‘Ashes’ depressing, but insightful, look at CIA

“Legacy of Ashes”

by Tim Weiner (Doubleday, 702 pages, $27.95)

Call this summer a season of sorrow for the Central Intelligence Agency.

First, the agency released its own long list of misdeeds committed in its 60-year history. Now comes New York Times reporter Tim Weiner with “Legacy of Ashes,” subtitled “The History of the CIA.”

In Weiner’s view, that history is a sorry story. His book teems with incompetence, ill vision, bureaucratic cowardice, bureaucratic arrogance, over-the-top schemes, underhanded scheming – and on, and on, and on.

Except for a very few passages, this history recounts an institution that veers between misjudgment at best and immorality at worst.

Among the running themes:

•Although the CIA was set up chiefly to provide the president with thoughtful analysis, its people have traditionally favored soldier-of-fortune covert operations. Most of the operations flop, while most of the analysis is superficial stuff compiled by superficial desk jockeys – “40,000 people over there reading newspapers,” in President Richard Nixon’s sardonic summary.

•The CIA has fought a string of losing battles against the Defense Department for control of intelligence and against the White House (since Nixon, or maybe Bobby Kennedy) over the politicization of the agency.

•Periodic purges have regularly stripped the CIA of its thin cadre of truly talented people. Now, Weiner says, the ranks are rife with rookies, ignorant of the history, language and culture of the societies they’re supposed to analyze or penetrate.

All of which makes “Legacy of Ashes” sound abstract. Far from it.

Weiner marches readers through a detailed and chronologically ordered account of the CIA’s sins and slip-ups, from Indonesia through Iraq to the Congo to Cuba – even inside the homeland, where the agency has regularly ignored laws barring it from spying on Americans.

And his research is all on the record: the CIA’s own files, plus attributed interviews with scores of agency veterans and others in a position to know.

For all of Weiner’s grim assessments, the man writes with a deft touch. He calls legendary CIA official James Jesus Angleton “an extraordinary drinker … one of the CIA’s champion alcoholics, a title held against stiff competition.”

In describing former director R. James Woolsey Jr., Weiner says: “His bulging temples and biting wit gave the impression of a highly intelligent hammerhead shark.”

But mostly, this account sighs with frustration and sadness over the shortcomings of what should be a vital part of government. Despite call after call for reform, nothing seems to change.

In this depressing but insightful and well-written book, the CIA’s history continues to be what President Dwight D. Eisenhower said he was handing on to his successor: “A legacy of ashes.”