Tim Weiner

Long, exhausting, and, frankly disheartening book charting the myriad catastrophes and occasional triumphs of the CIA. From its origins in the OSS, whose romantic gung-ho legacy it completely failed to shake off, to its colossal betrayal of everything it should have stood for in the creation of the case for the Iraq war, the CIA seems to have mostly succeeded in spending lots of money, killing lots of its own agents, overstating the threat of Soviet communism and reacting with horrible show more blunders or equally horrible successes that either became self-fulfilling prophecies or worse for the people involved than any communist regime. It also failed as at espionage but everybody, including a succession of presidents, loved the covert action stuff, even though it generally made everything worse. Oversight was a joke, and so was their intelligence. Scandals and leaks and murders and corruption and cover-up and betrayals and finally a terrible eagerness to please and tell the president only what he wants to hear.

Highly readable, packed with various colossal giants of history, this sticks closely to the CIA view of things, so as a history of the various events it gets caught up in - Bay Of Pigs, Vietnam, Iran-Contra, it's necessarily incomplete, leading to a certain amount of whiplash and a longing for closure. Anyway, the CIA: it sucks, and this book shows how much damage a powerful secret institution in thrall to romantic methods and ideas that were born, had their heyday and died in WWII, can really do as it careens out of control down through the century. show less

Our republic has faced external and internal threats since nearly its beginning. A critical challenge for our system of government in dealing with these real or perceived threats is whether we can address them while maintaining the individual liberties guaranteed by the constitution -- liberties which without question impede the range of responses government may use to respond.

Sadly, we fail time after time. From the Alien and Seditions laws of the 1790's to imprisonment of dissenters in WWI show more and internment of Japanese-Americans in WWII to today's electronic invasions of privacy in the war on terror, we have been largely incapable of holding true to our ideals.

Nowhere is this shown more clearly than in the history of the FBI. Tim Weiner's incredibly well-researched book describes the abuses of the FBI in its efforts to deal with foreign and domestic enemies. While the notion of FBI misdeeds is familiar to us, the details are shocking. Warrantless wiretaps, bugging, break-ins were not the actions of rogue agents, they were standard practices and pervasive in use from the begining of the agency one hundred years ago.

The willingness to use such techniques and their extent is related to J. Edgar Hoover's obsession with communist and other left wing parties, but to focus only on him is to miss a major theme of Weiner's story. Many, many political leaders were aware of Hoover's approach and sanctioned it openly or tacitly. Surely the powerful political influence developed by Hoover over his long tenure inhibited presidents and attornys general from taking the principled position they should have, and admittedly some of the enemies were indeed threats, but those are lame excuses in view of their oaths to uphold the constitution. (One of the few admirable incidents was the resistance of the current director, Robert Mueller, and then attorney general Ashcroft to Bush's/Cheney's efforts to grossly violate the privacy of individual Americans under the Patriot Act's electronic surveillance provisions.)

As unsettling as presidents' toleration of Hoover's illegalities is the fact that some, especially Johnson and Nixon, seemed to relish hearing the "dirt" Hoover collected on their political opponents and others.

The consequences of this long era of misconduct are reverbating today. After the Watergate episode in which the FBI, below the level of director L. Patrick Gray, resisted the White House effort to cover up the break-in, the agency went through a series of ineffective directors with the exception of Mueller who seems to have scruples. The insularity and bureaucratic rivalry with other intelligence agencies that was so important to Hoover, seems to have persisted until the pre-September 11 years when the lack of sharing of intelligence blinded us to the major danger of radical Islamists. One hopes that this shortsightness is very much diminished now.

