Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

There’s a blurb on the back of Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA in which a Christian Science Monitor reviewer calls it “the scariest book of the year.” It’s the scariest book of any year in recent memory, if “scary” is understood to reach beyond mere bumps in the night and encompass the horrifying ways in which a great nation can utterly fail in upholding its own ideals.

In Legacy of Ashes, author Tim Weiner assembles a convincing argument for the dissolution of American government and a return to the calming embrace of British rule, as he takes readers on a tour through sixty-odd years of absolute failures on the part of the Central Intelligence Agency. The cost of these misadventures is billions of dollars and thousands of lives, and yet the agency’s officials and agents conduct themselves with a swagger and hubris totally disproportionate to their own accomplishments. It’s a near-endless parade of devastating blunders that makes for a compelling and grueling read.

Essentially, the CIA is painted as a government organization that has rarely if ever known how to carry out its mission. The goal of their projects is ostensibly to gather intelligence worldwide on America’s allies and adversaries, and to analyze this intelligence for use by the President, the State Department, and the Pentagon.

Instead, the CIA’s activities from its inception devolve into the kind of silly cloak-and-dagger covert missions that make for awful Chuck Norris movies. Except with the Chuck Norris movies, all you’ve really lost is a few hours of your time — when the CIA fouls a covert op, it usually pours millions of dollars and actual human lives down into the abyss. Their failures have serious consequences, and yet for decades, the organization is allowed to act with nearimpunity and no accountability whatsoever.

Weiner’s prose style is clean and sparse, and he focuses exclusively on the CIA’s history, which occasionally means excluding bits of detail that would help fi ll in the blanks for those who aren’t avid students of American history.

The section on the Cuban Missle Crisis, for example, assumes that the reader will bring in some knowledge of the events surrounding this period, and skims over some of the key moments from a broader perspective. But then, the story here isn’t really America so much as it’s the same worst-case scenario Americans have seen from their government all too often — a tale of power-hungry, self-obsessed, delusional “leaders” who blindly carve a path through enemies tangible and imaginary, whatever the human cost may be.

The story told by Legacy of Ashes is all the more terrifying when you consider the immortal words of George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.” Again and again, the CIA fails to remember its own past failures; again and again, it recommits the same mistakes and loses even more money and lives in the process. Perhaps Weiner’s greatest accomplishment is how he draws a convincing line between the agency’s earliest disasters and its most recent failure in providing the nonexistent “evidence” that prompted the invasion of Iraq and convinced the UN to support that invasion. The CIA never did heal or “reform” itself; it continued to repeat the failures of the past at an almost incalculable cost.

Legacy of Ashes is absolutely worthwhile, but is an intense and difficult book. Be forewarned as you plan your vacations and spend Saturday afternoons in the hammock: It is not anything close to “summer reading.” Do not take it to the beach. Instead, Legacy of Ashes is the kind of volume that might be best served by the harsh, merciless nights of fall and winter, when you can curl up on the couch and descend into the horror show of death, destruction, and wasted resources that is the history of the CIA. Anyone interested in the past, present, and future of our government and how it operates should fi nd this an essential read — it’s just not for the faint of heart, and there’s nothing “escapist” about it.

Steel yourself, and educate yourself on this nation’s darkest secrets.

by Tim Weiner
Matt Springer blogs at AlertNerd.com