Although no one should be shocked with the atrocious failures of the CIA, the length, depth, and outrageous incompetence of CIA is startlingly in this work nonetheless. There were few successes and consistent failings of a revolving door of directors and an inability of both Republicans and Democratic presidents to grasp the essential importance of protecting Americans from attack. Most notably with 9/11, but in case after case, CIA could not provide verifiable intelligence about American's enemies and they failed in their mission to protect America.
The author is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the New York Times which in itself commends itself to be read. The Weiner volume updates the gap left by the now dated works of John Ranelagh (The Agency, 1986) and Christopher Andrew (For the President’s Eyes Only, 1995) regarding CIA history.
As Weiner relates it, the title phrase “legacy of ashes” comes from a critical remark President Dwight D. Eisenhower uttered near the end of his administration when, Weiner tells us, Ike finally blew up at Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Allen Dulles and the failings of CIA generally, and more particularly at Dulles’s resistance to recommendations for intelligence reform from the president’s board of consultants.
“A great deal has been accomplished,” Dulles insisted to the president at the final gatherings of Eisenhower’s National Security Council. Everything is well in hand, he said. I have fixed the clandestine service. American intelligence has never been more agile and adept. Coordination and cooperation are better than they have ever been. The proposals of the president’s intelligence board were preposterous, he said, they were madness, they were illegal. I am responsible under the law for intelligence coordination, he reminded the president. I cannot delegate that responsibility. Without my leadership, he said, American intelligence would be a “body floating in thin air.”
At the last, Dwight Eisenhower exploded in anger and frustration. “The structure of our intelligence organization is faulty,” he told Dulles. It makes no sense, it has to be reorganized, and we should have done it long ago. Nothing had changed since Pearl Harbor. “I have suffered an eight-year defeat on this,” said the president of the United States. He said he would “leave a legacy of ashes” to his successor (p. 166).
Weiner takes license with factual data since the interaction, as presumed here, did not take place as reported.
An examination of the source documents shows that:
* Dulles made his remarks (“body floating in thin air”) at a meeting of the National Security Council (NSC) on 12 January 1961, and he was speaking against a Defense Department proposal to separate the position of DCI from the management of CIA.
* Eisenhower’s supposed retort (“eight-year defeat…legacy of ashes”) occurred a week earlier, at the 5 January NSC meeting, and had nothing to do with CIA. Eisenhower was expressing frustration at what he considered his major failing regarding intelligence—his inability to reform and streamline military intelligence.
* Far from criticizing Dulles and CIA, Eisenhower at both meetings affirmed the Agency’s central role in the collection and correlation of strategic intelligence while criticizing the redundancy and expense of having four separate military intelligence agencies.
* The words “preposterous” and “madness” are nowhere to be found in the record of Dulles’s remarks on proposals to reform intelligence (Memoranda of Discussions at the 473rd Meeting (5 January 1961) and the 474th Meeting (12 January 1961) of the National Security Council; documents 80 and 84, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963: Volume XXV (2001). See also document 79, a record of 3 January meeting of Eisenhower, National Security Advisor Gordon Gray, and General Andrew Goodpaster).
The central concern of Weiner is of course to compare CIA performance against other intelligence agencies. The intelligence services that are often judged to be superior to CIA—the Israeli Mossad, the Cuban DGI, the East German Stasi, and even the British SIS—are far more limited in focus and scope. However, the real problem are the abundant mistakes and difficulties that a democracy has when engaged in covert operations. The most notable point of comparison in terms of performance from superior agencies, with the exception of the SIS of course, is that CIA originates from a democratic nation. They are at a disadvantage in the dark world of covert operations. The problem is acute in that CIA from the beginning was charged with worldwide coverage in all intelligence areas, something no other service, except perhaps the Soviet KGB, was required to do. As has been pointed out many times, `it is a rough neighborhood.' But perhaps more to the point, when you read alleged success stories and self-serving memoirs, such as George Tenet's about his tenure as head of CIA, he pointedly acclaims successes of other agencies, as a way of complimenting his our actions of course. This is a roundabout way of suggesting that other intelligence agencies are more effective than CIA.
In regards to CIA origins, Weiner is forced by his own premise of CIA incompetence to assert the incredible: that Harry Truman didn’t know what was going on in his own administration regarding Cold War covert activities.
Yet publicly available documents, which Weiner seems to be unaware of or ignores, make an overwhelming case that President Truman was informed frequently of NSC and other policy discussions on covert operations and CIA’s role in them. In Michael Warner, ed., CIA Cold War Records: The CIA Under Harry Truman (CIA History Staff, 1994) is a memo from the DCI dated 23 April 1952 to the NSC about CIA activities. It includes (pages 459–60) a discussion of “cold war covert activities, including guerrilla warfare.” The document is marked “Included in the President’s Book.”
