Customer Rating:  
Summary: A Pessimistic Burial Oration for American Intelligence and Covert Operations Run by the CIA
Comment: In the James Bond movies, James Bond saves the world virtually single-handedly. He often gets high-tech gear from Q and military backup coordinated by the CIA after the agents follow him until Bond locates the bad guys. Based on Legacy of Ashes, those movies are closer to the truth than I had thought.
In Mr. Weiner's extensive look at recently declassified documents, the CIA has always been the gang that couldn't shoot straight when it came to covert operations. To make up for that, the agency has apparently been quite good at keeping secret its bungles and shameful episodes . . . and proclaiming victory in public. The main problem has been that this gang has usually been pursuing its own agendas, disconnected from American policy and political oversight. And the agency liked covert operations so much that it rarely took intelligence gathering seriously.
The blame isn't only the agency's; there's plenty of blame to go around. Presidents in particular were addicted to the idea of quickly supplying covert efforts when something was happening that they didn't like. When that urge came over them, the CIA was called in.
You probably know some of the story, just from reading the newspapers and watching television (such as when Aldrich Ames was arrested, the missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and the lack of coordination over paying attention to evidence of the impending 9/11 attack).
What shocked me (and I don't shock easily) was how many thousands of people were sacrificed or harmed in programs that never worked. For instance, the CIA believed for decades that it could send dissidents back to their home countries and set up resistance efforts (as the OSS had done in France during World War II). Essentially everyone who was sent back for this purpose to many countries was quickly found and executed. While there is a wall at CIA headquarters for those who died in the line of duty, these sacrificed agents were largely ignored so that someone could have the stupid idea to do it all over again.
So where are we now in gathering intelligence? We don't have much of an idea of what's going on anywhere except where we buy information from other intelligence services or after we invade the country. That's not good enough in a world where nuclear proliferation is real and loose nukes are a real risk.
And where are we in covert action? We are probably still bribing any politician or military leader who wants our money. We coordinate and run lots of offshore prisons where we and those we hire can torture people who might be terrorists to their heart's content.
It's a discouraging picture. And one that's not likely to be changed any time soon.
I didn't grade the book higher because Mr. Weiner seemed to be skimming the surface in many cases, failing to get into the nuances of why things happened. I compared, for example, his account of Jack and Bobby Kennedy in working with the CIA to what is described in the book, Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years by David Talbot. Legacy of Ashes comes across as oversimplified and incomplete by comparison to the Brothers book. For instance, there's no hint of the CIA's possible involvement in the two Kennedy assassinations in Legacy of Ashes.
The book would also have been improved by exploring the organizational theory reasons why the CIA has had problems. You can't change an organization's leadership and charter as often as has happened with the CIA and not make a mess. Combine that with the need to hold many secrets and it's likely that institutional reform will lag behind the rate by which new problems can develop.
I also think this would have been a better book if it had contained the context of how well those who have had good intelligence (such as the old Soviet Union) used what they knew. In the case of Stalin, the intelligence coups didn't do much good because he didn't trust the information or want to act on it . . . except for stealing technological secrets.
What should the United States do now?
It may be a good idea to continue with the current administration's preference for private contractors to gather and interpret intelligence. Then, the role of the CIA could become evaluating the effectiveness of such contractors and foreign intelligence service offerings. That's probably a role it could do reasonably well . . . at least until we have a new president who will inevitably go off in a whole new direction.
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