To his credit, he documents a rebuttal by a CIA director that says essentially that their greatest successes were secret while only their many failures were known publically. Surely in over 60 years of service the CIA has done something right. The one thing the CIA did well was give money away, BILLIONS of dollars spent with a slim margin of return at best, and at worse it became clear that the CIA had literally been conned out of hundreds of millions by other states and even individuals.īut any work of journalism, to be regarded as great, must be objective and here is the problem with this book: it is such a pervasivley negative account, it reports that the CIA is so off the charts bad, that a reader wonders if Weiner is just slamming them page after page. But it is really a 700 page indictment of how bad a government agency can be. This is a superbly reseached work and tells the shadowy tale of American foreign policy from the late 40's to the present day. the best book ever written on a case of espionage.” Here is the hidden history of the CIA: why eleven presidents and three generations of CIA officers have been unable to understand the world why nearly every CIA director has left the agency in worse shape than he found it and how these failures have profoundly jeopardized our national security. The Wall Street Journal called it “truly extraordinary. Tim Weiner’s past work on the CIA and American intelligence was hailed as “impressively reported” and “immensely entertaining” in The New York Times. It takes the CIA from its creation after World War II, through its battles in the cold war and the war on terror, to its near-collapse after September 11th, 2001. LEGACY OF ASHES is based on more than 50,000 documents, primarily from the archives of the CIA itself, and hundreds of interviews with CIA veterans, including ten Directors of Central Intelligence. Now Pulitzer Prize–winning author Tim Weiner offers the first definitive history of the CIA-and everything is on the record. Its failures have handed us, in the words of President Eisenhower, “a legacy of ashes.” When it did not succeed, it set out to change the world. For the last sixty years, the CIA has managed to maintain a formidable reputation in spite of its terrible record, burying its blunders in top-secret archives.

Tim weiner cia book