Former president Richard Nixon was probably overstating the case when he said, “The CIA isn’t worth a damn.” Perhaps he was simply venting his frustrations, but if one accepts the basic thesis proffered by author Tim Weiner in his celebrated book Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, he was not altogether far from the truth.

Weiner, a New York Times reporter who has spent years covering the CIA, read 50,000 pages of documents—including the declassified oral and internal histories of the CIA—before writing his history of the agency or, to be more accurate, his history of the CIA’s failures. From a political perspective, his point of view is somewhat surprising. Weiner appears to be a man of the center-left, and he is very critical of the George W. Bush administration, which he blames for running a “faith-based” foreign policy. And yet, his book could easily qualify as an essentially right-wing indictment of the intelligence community.

The political left has always tended to complain about the CIA’s secrecy and its abuses of power—its ostensibly immoral involvement in orchestrating political coups in Latin America, its relationships with thugs and despots, and its lack of respect for democratic institutions. The American right, by contrast, has tended to question the CIA’s capabilities and grumble about its incompetence. Weiner, for the most part, gives more ammunition to the second of the two camps. Indeed, many Bush aides—including some long-departed neo-conservatives—will find their misgivings echoed in Weiner’s book. The same criticisms they could not voice in public without being accused of politicizing intelligence are readily found in this lengthy and detailed tome.

 

Donald Gregg, a former CIA station chief in South Korea and later national security adviser to vice president George H.W. Bush, once said that the CIA has “a great reputation and a terrible record.” This quote immediately springs to mind as one sifts through the few successes that Weiner chronicles—if one can call them “successes,” since these achievements were hardly worth the price or the consequences. The Iranian coup of 1953, for instance, which brought the anti-communist shah back to power, “was regarded as CIA’s greatest single triumph,” according to Andrew Kilgore, a State Department officer in Iran from 1972 to 1979. “It was trumpeted as a great American national victory. We had changed the whole course of the country here,” quotes Weiner. But a generation of Iranians grew up knowing that the CIA had installed the shah and helped keep him in power. Over time, the agency’s “triumph” in Tehran would return to haunt the United States.

And this, according to Weiner, was not the only unintended and damaging consequence of the coup. “The illusion that the CIA could overthrow a nation by sleight of hand,” he writes, “was alluring.” As a result, the CIA, incapable of doing what it was supposed to do—namely, providing American leaders with reliable information so they could make informed decisions—began to focus on more glamorous tasks. This “led the agency into a battle in Central America that went on for the next forty years.” The disastrous invasion of the Bay of Pigs in 1961, says Weiner, was a direct result.

If its successes are few—and disputable—the failures of the CIA are legion. Going through the list of mistaken analyses, trends overlooked, signs ignored, and operations mishandled can make one cringe. For example, the CIA failed to predict that the Soviet Union would detonate an atomic bomb in 1949 and that North Korea would invade the South in 1950. It was consistently wrong in its information and analysis both before and during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, and it failed to predict the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War in 1973. It was taken by surprise by the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian revolution of the same year. More relevant today, it also conspicuously failed twice in Iraq: It did not predict Saddam Hussein’s 1991 invasion of Kuwait, and it presented flawed intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program in 2003. And the list does not end there.

It is no wonder, then, that when Robert Gates, now secretary of defense, took control of the clandestine service of the CIA in 1982, he stated that “the CIA is slowly turning into the Department of Agriculture.” He complained that the agency had “an advanced case of bureaucratic arteriosclerosis.” Its halls were filled with plodding mediocrities counting the days until retirement, whom Gates viewed as the principal cause of “the decline in the quality of our intelligence collection and analysis over the last fifteen years.” Gates told the CIA’s analysts that they were “close-minded, smug, arrogant;” that their work was “irrelevant, uninteresting, too late to be of value, too narrow, too unimaginative, and too often just flat-out wrong;” and that their ranks were filled with amateurs “pretending to be experts.” It was time to shape up or ship out.

Seven years later, shape up or no shape up, Gates admitted that the CIA “had no idea in January 1989 that a tidal wave of history was about to break upon us.” The Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse, and America’s spy agency was as blind as a submarine without a periscope. In December of 1988, it had issued a report “confidently stating” that “the basic elements of Soviet defense policy and practice thus far have not been changed by [Mikhail] Gorbachev’s reform campaign.” Less than a week had passed before the Soviet leader publicly offered to unilaterally cut half a million troops from the military.

Because Weiner, generally speaking, treats the cooperative Gates with kid gloves, it is left to Mark Palmer, a former Kremlinologist in the first Bush administration, to remind readers of a basic fact about the current secretary of defense: Gates had “never actually been to the Soviet Union! He’d never once been there, and he was the top so-called expert in the CIA!”

In all fairness to Gates, being called an expert for very little reason was hardly unique or exceptional in the CIA. And Gates was far from the most blatant example of this puzzling state of affairs. “I knew little about Iran,” recalls William Daugherty, a thirty-two-year-old veteran of the Marine Corps, who was sent to the Islamic republic in the summer of 1979, only nine months into his service as a CIA officer. “My entire exposure to Iran, beyond the evening television news and a three-week area-studies course at the State Department, consisted of what I had picked up during five weeks on the desk reading operational files.”

It wasn’t long before Daugherty was captured by the Iranians. He later reported,

Amazingly enough, sending inexperienced and insufficiently trained agents into enemy territory has been a CIA tradition since its inception. Weiner’s retelling of the CIA’s early years contains a veritable laundry list of human tragedies caused by the agency’s insistence on sending raw recruits to certain death in Eastern Europe, Korea, and China. No one appears to have hesitated or asked questions about this policy, and no damning reports followed.

In 1952, for instance, the CIA was looking to bolster anti-communist forces in Manchuria. According to a CIA official study, “the CIA took steps to exploit the potential for a Chinese ‘Third Force’ by trying to link Chinese agents, trained by CIA, with alleged dissident generals on the mainland.” “Beijing later broadcast a scorecard for Manchuria,” writes Weiner. “The CIA had dropped 212 foreign agents in; 101 were killed and 111 captured.” One suspects that Weiner believes the Chinese numbers to be fairly accurate, and he has good reason.

The agency was not only wasting its manpower. It was also giving away billions of dollars to shady middlemen, con artists posing as counterintelligence agents, and petty thieves. According to Weiner, it was trying to compensate for its lack of competence by relying on others to garner intelligence in exchange for money. In the best cases, the CIA was paying a lot for very little, usually information that was overpriced and largely irrelevant. In the other cases, it was simply paying for nothing, or worse: false and misleading intelligence, for which it paid an even higher price in the future.

 

Responsibility for these failures does not fall solely on the CIA and its operatives. The American body politic shares part of the blame. A long line of presidents and their advisers, along with Congress and its numerous committees, have consistently botched any chance of changing the CIA for the better. They neglected the agency, played political games with it, replaced one miserable chief after another, and never invested the serious effort necessary to implement reforms. Then, when the bill inevitably came due, they blamed the agency.

True, every president since Eisenhower has harbored at least some ambition to crack, once and for all, the tough nut that is the CIA, and every single one of them has failed. The pattern appeared early on, with Eisenhower’s CIA chief, Allan Dulles, for whom Weiner reserves some of his most severe criticisms. Dulles’s sole talent appeared to be for public relations and governmental infighting. He “polished the public image of the CIA” and “fended off all efforts to change [it].” Eisenhower ended his term without ever reforming the intelligence services, and complained bitterly that he had “suffered an eight- year defeat on this.”