Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (2007)

Even though I have given this book 4 stars, I must confess I didn't manage to finish it. Don't get me wrong: it is very well written, the research has been thorough, and Weiner is certainly a very skilled journalist. That's why his work deserves 4 stars or more, and it is a book I would recommend to anyone.
But the story he tells, all that incompetence presented in black and white, was just making my blood boil. I realised I was reading it with a knot in my stomach and my eyebrow frown, so I chose to leave it aside for a while and haven't taken it up again.
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The history of the CIA

Just looked this over

This is a book worth reading if you are interested in understanding the misguided foreign policy of the United States since WWII and the major role the CIA played in it.

The book starts at the end of WWII and ends around 2007. Although many of the events described would be known to people that follow politics and foreign affairs, the book is based on documents that have been declassified up to 2007 and on personal interviews with CIA officers still alive. For those old enough to have lived through many of these events, the book reveals that actually things were much worse than we thought at the time. The incompetence, idiocy, illegality and fanatical obsession, with communism of those who run the CIA and their bosses (i.e., the various presidents) is so infuriating that I could not read more than 10 pages at the time.

It is really ironic that the country that acts as the world leader and promoter of democracy and its ideals would operate agencies that act in a totally undemocratic way not only against the citizens of other countries, if their decisions are seen as threatening to mostly fictional American interests, but also against its own citizens and their elected representatives. ( )

Solid readable history about the good and bad of the CIA. Mostly the bad and stupid moves they have made over the years. ( )