Legacy of Ashes is
the record of the first sixty years of the Central
Intelligence Agency. It describes how the most powerful
country in the history of Western civilization has
failed to create a first-rate spy service. That failure
constitutes a danger to the national security of the
United States. Intelligence is secret action aimed
at understanding or changing what goes on abroad.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower called it “a
distasteful but vital necessity.” A nation that
wants to project its power beyond its borders needs
to see over the horizon, to know what is coming, to
prevent attacks against its people. It must anticipate
surprise. Without a strong, smart, sharp intelligence
service, presidents and generals alike can become
blind and crippled. But throughout its history as
a superpower, the United States has not had such a
service.
History, Edward Gibbon wrote
in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
is “little more than the register of crimes,
follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” The annals
of the Central Intelligence Agency are filled with
folly and misfortune, along with acts of bravery and
cunning. They are replete with fleeting successes
and long–lasting failures abroad. They are marked
by political battles and power struggles at home.
The agency’s triumphs have saved some blood
and treasure. Its mistakes have squandered both. They
have proved fatal for legions of American soldiers
and foreign agents; some three thousand Americans
who died in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania
on September 11, 2001; and three thousand more who
have died since then in Iraq and Afghanistan. The
one crime of lasting consequence has been the CIA’s
inability to carry out its central mission: informing
the president of what is happening in the world.
The United States had no
intelligence to speak of when World War II began,
and next to none a few weeks after the war ended.
A mad rush to demobilize left behind a few hundred
men who had a few years’ experience in the world
of secrets and the will to go on fighting a new enemy.
“All major powers except the United States have
had for a long time past permanent worldwide intelligence
services, reporting directly to the highest echelons
of their Government,” General William J. Donovan,
the commander of the wartime Office of Strategic Services,
warned President Truman in August 1945. “Prior
to the present war, the United States had no foreign
secret intelligence service. It never has had and
does not now have a coordinated intelligence system.”
Tragically, it still does not have one.
The CIA was supposed to become
that system. But the blueprint for the agency was
a hasty sketch. It was no cure for a chronic American
weakness: secrecy and deception were not our strengths.
The collapse of the British Empire left the United
States as the sole force able to oppose Soviet communism,
and America desperately needed to know those enemies,
to provide foresight to presidents, and to fight fire
with fire when called upon to light the fuse. The
mission of the CIA, above all, was to keep the president
forewarned against surprise attack, a second Pearl
Harbor.
The agency’s ranks
were filled with thousands of patriotic Americans
in the 1950s. Many were brave and battle–hardened.
Some had wisdom. Few really knew the enemy. Where
understanding failed, presidents ordered the CIA to
change the course of history through covert action.
“The conduct of political and psychological
warfare in peacetime was a new art,” wrote Gerald
Miller, then the CIA’s covert–operations
chief for Western Europe. “Some of the techniques
were known but doctrine and experience were lacking.”
The CIA’s covert operations were by and large
blind stabs in the dark. The agency’s only course
was to learn by doing—by making mistakes in
battle. The CIA then concealed its failures abroad,
lying to Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. It told
those lies to preserve its standing in Washington.
The truth, said Don Gregg, a skilled cold-war station
chief, was that the agency at the height of its powers
had a great reputation and a terrible record.
Like the American public,
the agency dissented at its peril during the Vietnam
War. Like the American press, it discovered that its
reporting was rejected if it did not fit the preconceptions
of presidents. The CIA was rebuked and scorned by
Presidents Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter. None
of them understood how the agency worked. They took
office “with the expectation that intelligence
could solve every problem, or that it could not do
anything right, and then moved to the opposite view,”
notes a former deputy director of central intelligence,
Richard J. Kerr. “Then they settled down and
vacillated from one extreme to the other.”
To survive as an institution
in Washington, the agency above all had to have the
president’s ear. But it soon learned that it
was dangerous to tell him what he did not want to
hear. The CIA’s analysts learned to march in
lockstep, conforming to conventional wisdom. They
misapprehended the intentions and capabilities of
our enemies, miscalculated the strength of communism,
and misjudged the threat of terrorism.
