MichaelODriscoll

Tim Weiner won a National Book Award for his work on “A Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA”. It’s an in-depth look into a long history of the Central Intelligence Agency and takes a blunt look at both the good and the bad. Mostly, it covers how operations have often blown up in the faces of the people running them. Formerly called the OSS the CIA started during WWII to collect badly needed intelligence for the war. But, the war soon ended. The original ragtag crew were not just going to give up on their jobs so easy. Quickly, they lobbied for their work to pivot and focus on communism in Europe. Hence, the CIA was born. The CIA started out as an organization of cowboys. People who were not afraid to get dirty and would be described as “rough and tumble”. The organization would not keep up this persona for long.

As the new CIA expanded across Europe in the fight against communism, they repeatedly walked into lion’s den after lion’s den. Recruits who were interested in adventure joined the CIA expecting to make a difference. Instead, they were often sent to their death by walking directly into traps laid by the people they were supposed to be spying on in Korea, China, and the USSR. As time went on, they became more and more embedded in the affairs of European and South American countries. Funding dissidents, providing arms, and overthrowing those who posed threats was par for the course. Often times, they would fund both parties in an election to inject confusion into a community they saw as a threat. Eventually, the CIA failures became public discussion. Facing backlash at home the agency floundered from operation to operation. Eventually – flush with cash – the organization that started as a crew of cowboys had turned into a sprawling bureaucracy of middle managers from Ivy League schools who only saw the work as a springboard into well-paid defence contracting. The book details how this phenomenon often played out by quoting Bob Gates, the CIA Director at the time. “In 1992 Bob Gates lamented the hiring practices of the agency after learning a potential recruit from the Middle East (where the agency was trying to gather intelligence at the time) was rejected because of his inability to pass an english exam. But he did speak Azari – the spoken language of those living in the Middle East. Frustrated, Bob could responded by saying he had thousands of people who could pass an english exam, but not one single person who could speak Azari”. It’s easy to see how one would be upset.

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Rating: 3/3