Tim Weiner argues in Legacy of Ashes that an expert and dedicated foreign intelligence service is vital to the interests and security of America. He also argues that it has never had such a service. In a weighty and thorough history of the Agency, Weiner attempts to debunk the myth of the “all-powerful CIA” whose hand is suspected behind almost any coup or balance of power anywhere in the world. On the contrary, he argues that the CIA has been “incompetent, naive, chaotic and a danger to American interests for over sixty years.”
These are large claims, and Weiner sees the CIA’s history as containing some basic mistakes. Firstly he criticises an over-reliance on technology at the expense of analysis, which he says led to a situation in the Cold War where the Agency could detail the Soviet military capability with overflights and photographs, but totally failed to realise that the USSR which commanded them was about to collapse.
He also suggests that covert operations were stressed at the expense of intelligence gathering – in Weiner’s formulation, it is easier to try to change the world than to understand it. Successful operations in Iran and Guatemala, and the resulting impression that the CIA was “a silver bullet in the arsenal democracy”, led to an impatience with the painstaking processes of intelligence gathering and analysis.
In more general terms, Legacy of Ashes contains a critique of the American Foreign Service’s attitude to the countries in which they tried to exert influence. In contrast to legendary British operatives like T. E. Lawrence (themselves the subject of some pretty handy myth-making), Weiner finds their American equivalents lacking in the commitment necessary to learn difficult languages and spend years in the ground learning local customs and politics. (He recently reiterated this criticism in an interview with BBC Radio 4’s news programme Today.)
Of course, not all the disadvantages the CIA operates under are its own fault. Weiner makes the point that when the Second World War was coming to an end, America had to build a secret intelligence operation from scratch, whereas the Russians and British had been duelling with each other in the “Great Game” for more than a hundred years. Likewise the uncertainty of the lines of communication between the CIA, the President, and other agencies has apparently done little to promote harmony or efficiency.
Legacy of Ashes is definitely a book with a specific argument to make: it is not a primer on twentieth century geopolitics nor a discussion of the relative merits of American versus Soviet dominance, and cannot be read as such. Weiner’s analyses are impressive and convincing, however, and can only be strengthened by the fact that every quotation used in the book is on the record, and documented.