The supreme goal of the CIA
during the cold war was to steal Soviet secrets by
recruiting spies, but the CIA never possessed a single
one who had deep insight into the workings of the
Kremlin. The number of Soviet spies with important
information to reveal–all of them volunteers,
not recruits—could be counted on the fingers
of two hands. And all of them died, captured and executed
by Moscow. Almost all had been betrayed by officers
of the CIA’s Soviet division who were spying
for the other side, under Presidents Reagan and George
H. W. Bush. Under Reagan, the CIA set off on misconceived
third–world missions, selling arms to Iran’s
Revolutionary Guards to finance a war in Central America,
breaking the law and squandering what trust remained
reposed in it. More grievously, it missed the fatal
weakness of its main enemy.
It fell to machines, not
men, to understand the other side. As the technology
of espionage expanded its horizons, the CIA’s
vision grew more and more myopic. Spy satellites enabled
it to count Soviet weapons. They did not deliver the
crucial information that communism was crumbling.
The CIA’s foremost experts never saw the enemy
until after the cold war was over. The agency had
bled the Soviets by pouring billions of dollars of
weapons into Afghanistan to help fight the Red Army’s
occupying forces. That was an epic success. But it
failed to see that the Islamic warriors it supported
would soon take aim at the United States, and when
that understanding came, the agency failed to act.
That was an epochal failure.
The unity of purpose that
held the CIA together during the cold war came undone
in the 1990s, under President Clinton. The agency
still had people who strove to understand the world,
but their ranks were far too thin. There were still
talented officers who dedicated themselves to serving
the United States abroad, but their numbers were far
too few. The FBI had more agents in New York than
the CIA had officers abroad. By the end of the century,
the agency was no longer a fully functioning and independent
intelligence service. It was becoming a second–echelon
field office for the Pentagon, weighing tactics for
battles that never came, not strategies for the struggle
ahead. It was powerless to prevent the second Pearl
Harbor.
After the attacks on New
York and Washington, the agency sent a small skilled
cadre of covert operators into Afghanistan and Pakistan
to hunt down the leaders of al Qaeda. It then forfeited
its role as a reliable source of secret information
when it handed the White House false reports on the
existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
It had delivered a ton of reportage based on an ounce
of intelligence. President George W. Bush and his
administration in turn misused the agency once proudly
run by his father, turning it into a paramilitary
police force abroad and a paralyzed bureaucracy at
headquarters. Bush casually pronounced a political
death sentence upon the CIA in 2004 when he said that
the agency was “just guessing” about the
course of the war in Iraq. No president had ever publicly
dismissed the CIA that way.
Its centrality in the American
government ended with the dissolution of the office
of director of central intelligence in 2005. Now the
CIA must be rebuilt if it is to survive. That task
will take years. The challenge of understanding the
world as it is has overwhelmed three generations of
CIA officers. Few among the new generation have mastered
the intricacies of foreign lands, much less the political
culture of Washington. In turn, almost every president,
almost every Congress, and almost every director of
central intelligence since the 1960s has proved incapable
of grasping the mechanics of the CIA. Most have left
the agency in worse shape than they found it. Their
failures have handed future generations, in the words
of President Eisenhower, “a legacy of ashes.”
We are back where we began sixty years ago, in a state
of disarray.
Legacy of Ashes
sets out to show how it has come to pass that the
United States now lacks the intelligence it will need
in the years ahead. It is drawn from the words, the
ideas, and the deeds set forth in the files of the
American national-security establishment. They record
what our leaders really said, really wanted, and really
did when they projected power abroad. This book is
based on my reading of more than fifty thousand documents,
primarily from the archives of the CIA, the White
House, and the State Department; more than two thousand
oral histories of American intelligence officers,
soldiers, and diplomats; and more than three hundred
interviews conducted since 1987 with CIA officers
and veterans, including ten directors of central intelligence.
Extensive endnotes amplify the text.
This book is on the record—no
anonymous sources, no blind quotations, no hearsay.
It is the first history of the CIA compiled entirely
from firsthand reporting and primary documents. It
is, by its nature, incomplete: no president, no director
of central intelligence, and certainly no outsider
can know everything about the agency. What I have
written here is not the whole truth, but to the best
of my ability, it is nothing but the truth.
I hope it may serve as a
warning. No republic in history has lasted longer
than three hundred years, and this nation may not
long endure as a great power unless it finds the eyes
to see things as they are in the world. That once
was the mission of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Excerpted from
Legacy of Ashes
by Tim Weiner Copyright © 2007 by Tim Weiner.
Excerpted by permission of Doubleday, a division of
Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of
this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without
permission in writing from the publisher.
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