Last December, one book in particular seemed to crop up on every newspaper or magazine’s list of books of the year: Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. The Economist, for instance, calls it “this thorough and persuasive study”, noting that “as a New York Times journalist who has covered espionage for many years, Mr Weiner knows what he is talking about”.
The book is also, by all accounts, a complete hatchet job on the Agency. As the Economist summarises,
The 1947 act that set up the agency gave it two tasks: briefing the president with intelligence and conducting secret operations for him abroad. In Mr Weiner’s view the CIA was lamentable at both.
But the spooks aren’t taking any of this lying down. For proof, see a much more entertaining review of the book – on the CIA’s website. Nicholas Dujmovic, a member of the CIA’s History Staff, demonstrates that catty academic bitchiness is by no means limited to universities:
…the thing about scholarship is that one must use sources honestly, and one doesn’t get a pass on this even if he is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the New York Times. Starting with a title that is based on a gross distortion of events, the book is a 600-page op-ed piece masquerading as serious history; it is the advocacy of a particularly dark point of view under the guise of scholarship. Weiner has allowed his agenda to drive his research and writing, which is, of course, exactly backwards.
The CIA’s review is highly amusing, but too shrill to convince. More interesting is a piece from last September by former SIS director Sir Richard Dearlove, whom the FT persuaded to review the book. Like the CIA, he’s not a fan:
If you are disposed to think badly of the CIA then Tim Weiner’s book is for you. It is written to confirm your prejudice and give it historical substance. However, if your interest is in serious intelligence history, a coming subject in universities on both sides of the Atlantic, then “the history of the CIA ” that Legacy of Ashes claims to be should be approached with caution… This is a polemic that uses a fundamentalist style of argument – every fact is harnessed to a single theme – to demolish the myth of the CIA and its reputation. In short, the work lacks subtlety of interpretation or analysis and risks losing what merit it has on account of its uncompromising bias.
But Dearlove also makes a more subtle point: that “the very polemic of Legacy of Ashes threatens its welcome argument that there should be less adventuring on covert action and that the CIA should concentrate its clandestine resources on true espionage, the collection of intelligence from human sources”. He continues:
As we mark the sixth anniversary of 9/11, two concerns are critical: what should be the role for US intelligence, and for the CIA in particular, in the new world of 21st century threats; and how the intelligence and security community should be controlled and organised with the complex checks and balances of the US system of government. Weiner proffers no solutions himself – more cerebral writers such as Richard Posner are striving to provide them.
Fortunately the CIA’s legacy in this respect is not one of ashes – there are in fact already solid foundations on which to rebuild, although it will take a decade of consistent clear-minded leadership to bring to maturity the intelligence capability that the US now needs. However there is no quick political fix. Congress and the White House, please note.