Some of the threats over time were real, e.g. Soviet espionage efforts to get nuclear secrets. Some were important, e.g. the violent actions of the KKK against civil rights activists in the 1960's. Other threats were more imagined, e.g. the communist party USA or thousands of Japanese-Americans in 1942. Whether real or imagined, the disturbing message of Weiner's history is that our government does not seem able to resist resorting to extreme tactics that clearly violate the constitution. Adhering to the safeguards contained in the constitution would and do inhibit the effectivness of law enforcement and counter espionage actions, but that is the price we must pay if we are to preserve on a larger scale our unique and precious civil liberties. show less

Lest anyone think that the CIA’s history of getting it wrong doesn’t date back from the beginning of the agency, here is the evidence. Now, you might think that Weiner has some axe to grind and it’s just his spin, or cherrypicking the failures but ignoring a vastly larger number of victories; but more on that later. There’s a reason why the book contains over 150 pages of notes citing his sources, many of which are CIA documents themselves that have been declassified over the past 20 show more or 30 years. Other sources include interviews with agents who were there at the CIA stations or worked in the military or the State department, sometimes dating back to the 1950’s. It’s as if he anticipated attacks on his credibility. This stuff is not hearsay.

Almost every covert action taken by the CIA in the late 40’s and early 50’s ended in abject failure, often costing all the lives of the agents dropped by parachute into the Eastern Bloc. The credulous agency was also easily infiltrated by Soviet agents. The sheer level of incompetence is breathtaking, and the fact that one humiliating failure after another by Frank Wisner (someone who was diagnosed years later as psychotic), the architect of the covert ops division, didn’t cost him his job, speaks volumes about the amount CYA that went on. Blatant lying to the President, you name it. And they all got away with it.

It was Pearl Harbor that finally clued in the geniuses working in the Federal government that maybe having an intelligence service was a good idea. The problems were (and one could say, still are): an ill-defined mission, with no boundaries defined; a complete lack of understanding of how to structure the agency; no consultation with allies with extensive experience (such as the Brits) to avoid infiltration; and how the agency should be funded, along with what its accountability should be.

But there’s so much going on in this book that no review could encapsulate it. I will just say that the business of an intelligence agency should be to gather intelligence, not to engage in covert ops designed to destabilize foreign governments, attempt coups, assassinate leaders, and support factions with armaments that could be used on their suppliers. (By the way, the revisionists now consider Eisenhower one of our greatest Presidents, he who was an enthusiastic supporter of this sort of foreign interference. He ordered the CIA to kill the legally elected President of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, but the CIA decided to buy the services of Mobutu to do the dirty work and install him as President instead. Mobutu was one of the vilest dictators ever in Africa. Eisenhower also didn’t have the guts or smarts to fire Dulles, a despicable and incompetent CIA director.) A list of what not to do would be too lengthy and could never be exhaustive. We’ve seen where negligence with the intelligence-gathering (and sharing) end has gotten us — 3300 American dead on 9/11.

Critics of the book say that it ignores the many successes of CIA, although they invariably don’t cite a single one. It is difficult to know just how accurate a portrayal of CIA this book is, because Weiner could be willfully ignoring successes documented in CIA’s vast amount of declassified files, or the successes have not been declassified or even recorded because they would publicize truly dreadful or illegal activities. If someone can point me at a comprehensive history that recounts successes, I would appreciate it. Successful covert actions most likely have been assassinations and coups, as opposed to intelligence gathering that would allow the US to formulate foreign policy and diplomacy that would create allies instead of enemies.

Despite giving us the full picture, this book should be required reading for anyone who aspires to a position in the executive or legislative branches of the Federal government, for it is a warning of how the intelligence community can hijack American foreign policy, not to mention the ethics or lack thereof of the people we taxpayers have entrusted with our safety. show less

Well written, well researched, and absolutely infuriating. Bad as I thought the CIA was ,it turns out to be worse. But it’s not only the disastrous, murderous incompetence that rankles. It’s the moral decay, authorized and egged on or simply tolerated by morally corrupt and incompetent presidents and staff. It’s things like Eisenhower trying to “really encourage the holy war aspect” for Muslims opposed to communism and then our collective surprise when that form of poison came back show more to kill us. It’s the special brand of theocratic moral decay that makes Christian nationalists believe anything is permitted so long as it’s us versus them. It’s the blatant and flagrant lying, the utter hypocrisy of US statements that we support the rights of persons to choose their own government, while shamelessly supporting and installing actual dictators against free elections if they are “our son of a bitch.” That the coup in Iran installing the Shah was considered a great triumph for the CIA speaks volumes, for example. A legacy of ashes, indeed. show less