Weiner might also have read Hayden Peake, “Harry S. Truman on CIA Covert Activities,” in Studies in Intelligence 25, No. 1 (1981). Peake demonstrates that, Truman’s stated opposition to Eisenhower- and Kennedy-era covert operations notwithstanding, CIA officials of the late 1940s and early 1950s considered Truman to have been intimately involved in the development of CIA’s covert mission.
Weiner might also have examined more closely the holdings of the Truman Library, where he would have been able to see a progress report sent by DCI Souers to the president in June 1946 on “planning for psychological warfare” on the part of the Central Intelligence Group; he might also have taken note of the NSC memorandums for the president summarizing NSC discussions of 20 May and 3 June 1948 concerning psychological and political warfare, also in the Truman Library, President’s Secretary’s files.
He misses other important evidence of Truman’s knowledge of such activity, such as the Acting DCI’s 16 January 1951 report to the NSC on “Responsibilities of CIA (OPC) with Respect to Guerrilla Warfare.” Weiner does cite the 23 October 1951 NSC report on “Scope and Pace of Covert Operations,” but he misses the significance of this document’s presence in the files of Truman’s secretary—unless Weiner is implying that she was in on the aforementioned conspiracy to keep him in the dark.
During the Eisenhower administration, CIA began their mission to provide actionable intelligence about American enemies to a succession of presidents. Eisenhower handled CIA by looking the other way. CIA should act but not to let Eisenhower know what manner of nefarious activities CIA did.
Allen Dulles freely admitted to Eisenhower that CIA had no sources in the Kremlin, that its Soviet estimates relied more on speculation and “the logic of the situation” than on hard evidence, and that the Agency could not reliably warn of a sudden Soviet attack (pp. 73–75). This goes to the heart of Weiner's import; CIA failed to penetrate and discover the intentions of American's enemies.
Weiner chronicles the chaos of the early days of CIA espionage and covert action, particularly when the Office of Strategic Operations and Office of Policy Coordination were separate entities with separate stations in the field and competing programs (p. 33).
Weiner notes with some alarm that ethnic agent teams were sent into action and few--about 25%--were ever heard from again. These ethnic agents were nationalists, willing to risk their lives against the Soviets in their homeland without US help, and we were willing to take the chance that sending them might yield good intelligence or otherwise harm our adversaries. By contrast, in the more recent case of the Chinese Muslim Uighers for example, they will simply be dispatched without mission or recruitment, insofar as we know, out of Guatanomo. The same low risk-possible moderate to high return because of their actions is not apparently considered today.
Successes pale in comparison with the failures of CIA. In 1948 CIA accurately assessed the chance for war with the Soviets as nil which was a positive accomplishment but the accurate Agency predictions of genocide in Rwanda in 1994 hardly compares as something which impacts the security of Americans.
One of most notable failures and the most memorable is an episode in Guatemala in 1994, when the CIA chief of station confronted the American ambassador, Marilyn McAfee, with intelligence, as she recalled, that "I was having a lesbian affair with my secretary, whose name was Carol Murphy." The CIA's friends in the Guatemalan military had bugged McAfee's bedroom, Weiner reports, and "recorded her cooing endearments to Murphy. They spread the word that the ambassador was a lesbian." The CIA's "Murphy memo" was widely distributed in Washington. There was only one problem: the ambassador was married, not gay, and not sleeping with her secretary. " 'Murphy' was the name of her two-year-old black standard poodle. The bug in her bedroom had recorded her petting her dog."
Weiner portrays the development of the U-2 spy plane, mostly as a result of the fact that CIA could not develop human assets inside the USSR. However, if we had only developed “a bigger picture of life inside the Soviet Union” that revealed the Russians “were unable to produce the necessities of life” (p. 114), we would not have had to create the unprecedented capability to take pictures of Soviet military power from 70,000 feet. A better insight into Soviet life would have revealed that a formidable and genuinely threatening military machine was a chimera. Satellite imagery helped keep the Cold War cold. This is significant.
Other successes include the successful covert support of democracy in Italy in 1948. The Berlin Tunnel operation gets a note, and the story of CIA’s first major Soviet spy, Pyotr Popov, is buried in a footnote. The Agency understood the 1967 Mideast war and was attributable to the rigorous analytic work that was behind the judgment.
A key point that could be an overwhelming success is whether CIA identified the collapse of the Soviet Union. Weiner also repeats the canard that CIA missed the decline of the USSR, something that was obvious to everyone in the world but the Agency. He does not discuss several important sources that have refuted this claim: the work of Bruce Berkowitz, Douglas MacEachin, Robert Gates, and the Case Program of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. CIA analysts warned of the USSR’s socio-economic troubles from the late 1970s on.
