intelligence community manufactured evidence of a Communist attack on American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin.
This is a disturbing book in part because we are paying dearly now for a war that is illegal and immoral and as Weiner points out has left us no safer from terrorism. As we drown in economic woes, the falling dollar, debt so high it is hard to imagine, loss of prestige around the world, inflation, an economy slowing to a crawl we have to ask is there any way to keep leaders from waging war because they want to and using false intelligence to support it. Weiner’s book is exciting although disturbing as he traces the incompetence of the CIA along with the political pressures that have stripped the agency of competent officials and money to fund it.
Let me know what you think after you read it.