Book Review: Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner is an exhaustive tome concerning the history of the CIA. He wrote the book after an extensive reading of some 50,000 documents and many, many interviews with past CIA people. The footnotes in this book are incomparable to any other book I have read.

There is much to learn about the CIA in this book. Given the number of footnotes in this book, there is no doubt that the history that he writes about is real. The events are real. The people are real. Many of the accounts are recorded directly from the sources.

He outlines the leaders over the years and how they often kept the government (including the President, at times) in the dark on many of their operations. He talks about their ineptitude when it comes to leadership and gaining intelligence on America’s enemies. While some of this is probably true, I am sure that the job was much more difficult than writing.

He discusses the roles that the Presidents have played with the CIA. Surprisingly, he was rough on both Kennedy and Clinton when it comes to their relationship with the Agency. Predictably, he was tough on Nixon, Reagan, and George W. Bush. The only President he praised for a good relationship with the CIA was George H.W. Bush.

The problem I have with the book is that the author really has nothing positive to say about the Agency. Everything is negative. He says that this is due to the fact that they have had very few successes over the years. I believe that he has purposefully left out some of the positive things the CIA has done so as to create a negative image of the Agency (and given the fact that the author works for the New York Times, I feel I am right about this).

After spending the whole book railing against the CIA, he suddenly feels sorry for them after the events of 9/11. At that point, all of a sudden the national leaders started to ignore the CIA and its intelligence. I found it highly ironic that the CIA could do nothing right, and that they missed the events leading up to 9/11. However, all of a sudden, they became credible. President Bush started to ignore the intelligence reports and the intelligence was being ‘cherry picked’.

The author, in my opinion, is very self-serving and will do what he can to make the CIA (as well as the U.S.) look bad. I do not believe it was his goal to provide a balanced look at the Agency. If you have a lot of free time on hand, go ahead and read the book. If you do not have the available time, you are not missing anything by skipping over this tome. I read this book so you did not have to.