Another mistake is the common misconception is to dismiss Ronald Reagan as someone who came to the presidency knowing “little more about the CIA than what he had learned at the movies” (p. 375). This is a wrong-headed view of a president who in 1975 had served on the Rockefeller Commission investigating intelligence activities and who had drafted for his own delivery, from 1975 to 1978, radio addresses on national security matters that included cogent discussions about CIA and intelligence issues. In addition, a large number of Reagan’s letters and essays has emerged that dispel Weiner’s notion.
A recent, really critical situation to consider is the infamous “sixteen words” President Bush used in the 2003 State of the Union address about Saddam Hussein’s alleged efforts to purchase uranium in Africa. Weiner, claiming that Bush was making “CIA’s case,” omits mention of the attribution of the information to British intelligence. Moreover, George Tenet’s recent memoir makes it clear that the Agency had removed the assertion from previous speeches and simply had failed to do so for the State of the Union. CIA, in fact, did not support that statement.
There are errors of fact in Legacy of Ashes. Following is a short list:
* OSS was not “barred from seeing the most important intercepted communications” during World War II (p. 5); few in any organization could view ULTRA intercepts, but within OSS the X-2 counterintelligence branch had access.
* The distinction between the espionage and covert action missions did not emerge in the postwar period (p. 11) but years earlier was already part of the organizing principle of OSS; the Secret Intelligence branch handled what would later be called HUMINT, and various other branches were responsible for paramilitary and other covert activity.
* The 1949 CIA Act did not provide the Agency with the legal authority to conduct covert action (p. 40)—that legislation concerned DCI authorities regarding personnel, secrecy, and unvouchered funds (which certainly helped operations remain covert); the Agency construed its covert action authority from admittedly vague language in the 1947 National Security Act and from Executive Orders.
* Weiner obviously read (and quotes from) my Studies in Intelligence article on the ill-fated flight of Jack Downey and Dick Fecteau in 1952, yet he misrepresented a flight to pick up documents as a mission to “rescue” agents who had radioed for help (p. 60).
* The reference to a “CIA colonel” (p. 88) is odd; the KGB had colonels, but CIA never had military ranks—though it has employed military officers.
* Weiner also errs when he says that the current director, Michael Hayden (p. 510), is the first active-duty military officer to lead the Agency since the early 1950s—that was Admiral Stansfield Turner (1977).
* Weiner says that the 1950s-era program to encourage Soviet walk-ins outside the USSR, REDCAP, was not effective and had no significant successes by 1956 (p. 124). He forgets the two Peters, Pyotr Deriabin and Pyotr Popov, both of whom were immensely important assets.
* The idea that the “Islamic warriors” CIA supported in Afghanistan would later turn on the United States (p. xv) fails to make the basic distinction between the Afghan mujahedin, whom the Agency supported, and Arabs who went to Afghanistan in the 1980s—whom CIA did not support.
* John McCone was never a deputy secretary of defense (p. 180) and did not, as DCI, begin mass firings (p. 188).
In Weiner's view the CIA never performed up to snuff. He paints a critical portrait of an agency run by Ivy League incompetents, "old Grotonians" who lied to presidents -- an agency that, more often than not, failed to foresee major world events, violated human rights, spied on Americans, plotted assassinations of foreign leaders, and put so much of its energy and resources into bungled covert operations that it failed in its core mission of collecting and analyzing information.
The success of CIA have to be taken with a grain of salt. CIA had overthrown the legally elected government of Guatemala, a covert operation long touted as one of the intelligence agency's grand "successes." It was even called Operation Success. Guatemala was made safe for United Fruit -- talk about banana republics -- but not for democracy. A series of military dictators followed the CIA coup, with death squads and repression in which perhaps 200,000 Guatemalans perished.
The question of how CIA relates to democracy is acute. Weiner states that CIA director Richard Helms opposed Richard Nixon in regards to the Watergate cover-up. Not so. In an odd footnote, Weiner says Helms "complied with the president's order to go along with the cover-up for sixteen days at most." But the author, who quotes extensively from dozens of CIA documents, curiously makes no mention of the damning memo that Helms wrote to his deputy, Vernon Walters, on June 28, 1972, about the FBI investigation of the break-in: "We still adhere to the request that they confine themselves to the personalities already arrested or directly under suspicion and that they desist from expanding this investigation into other areas which may well, eventually, run afoul of our operations." It was a bald-faced lie, exactly what the White House was demanding that Helms tell the FBI.
Of course, the most critical point is the CIA quandry. How do we proceed without clear direction of the president and what do we do to serve a democracy in undemocratic ways. John Hamre, former deputy secretary of defense and president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington states: "It is an organization that thrives through deception. How do you manage an organization like that?" Weiner notes: "How do you run a secret intelligence service in an open democracy? How do you serve the truth by lying? How do you spread democracy by deceit?" (p. 501). We are left with the paradox that is CIA.
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